Tag: features

‘Never giving up’: A former Afghan refugee’s mission to heal trauma | Refugees

Chester, United Kingdom – It is just after 8:30am on a Friday and 40-year-old Waheed Arian is cycling down a path next to a frost-covered football field in the northwestern English city of Chester.

His cheeks are slightly flushed as he hops off his bike, and he seems sprightly despite having caught only a few hours of sleep.

During the week, he often works into the early hours of the morning running his two digital health charities, and he spends most weekends at the A&E (accident and emergency) ward of his local hospital where he works as an emergency doctor.

As Waheed locks up his bike, personal trainer Andy Royle walks up to him.

“Good to see you, Andy,” Waheed says.

The two men stretch, then run laps around the field. Despite the freezing weather, Waheed is enthusiastic. Physical activity has helped him cope with the most trying times in his life.

“In Afghanistan, when I was young, I used to do taekwondo and imitated the moves that Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan did in their movies. I fell down a lot,” he tells Andy laughing as they finish their workout.

Now Waheed, a former refugee, is helping others overcome adversity by drawing on his personal experience of surviving war-related trauma to advocate for and deliver mental health services to refugees.

A young Waheed and his parents after fleeing to Pakistan as refugees [Courtesy of Waheed Arian]

Finding strength

Waheed’s calm demeanour belies a difficult past.

He was born in 1983 in the Afghan capital Kabul during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) when the Soviet-controlled government fought the US-backed Mujahideen for control over the country.

Waheed is the eldest son in a Pashtun family of 11 children. His father bought and sold antiques and traded currency at a bazaar, while his mother was a housewife.

As a child, he remembers being unable to sleep at night, terrified by the sounds of government planes and helicopters being fired at near his house. The government soldiers and tanks on the streets frightened him and he remembers wondering if they would shoot him.

“I only have two happy memories from my childhood during the 1980s,” says the softly spoken Waheed. “One was being taken by my mother to a local park to have ice cream.” The second was when his father gave him a kite.

When he was older, he remembers hours-long shelling in the capital preventing his family from venturing out. At times they went without food or water. When Waheed did go out to buy necessities for the family, he would see dead bodies lying on the streets and if a gun battle erupted, he would have to throw himself into a gutter to avoid being hit. Once, while cycling home, a missile hit a house in his neighbourhood and sent him flying, though he wasn’t badly injured.

Waheed’s childhood and teenage years were marked by anxiety and nightmares, which he would later learn were symptoms of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). But during those years, he also began associating exercise with resilience. When he was 11, his family was internally displaced to the rural province of Logar. “I had a really depressive episode then, and lost all my energy because I couldn’t sleep or eat,” Waheed recalls.

On a particularly difficult day, he decided on a whim to go for a run. Afterwards, he felt a bit better. “So I decided that I would keep doing it,” he says.

Then he started looking at famous sportspeople for inspiration, including the boxer Muhammad Ali and his story of surviving a tough childhood. He began taekwondo and started running regularly. Exercise gave him the strength to dream of a different future, he says.

Waheed and Andy doing stretches on a frost-covered football field-
Arian Wellbeing works with mental health professionals and fitness experts like Andy Royle (R) who exercises with refugees to help them stretch and release tension in their necks and backs [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]

Arian Wellbeing

In August this year, Waheed set up Arian Wellbeing to help address refugees’ mental health needs.

Working alongside 20 clinical psychologists and therapists, as well as five fitness professionals like Andy, Waheed and his team are piloting tailored therapy and exercise in group and one-on-one sessions with refugees in Chester, his home for the past nine years.

They aim to provide the service for free to people who don’t have a stable income or accommodation via a scheme that accepts payment from participants who are not experiencing financial difficulty. They provide both in-person and digital sessions.

With 22.1 percent of conflict-affected populations suffering from issues such as depression, anxiety and PTSD – compared to the global average of 12.5 percent – Waheed believes refugees’ mental health remains a widely underserved need.

“These are people who have overcome so many adversities, faced traumas over many years that are not understood,” he says.

Waheed believes that Arian Wellbeing’s culturally sensitive approach makes it unique.

The team comprises people who either have lived experience of conflict or have undergone rigorous training to better understand participants’ countries of origin – whether Afghanistan, Syria or Ukraine, for example.

“Even being aware of the tribal and regional makeup of a refugee [Afghan] community here in Chester can help us work with them more effectively,” he says. “For example, we know that in Afghanistan, women like to sew and bake together, while men bond over tea.” To help build rapport, he has embedded the sharing of food with various forms of therapy in his group sessions in Chester.

Waheed graduated in medicine from Cambridge University in 2006 [Courtesy of Waheed Arian]

The doctor in Peshawar

After that morning’s exercise, Waheed sits in his living room, soft winter light streaming in through the window. Behind him is a large wooden toy kitchen for his children Zane, 7, and Alana, 4. There are family photographs all around. In the garden outside is a mini-playground with a slide. “In a way,” he says quietly, “I see my own lost childhood when I look at my children.”

In the spring of 1988, when Waheed was five, his father risked being conscripted by the government to fight on the front line, so like some 3.5 million other Afghans, they left for neighbouring Pakistan.

“We travelled on a few donkeys and horses, taking seven days and nights to reach Babu refugee camp,” Waheed says, referring to the temporary settlement for Afghans that lay just outside Peshawar in northwest Pakistan. The journey over mountains and rivers was arduous and dangerous. “We came under attack from helicopter gunships three times,” Waheed recalls.

In Babu, sanitary conditions were poor, and within days, almost everyone all his family had contracted malaria.

After three months, Waheed was coughing so much that he brought up blood. “I could hardly walk,” he says. “That’s when my parents realised it wasn’t the typical cold or flu symptoms that children have.”

His worried father carried him to a pulmonologist in Peshawar, selling some of the gold reserves he had brought to afford the medical fee. The doctor examined Waheed and concluded he had advanced tuberculosis (TB), with just a 20 to 30 percent chance of survival even if he underwent treatment. “My father was in tears, but he was committed to saving me,” Waheed says. He went to the local marketplace and sold antiques they’d brought in order to buy meat, fruit, milk and medicine to help Waheed recover.

As Waheed slowly recuperated, he would still see the pulmonologist, a benevolent man who left a deep impression on Waheed. “I caught his attention because I was always very curious about his job every time I interacted with him,” he chuckles. “One day he gave me a stethoscope and a black-and-white medical textbook, and he said, ‘Son, I think you’ll be a doctor one day. So you’ll need these.’”

Waheed says he knew then that he wanted to become a doctor. “I was determined to also change people’s lives with the same patience and empathy that he showed me,” he explains.

Waheed as a child in Afghanistan [Photo courtesy of Waheed Arian]

Ambition, flashbacks

In 1991, after the Soviet Union had withdrawn from Afghanistan and during a lull in the fighting, the family returned to Kabul and Waheed formed his plan to become a doctor.

First, he thought, he had to learn English. This was the language of the pulmonologist’s medical textbook. He threw himself into his third grade studies and visited the United Nations Development Programme office in Kabul. There, he argued with the staff to allow him to enrol in their English classes. “They told me that I wasn’t an employee so the course wasn’t for me,” he laughs. “And I started debating with them about the importance of investing in children’s education.”

The office agreed to accept him as a student, and he became one of the first children in their English classes. But this period of stability was short-lived.

In April 1992, fighting broke out once again. Waheed wanted to continue studying but turned up to his school one day to find it had been destroyed by rockets.

Undeterred, he bought English and science textbooks that were being resold on market stalls after being looted from school cupboards.

By the time he was nine, he found himself playing the role of an unofficial neighbourhood doctor. “The health infrastructure had collapsed from years of fighting. There were no facilities, no drugs, no doctors,” he explains.

In Pakistan, he had spent many afternoons at the local pharmacy watching the pharmacist dress wounds. “I also learnt the names of common drugs like paracetamol, ibuprofen and penicillin,” he says. Using this knowledge, coupled with what he gleaned from his medical textbook, he tended to his neighbours’ less severe artillery wounds at home, using bandages improvised from old clothes and pillowcases.

In 1994, the Taliban came to power and gradually the chaos was replaced with an ironfisted rule.

Then, when Waheed was 15, his parents decided to send him to the UK to try to pursue his ambition of becoming a doctor. Meanwhile, despite his stellar grades, he was also experiencing symptoms of PTSD.

“I wanted to sleep all the time, and felt escalating anxiety whenever I had flashbacks of my childhood years,” he says. To calm himself, he would practise what he called a “do-it-yourself” form of cognitive behavioural therapy – which focuses on changing thought and behavioural patterns to manage one’s problems – by quietly reviewing the positive aspects of his life: that he was alive, and doing well academically. And he practised taekwondo.

Waheed working as a shopkeeper in his early days in London. He worked in a shop, in a cafe and as a cleaner to support himself and earn money for his studies [Courtesy of Waheed Arian]

A red tank

In 1999, Waheed left Afghanistan and applied for asylum in the UK where he was initially detained. As he waited three years for asylum to be granted, he juggled three jobs while studying at college. Though he found London exhilarating, his PTSD was worsening.

“As soon as I saw a red bus, it would turn into a tank… Or I’d have nightmares of a sniper taking my head off,” he says.

Only after excelling in his college A Level exams, then going to the University of Cambridge on a scholarship and graduating in 2006, did the mental strain become too much for him to bear. In 2008, experiencing back and shoulder pains and constant nightmares, he went to see a counsellor, who suggested that he had PTSD and anxiety. Therapy helped him to better cope with his symptoms and allowed him to embark on a medical career as a radiologist and emergency doctor.

After a while, he began wondering how he could give back to society.

“I started a telemedicine charity called Teleheal in 2015, which enables doctors in low-resource countries and conflict zones to access advice from volunteer medical experts in the UK, Canada and the US,” he says. Doctors in Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria, for example, connect with their counterparts through WhatsApp and Skype. Teleheal believes almost 700 lives may have been saved between 2016 and 2018 as a result of emergency care advice received via the charity.

“Teleheal taught me that it’s not technology that helps people communicate effectively, it’s compassion,” Waheed says. This made him think about how to harness compassion to help refugees overcome trauma.

Waheed and Palwasha, who fled from Afghanistan in 2021, walk along the River Dee in Chester [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]

‘He gave us hope’

Waheed walks along Chester’s River Dee, which is lined by moss-covered stone walls and red brick homes on both sides.

He is on his way to catch up with Palwasha*, a 33-year-old Afghan woman who is receiving counselling through Arian Wellbeing. The former languages student fled Afghanistan after the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

“I was staying at the Holiday Inn in Chester with around 15 other displaced families when I met Waheed,” says Palwasha, speaking at a cafe.

“In communities like ours where there’s little awareness of mental health, we don’t always realise that physical symptoms can be a sign of depression or anxiety,” Palwasha explains as she cradles a cup of green tea. “I observed that many of the women had headaches, or said they felt fatigued.”

After arriving in Chester, although people were friendly and kind, she missed the liveliness of Kabul. She felt uncertain about her future and found there were days she felt drained of energy.

In April, when Waheed met the families housed at the hotel by the UK government, Palwasha remembers his inviting manner struck a chord with people.

“I thought: He is like us. He came here with nothing. He gave us hope that our lives might be different in the future,” she recalls.

Slowly, through gender-segregated group therapy sessions coupled with stretching exercises, the residents began to open up. “Before we received counselling, we weren’t really talking frankly about how we felt, or what we experienced back home,” she says. “It was really comforting to know that we were all in the same boat.”

Palwasha is about to move on to the next phase of her recovery programme where she’ll do more personalised one-on-one sessions.

She says she is feeling positive about the future. She is about to complete a diploma in mental health studies, reads Afghan poetry in her leisure time, wants to study Japanese, and is in discussions with Waheed about working as an interpreter for other Afghans who sign up for Arian Wellbeing.

Palwasha feels strongly about giving back to the initiative that has helped her.

“We’ve had war in Afghanistan for more than 40 years now,” she reflects. “I think it doesn’t really resonate with people the level of intergenerational trauma that Afghans carry with them. Some people, before coming to the UK, had never even left their province. It’s tough for them to assimilate, and they miss their family. I know I do.”

Training refugees to provide mental health support

Back at home in his study, Waheed has a brief Zoom meeting with Cressida Gaffney, a clinical psychologist with the National Health Service (NHS) who is also part of his team.

She later tells Al Jazeera that the UK health system “assumes a particular starting point for physical and mental distress that doesn’t always map to other cultures”. This is why, she says, Arian Wellbeing places great importance on team interpreters being present to pick up on cultural nuances, and wouldn’t carry out a therapy session without one.

Throughout the week, Waheed also speaks to mental health practitioners from around the world to share know-how. One of the people that he meets online that Friday morning in early December is Hivine Ali, a Bangladesh-based mental health and psychosocial support officer with the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

She’s Lebanese, and her parents have been displaced across three different countries. “So I really connect with the issues that refugees face, and it gives me a sense of meaning and fulfilment to help them,” she says.

Currently, along with other UNHCR staff, she’s training 200 volunteers from the Rohingya community to provide mental health support to their fellow refugees. She says that, unlike other refugees who may have a sense of belonging to their home countries, the Rohingya face extreme exclusion as they are not accepted in Myanmar, from where they fled, nor in Bangladesh.

The training programme is giving her and her team cause for optimism, however, with some of the young Rohingya providing mental health support over the phone to their parents in Myanmar. This model Hivine is adopting “to help refugees help themselves” is something Waheed is interested in exploring. They end the call and agree to stay in touch.

Waheed at home with his wife Davina and their dog Pushkin [Amandas Ong/Al Jazeera]

‘I can’t stop’

In the late afternoon, Waheed relaxes in his kitchen with his wife, Davina. Zane is at school, while Alana is upstairs sleeping off an earache.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without Davina’s support,” Waheed says as he picks up Bruno, one of the couple’s two cats.

“He cares very much about his work, but he knows that if he’s feeling stressed about something, he can always talk to me,” Davina says.

Waheed travels often to speak about his work and published a memoir in 2021 hoping his story might help others.

Tomorrow, he has a rare day off from his multiple jobs and is excited to spend time with the children and order takeout. “Davina and I really love food,” he says, reminiscing about how the two had their first date in an Indian restaurant. “It’s true what people say, if you don’t love food, you probably have no appetite for life.”

Although Waheed will be back at the A&E ward on Sunday, he knows that the time spent with his family will give him the energy to continue.

Like the pulmonologist in Peshawar who inspired him so many years ago, “My life now really is just dedicated to giving people a message of hope, of resilience, of never giving up,” Waheed says. “I’m so privileged to be where I am, so I can’t stop.”

*Name changed to protect the interviewee’s identity.

This article has been produced with the support of UNHCR.

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‘We are the living dead’: Drought-hit Tunisian villages battle isolation | Climate Crisis

Tunisian villager Ounissa Mazhoud ties two empty jerry cans to a donkey and cautiously descends a stony hill towards the last local source of water.

The North African country, in its fourth year of drought, is grappling with its worst water scarcity in years.

Mazhoud – like other women in the remote village of Ouled Omar, 180km (110 miles) southwest of the capital, Tunis – wakes up every morning with one thing on her mind: finding water.

“We are the living dead … forgotten by everyone,” said Mazhoud, 57, whose region was once one of Tunisia’s most fertile, known for its wheat fields and Aleppo pines.

“We have no roads, no water, no aid, no decent housing, and we own nothing,” she said, adding that the closest source of water is a river about an hour’s arduous walk away.

Providing water for their families, she said, means that “our backs, heads and knees hurt, because we labour from dawn to dusk”.

Some villagers have felt pushed to move to urban areas or abroad.

Ounissa’s cousin, Djamila Mazhoud, 60, said her son and two daughters had all left in search of better lives.

“We educated our children so that when we grow old, they take care of us, but they couldn’t,” she said.

“People are either unemployed or eaten by the fish in the sea,” she added, using a common phrase for migrants who attempt the dangerous sea voyages for Europe.

Entire families have already left the village, said Djamila.

“Their houses remain empty,” she said, explaining that elderly people feel they have no choice but to follow their sons and daughters.

“Can an 80-year-old go to the river to get water?”

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Australia is preparing to burn – more fossil fuels | Climate Crisis News

Australians are used to seeing messages with advice on preparing for bushfires and other extreme weather at this time of year.

“Amid the Christmas promotions, [we’re] seeing increased warnings about extreme heat and fires and how to cope and stay safe,” Belinda Noble, the founder of climate advocacy organisation Comms Declare, told Al Jazeera.

While there is nothing new about these kinds of public service announcements, the messages have taken on added meaning as the weather becomes more unpredictable and memories of severe bushfires three years ago linger.

“Australia desperately needs national public information campaigns to keep people safe,” Noble told Al Jazeera, stressing that similar campaigns were also needed on how to “reduce emissions and to combat lies about fossil fuels, renewables and climate science”.

Australia passed breakthrough climate laws in March this year, 10 months after a new centre-left Labor government under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese took office.

“In contrast to our last government,” the new government now “acknowledges that climate change is very real, is with us now and is worsening extreme weather and disasters,” Greg Mullins, the former commissioner of fire and rescue for the state of New South Wales told Al Jazeera.

But, Mullins added, it is “inexplicable that as they strive to reduce emissions, they undo all of their good work by continuing to approve new fossil fuel projects.”

Even as the Albanese government passed its new legislation in March, its annual Resource & Energy Major Project list included 116 new fossil fuel projects, “two more than at the end of 2021”, according to Canberra-based think tank the Australia Institute.

Combined, Australia’s oil and gas expansion plans are the eighth largest of any country, the advocacy organisation Oil Change International said recently.

Many of the planned fuel projects – on land and sea – are facing opposition from Indigenous people, who are seeing the effects of fossil fuel extraction and climate change first-hand.

“My community is facing not just fracking, but mining [and] overgrazing” said Rikki Dank, the director of Gudanji For Country, an Indigenous charity. “On top of that, we are feeling the effects of climate change. The weather patterns are all over the place,” she said.

“There’s not as much rain as there used to be and the heat is becoming almost unbearable,” said Dank, who spoke to Al Jazeera from COP28 in Dubai where she was bringing attention to Australia’s plans to frack her traditional lands.

Fracking or hydraulic fracturing involves the high-pressure injection of liquid into shale rock to release gas.

“We’re seeing a lot of people in Australia lose their homes because it’s becoming too hot or because we can’t live there any more because of the mining or fracking,” she added.

But at a special COP28 meeting where leaders were encouraged to speak off-script on Sunday, Australia’s Climate Minister Chris Bowen backed calls for the global phasing out of fossil fuels.

The comments sparked confusion given Australia’s fossil fuel expansion at home.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a petrostate, but Australia is a bigger fossil fuel exporter than the United Arab Emirates, by far,” Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the Australia Institute wrote last week, comparing Australia with the host of COP28.

Australia is “the third-largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world,” Bennett added. The country is one of the world’s top exporters of coal with Russia and Indonesia.

‘Your whole world’

While Australia’s messages on the world stage may seem mixed, at home, the messages, at least on the dangers of fire, are much clearer.

A Queensland Fire and Emergency Services advertisement shows images like a warped dog’s bowl and a children’s bike in a burned landscape while a narrator says “your best friend” and “your whole world”.

A fire preparation sign at the Rural Fire Service (RFS) station in Shannons Flat, Australia says, ‘Sorry guys, you are all too late now!’ in January 2020 [Tracey Nearmy/Reuters]

While more disaster preparedness is welcome, Mullins says recently-announced funding is “still just a drop in the bucket and climate change is causing that bucket to leak.”

The former fire chief who is also the founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action says greater efforts are needed to address the growing climate crisis. 

“It doesn’t matter how many helicopters, how many planes, or many trucks you have,” Mullins told Al Jazeera. “We cannot just deal with the damage once it has been done, we need to tackle it at its root cause – which is the continued extraction and burning of coal, oil and gas.

“We must take urgent action now to get emissions plummeting during this crucial decade”, he added, “to give some hope to future generations”.

For Dank, the solutions include drawing on the experience of Indigenous people in caring for their land as a nature-based solution.

“Unfortunately”, there is a “current culture” of “band-aid solutions for how we can fix something that’s making us uncomfortable now as opposed to actually looking at and addressing the problem,” she said.

Meanwhile, Noble says public awareness campaigns are also needed to dispel the fossil fuel industry’s influence.

“Communities need more consistent, accurate and reliable climate information to manage the massive challenges ahead,” said Noble, whose organisation is also campaigning to see misleading fossil fuel advertising banned in Australia.

“There’s no doubt people are anxious,” she added, but it is possible to turn “anxiety into action against the fossil fuel companies causing the extreme heat, fires and storms”.

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Pio Gama Pinto: The Indian who became a Kenyan freedom fighter | Features

Nairobi, Kenya – On December 12, 1963, six months after Kenya’s independence from the British, the former colony officially became a republic. It is an occasion that has been marked ever since as Jamhuri Day.

With the new status came the fight against a colonial-era hierarchy in which Europeans sat at the top, followed by South Asians and then Black Africans who were granted the least economic and political rights, he fought for African nationalism and land distribution.

Today, as Kenya celebrates the 60th anniversary of Jamhuri Day, some of the heroes of its liberation struggle and fight for equality remain unsung. One of them is Pio Gama Pinto, the radical journalist, politician and socialist. His role has been largely forgotten, partly because he died aged just 37 in what was effectively Kenya’s first political assassination on February 24, 1965.

His eldest daughter, Linda Gama Pinto, was just six years old when he was shot dead in the driveway of their family house in broad daylight in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. Three men were jailed for his murder yet those close to the story believe the real perpetrators behind the assassination remain unknown.

Linda says her father remains part of the country’s story, even in death.

“[He] is woven into the fabric of Kenyan history and I’m very proud of his contribution,” she said from her home in Ottawa, Canada, where the family emigrated to after the assassination. “My father’s memory has been nurtured by [only] a few people … this was a selfless man who had at his core, the desire for equality.”

Some scholars say he was seen as a threat first by British colonialists and later by the Kenyan post-independence government due to his advocacy.

“By the time of Kenyan independence, he had reached a point where he could oust the capitalist, conservative ruling elite that had replaced the colonial powers,” says Wunyabari Maloba, professor of African studies and history at the University of Delaware. “He had a radical vision and was very much respected by Black Africans so it was extremely important for him to be silenced. Yet his death can’t be viewed just within the domestic context, this was also the time of the Cold War and Kenya was at a pivotal place in eastern Africa.”

Political life

Pinto was born in Nairobi on March 31, 1927, to parents of Goan descent. His father was among the many economic migrants from the Indian subcontinent who took up roles within the colonial administration in East Africa. Pinto, who spent his early school years in India, became politically engaged and joined liberation protests against British and Portuguese rule in the country, working with trade unions in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) and Goa.

A founding member of the Goa National Congress, his activism led to the colonial authorities issuing an arrest warrant so he was forced to return to Kenya in 1949. By then, India was independent, and calls for decolonisation were spreading across the British Empire, even to Kenya.

He learned Kiswahili and, as historian Sana Aiyar has noted, took on editorship roles at the Daily Chronicle newspaper, convincing the owner to print pamphlets in various vernacular languages. He also spoke out against the British on his Swahili programme for All India Radio, which colonialists described as a “consistent denigration of British rule in Africa”.

His role in supplying the Mau Mau – an anticolonial armed uprising led by the Kikuyu people – with arms and co-producing its media mouthpiece The High Command led to his arrest by the British in 1954. He was held until 1959.

British-Kenyan author Shiraz Durrani has been collecting documents on Pinto for 40 years. In 2018, Durrani published Pio Gama Pinto: Kenya’s Unsung Martyr. He told Al Jazeera that Pinto was a skilled journalist who knew how to use his voice to rally people.

“When he was not on the streets talking to people, Pinto used to spend most of his time writing letters and articles,” he told Al Jazeera. “He kept the outside world informed of anticolonial protests and exposed what the British were doing. His ideological stance was also very important and Pinto was not shy about saying that socialism was the solution.”

Indeed, he was also connected with anti-imperialist and socialist movements globally, as well as with American revolutionary Malcolm X.

Personal life

Stories of his personal and financial sacrifice are consistent throughout his brief life. For instance, in prison where South Asians received better treatment, Pinto would share his rations with Black inmates.

It was a contribution made further possible with the support of his wife, Emma Christine Dias, a Goan woman whom he married in 1954, five months before he went into prison. Pinto is said to have used the wedding money gifted to the couple by Emma’s father on a printing press.

“She constantly wrote to him in prison and my father said that without that link to the outside, he may not have survived as well as he did,” Linda told Al Jazeera. “He also taught other inmates to read using her letters. He was allowed to be a very absent father to me and my two sisters and dedicate himself to a larger collective of people.”

While there were also other South Asians who joined Black Africans in Kenya’s independence struggle, Pinto was the most visible among them amid the fight for an equal society across racial lines, Maloba told Al Jazeera.

“This idea – insofar as the colony concerned – was a big problem because the imperial colonial framework was based, and its survival depended on, the idea of divide and rule,” he said. “Pinto was against the idea that the Africans who were taking over from the British should perpetuate the system that oppressed and exploited Africans. His definition of independence was linked to economic power, equality, and sovereignty.”

After his release in 1959, he co-founded the Kenya Freedom Party, which later merged with the Kenyan African National Union, a political party that remained in power until 2002.

‘Nothing has changed’

In recent years, Pinto’s memory has increasingly returned to the surface, including in an exhibition on his life that launched at the Nairobi Gallery in March and is set to travel the country next year.

April Zhu, a Nairobi-based journalist who collaborated on a 2020 podcast series Until Everyone is Free that looks at Pinto’s life and politics, says the success of the first podcast has led to an expansion of the project that will begin airing next year.

She has encountered enthusiasm from young Kenyans when discussing this part of their history as it was missing in their school curricula. One of them is Stoneface Bombaa, host of the podcast and a 25-year-old community organiser from Mathare, an informal settlement in the capital.

“It was a very sanitised history,” he tells Al Jazeera of his time in school.

Having learned more about Pinto in recent years, he describes him as a beacon of hope in a society that remains unequal. “From a younger age, he was fighting for change, fighting for freedom, he wanted people to have their lands right back and to see the end to corruption, poverty, and disease. Since his assassination, nothing has changed, these are the things we are still fighting for today.”

Even with the renewed examination of Pinto’s legacy, Zhu acknowledges that there is still work to do in preserving his legacy.

“It would be a shame if he became memorialised without his politics being brought into the current context,” she said. “For example, why are there no militant trade unions left in Kenya? The things that still plague the majority of working-class Kenyans today are the very things that Pinto fought for. Going forward, that needs to be the centre of any effort to memorialise Pinto.”

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Rice, beans and best friends: A Nigerian embrace for Cameroonian refugees | Refugees

Ogoja, Nigeria – Rebecca stares down her sandy street past the palm trees and T-junction. No sign of Blessing. It is already after 7:30am, and their school’s morning assembly will soon start. Rebecca sighs with relief when she sees her friend running towards her. “Sorry, sorry,” Blessing gasps, “I had to queue for hours to get water this morning.” The two 15-year-olds hug and quickly make their way to their secondary school, a stone’s throw from Rebecca’s home in Ogoja, a town in southeastern Nigeria about 65km (40 miles) as the crow flies from the Cameroonian border.

The best friends sport similar buzz cuts and wear the same white blouse and navy blue skirt uniform. As they hurry to school while chatting in Pidgin, there is little to suggest that they come from different countries. Yet Rebecca Jonas was born and raised in Nigeria, while Blessing Awu-Akat is a refugee whose family fled violence in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions where Francophone government forces are fighting English-speaking separatists.

Rebecca’s family lives in town in a duplex with a gas stove and indoor bathrooms. Blessing lives in Adagom I, a settlement on the outskirts of Ogoja where almost 10,000 Cameroonian refugees reside. Her family uses firewood to cook and shares latrines and showers with other refugees. And in the morning, when everybody is waking up, she has to wait in line to use the communal water taps to wash and collect water to prepare breakfast. Which is why Blessing’s friend cuts her some slack when she is late.

Blessing’s mother Victorine Ndifon Atop stands in front of the house shared by the family of nine in the refugee settlement of Adagom I [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

An open settlement

Blessing’s family fled to Nigeria in November 2017. She remembers the morning when an army helicopter suddenly hovered over their village of Bodam, which lies close to the Nigerian border. “Everyone started running into the bush. But there, soldiers were shooting at people,” she recalls.

A friend of hers was shot, Blessing says, shivering in horror as she points at where the bullet shattered her friend’s arm. She, her parents, her three siblings and two cousins, escaped on foot to the Nigerian border unharmed, but destitute. “There was no time for us to pack. All I had was the dress I wore that day.”

Just across the border, the violence was never far away, and at night, gunshots on the Cameroonian side kept the then nine-year-old girl awake. Because the border area was not safe for the thousands of refugees, Nigerian authorities decided to move them further inland. This is how Blessing’s family was resettled at Adagom I, 63 hectares (156 acres) of federal government land that Nigeria offered to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR to use as a settlement for the refugees. “Here I finally managed to sleep through the night,” Blessing says.

Adagom I, named after the village in the Ogoja area where the refugees were resettled, is not a refugee camp with curfews, exit restrictions and separate camp schools and clinics, but an open settlement of about 3,000 households where inhabitants can come and go as they please and interact with their Nigerian neighbours freely. In Nigeria, a country already faced with the challenge of more than two million internally displaced people (IDPs), mostly in the northeast, all 84,030 UN-registered refugees from Cameroon enjoy freedom of movement, access to healthcare, education and the right to work – rights that many wealthier countries in the world do not immediately grant to foreigners seeking refuge within their borders.

The government also waived school fees for refugee children to enable them to continue their education and return to as normal a life as possible. That is how Blessing and Rebecca became classmates and best friends at Government Technical College, Ogoja.

Blessing and Rebecca head to their classroom at Government Technical College, Ogoja [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Knowing what it’s like to be new somewhere

Blessing and Rebecca barely make it to the school assembly on time; the band has just started playing the school anthem as they rush through the wrought iron gate. When the assembly is finished, they head to their classroom, where they always sit together, preferably at the front. As they wait for their English lesson to start, they recount how their friendship started.

It was Blessing who welcomed Rebecca on the first day she came to school in March 2021. Rebecca had just moved from Lagos with her mother and brother – her father stayed behind to run his business selling home appliances. She dreaded her first day in a new school. But there was Blessing, a friendly girl who had attended the school since her family arrived in Ogoja in September 2018. She greeted the more timid Rebecca when she entered the classroom and moved over to make space for her to sit down.

“She was the first to accommodate me,” Rebecca says with a smile. “She knew how it was to be completely new somewhere.” After school, it turned out, they took the same route home, and since that first day, Rebecca has waited for Blessing to pass by her house in the mornings so they can walk to school together.

Rebecca is aware that violence drove her friend out of her country, but she does not ask her about it. “I don’t want to make her cry,” she says.

Sometimes, she sees sadness in Blessing’s eyes, and her chatty friend grows quiet. Then Rebecca tries to cheer her up by telling her a silly story or getting her to sing – they love to sing gospel songs together. Sometimes, she notices Blessing finds it hard to concentrate in class. “Then I know that afterwards, she’ll be asking to take my notes home to copy them,” she says. Even though it means she won’t be able to study that day, Rebecca says, “I have to lend her what I can. She’s my friend.”

Their English teacher Comfort Ullah Solomon, 46, remembers how lost and lonely many of the refugee students appeared when they first arrived in Ogoja. “They seemed miles away, sometimes they were not even listening, as if they were in a trance,” she recalls. When Adagom I opened in 2018, a lot of Cameroonian children came to the school. In the first year, almost one-third of the students were from Cameroon. Today, as they have moved to other schools in Ogoja, about 150 of the more than 1,000 pupils of the secondary school are Cameroonian.

Comfort Ullah Solomon teaches English to students in Rebecca and Blessing’s year [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Sometimes, in those early days, there was friction, the teacher says. She describes an incident where a Nigerian and Cameroonian student were running around when the former playfully shouted, “I will shoot you!” The Cameroonian teenager broke down, leaving his classmate puzzled. Comfort sat down with them and explained to the Nigerian pupil the violence his classmate had fled, and how for him the game might have felt real. “They became friends,” she says.

She made an effort to comfort the new students. “I kept them close, told them they were worthwhile. After a while, their absent-mindedness disappeared.”

Blessing confesses she was scared when she first arrived at her new school. “I thought the Nigerians would bully us and ask us what we are doing in their land,” she recalls. But the way the school teamed up the refugees with their Nigerian fellow students for the Friday quizzes and debate teams quickly made her feel accepted.

Her 17-year-old Nigerian classmate, Benjamin Udam, admits he was also worried when the new students came. “I thought maybe they had a different way of life than us. But we turned out to be just the same,” he says.

Blessing’s Nigerian classmate Alice Abua, 16, remarks that Cameroonians prepare their soup with very little water, another mentions they dance the makossa, while another suggests their English sounds a little different. Apart from that, they don’t see any substantial differences between Nigerians and Cameroonians. And when asked who has a friend from the other country, everyone in the classroom raises a hand.

Rebecca and Blessing prepare rice and beans at Blessing’s place [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

Rice and beans

After school, Rebecca joins Blessing at her place to cook rice and beans, their favourite meal. They stroll to the settlement market to buy condiments, over the red sand paths lined with papaya, palm and mesquite trees, past the one-storey houses refugee families built with bricks and roofing sheets provided by the UNHCR.

The market vendors are a mix of refugees and locals. Janet Aricha, the woman the girls usually buy crayfish from, is from Ogoja. She never saw the refugees as a threat. “I felt bad for them,” she explains. “Imagine to lose your home and everything in a single day.”

Much like the other Nigerian sellers at the market, she saw the influx of new customers as a business opportunity. Even in town, most people agree that economic opportunities in Ogoja, home to an estimated 250,000 people, grew with the arrival of Cameroonian refugees.

Meanwhile, the girls realise the money Blessing’s mum gave them has finished before they have managed to buy all the ingredients they need. “How did we forget pepper?” Rebecca asks her friend in disbelief. But Blessing has a solution; on the way back, she asks a neighbour if she could pluck some chillies from their garden.

At home, Blessing’s mother has started the fire. While her daughter and her best friend prepare the meal, Victorine Ndifon Atop talks about life in this new place.

It’s not easy, but for the children she tries to make life as familiar as the one they left behind, the 43-year-old says. She points at the garden in front of the 20-square-metre (215-square-foot) house the now family of nine shares. The small patch of lawn is meticulously cut and the white periwinkle and hibiscus shrubs are blooming.

She only knew Nigerians from Nollywood movies when they first came to Nigeria. “In those movies, they are always shouting at each other,” she says. “So back home, we thought they were all ruffians.” But six years in Adagom I changed her mind. When the refugees first arrived, complete strangers from town brought them clothes and provisions. And one day, a Nigerian neighbour from the host community of Adagom gave her a plot of land she now grows cassava on to prepare fufu, a popular Western African dish, to sell. “They embraced us and received us like family,” she says.

Nigerian vendor Janet Aricha, right, says she feels for the Cameroonian refugees who came to the area after losing their homes to violence in their home country [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

‘They are like us’

Down the road, a five-minute walk away, Adagom I chief Stephen Makong shrugs to indicate he finds his community’s hospitality towards refugees self-evident. “Of course, we gave them land to farm on. If you don’t, what are they going to eat?” he asks.

When the village leader was told about the refugee settlement plan in his community, he saw it as a blessing. “My father taught me: for strangers to come to your house, you must be a good person.” Not everyone in his community thought so, he adds. “Some young men were afraid they would come and claim ownership of the land. But I told them they did not come to steal our land. They are running from war. You cannot drive them away again.”

But there are occasional disputes. “Even when two brothers live in a house, they quarrel,” the chief says. When some refugees cut trees in the forest for firewood, a town hall meeting was called to explain that in Cross River State you only use deadwood for cooking. But life together has been largely harmonious, most people in the village say. They have also benefitted from the settlement’s development. The UNHCR divides investments in the local infrastructure between the refugee and host community, reserving about 30 percent of its budget for the latter. The drilled wells, water taps and the widened road through the village wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the refugees.

On top of that, the locals discovered that some Cameroonians are from the same ethnic group as them – the Ejagham who live on both sides of the border. So they even share a language, says Makong. “They are like us. We are the same people.”

That cultural proximity, combined with the perceived economic advantages, could explain why Ogoja has taken in thousands of Cameroonians without much local resistance. Farmers who used the federal land where the refugees were settled may grumble a bit even though they have been compensated for the crops they could not harvest. And with inflation making everyone’s money far less valuable, the town’s economic activity has ground to a halt, much like in the rest of the West African country. But that does not make the refugees less welcome, says the chief. “We enjoy together, and we suffer together.”

This hospitality towards strangers on the run from violence is not an exception in Nigeria. Three-quarters of the Cameroonians seeking refuge in the country did not have to go to a refugee settlement – they found shelter within a community. Just as, according to the UN, more than 80 percent of Nigerian IDPs found refuge with fellow Nigerians.

Rebecca and Blessing greet each other in the morning before going to school [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]

‘She is my friend’

Back at Blessing’s home, the two girls have finished cooking and sit in the shade with a plate of steaming rice topped with smoky bean sauce on the floor in front of them. For a while, the chatting stops and the only sound is the clicking of two spoons on the shared aluminium plate. When they finish their meal, Blessing teases her slender friend, “The way you eat! I don’t understand you’re not fatter.”

The sun is on its way down when Rebecca arrives back home, but her mother does not mind. She is happy her daughter has found such a good friend. “When I look at them, they remind me of my best friend and me back home in Akwa Ibom,” says 39-year-old Favour Jonas, referring to the Nigerian state she grew up in. “I remember how we used to gist, play and sing together as girls.”

Next year will be the girls’ final year in secondary school. Afterwards, even if they go to different universities, Rebecca is sure they will stay in touch. For now, she has more immediate things to think about. Tomorrow they have a maths and an economics exam, and Rebecca hopes Blessing won’t be late. But even if she is, she will wait for her. “I have to,” she says. “She is my friend.”

This article has been produced with the support of UNHCR.

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Batang Kali: A British massacre in colonial Malaya and a fight for justice | Human Rights News

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – In the smart offices of a law firm located among the skyscrapers of the Malaysian capital, 85-year-old Lim Kok’s thoughts turn back to a crime perpetrated by British forces three-quarters of a century ago.

The decades in between have not faded Lim’s memories of the period when then-Malaya was a colony in the waning days of the British Empire.

Attempting to slow the sun setting on its colony in Southeast Asia, London sent thousands of British and Commonwealth troops to suppress a local movement fighting for independence in the aftermath of World War II.

Lim was just nine years old when his father, a hardworking ethnic Chinese supervisor at a rubber plantation, was gunned down in a hail of bullets along with 23 other innocent workers in what is still known to this day as the Batang Kali massacre.

He lost more than his father that day, Lim said.

He lost a family.

With her husband and the family’s breadwinner dead, Lim’s mother was left alone to raise six children – an impossible task for a poor rural household in the late 1940s.

Lim’s mother was forced to give her youngest child, a newly-born baby girl, up for adoption. Lim was later sent to live with a granduncle in Kuala Lumpur.

Not only was Lim’s family torn apart, but the British troops who carried out the massacre tried to cover up the atrocity by accusing their victims of being involved with the Communists fighting for independence.

The truth would surface years later as journalists, researchers and court hearings attested to the innocence of those killed by British soldiers in Batang Kali.

To this day, however, there has been no redress or official apology from British authorities, who have resisted calls to open an enquiry into the massacre that took place 75 years ago this week.

An ethnic Chinese protester leaving a white flower at the main entrance of the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur during a commemoration in 2008 for those massacred by British soldiers in Batang Kali in 1948. Britain has refused requests to hold an inquiry into the massacre by 14 members of the Scots Guards [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]

“I knew my dad was a genuine rubber tapper,” Lim told Al Jazeera, when asked about the colonial state’s attempt to frame the victims of the massacre as rebels.

The false accusations never made him “feel bad” as he was growing up, he said.

“The only thing bad is that they were massacred by the British soldiers.”

Though he is in his mid-80s, Lim is spry and energetic and has not given up the fight to hold the British government to account for “the suffering which we and the other relatives of the murdered persons experienced”.

“Being the offspring, we suffered a lot. Even my brothers and sisters… They have to go out in search of work at a very early age just to earn a living,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “They suffered a lot.”

The most recent fight to hold British authorities to account began in 2008 when the father of Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer Quek Ngee Meng launched a campaign for justice after researching the incident in his retirement.

When his father passed away in 2010, Quek took up the torch for the victims of Batang Kali.

The campaign for an official inquiry has taken advocates from London’s High Court to the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, and onto the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Quek said the massacre has had a multigenerational impact on the families of the slain men, who were consigned to economic hardship and poverty on top of suffering the trauma of the violent deaths of their loved ones.

Many families of the victims could not afford to educate their children well. Some gave up children for adoption. Others married young or agreed to arranged marriages just to keep their families afloat following the loss of their breadwinner.

“The families were actually broken down,” Quek told Al Jazeera, explaining that it took generations for the families of victims to improve their economic and social circumstances.

“It actually wasn’t just the 24 or whoever who were killed. Many, many people are victims of this,” he said.

Quek recalls that legal action was not their first choice. An apology and a settlement would have sufficed for relatives, but a letter sent to British authorities seeking to negotiate was ignored.

“There was no middle ground that we can reach…. No offer for any talks. We just have to go on this legal journey and, yes, we lost on technical grounds,” he said.

Quek Ngee Meng, centre, presents a memorandum condemning the massacre of 24 civilians at Batang Kali to British High Commissioner to Malaysia Boyd McCleary outside the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur on December 12, 2008 [File: Saeed Khan/AFP]

“I felt sorry for Lim Kok and all those I couldn’t get compensation for,” said Quek, who has worked for years on the campaign on a pro bono basis.

“But, what I can get is this: All judges all agree that an atrocity at that time was committed by the British soldiers. And, the fact, the true fact, is these villagers, they were not guilty of any crime.”

“They were not Communists. There is no proof that they were sympathisers,” he said.

The details of the Batang Kali massacre are chilling.

According to court documents, in the early evening of December 11, 1948, a patrol of Scots Guards numbering 14 soldiers entered the remote settlement in Batang Kali, located among heavily jungled hills some 60km (around 40 miles) north of Kuala Lumpur. The settlement was inhabited by around 50 adults and some children who worked on the surrounding rubber plantation, which was owned by a Scottish man.

The British soldiers separated the men from the women and children and confined them overnight in a wooden long hut where they were interrogated. The soldiers carried out mock executions to terrify the unarmed male villagers in the hope of obtaining information about rebels that might have been nearby.

Troops of ‘G’ Company, Second Battalion The Scots Guards, wade through a swamp during an operation in Pahang, Malaya, in 1950 [File: AP Photo]

That night, the first victim was shot.

The following morning, the women and children, and one traumatised man, were put on a truck and driven away from the plantation. The hut in which the 23 men had been detained was opened and, in the next few minutes, all were shot dead.

With bodies strewn all around, the soldiers torched the workers’ huts and the patrol moved on, returning to their base later.

The first newspaper report in the days following the massacre described the slain men as “bandits” who were shot while trying to escape and claimed that a quantity of ammunition had been uncovered.

Shortly after, Britain’s War Office officially declared the killings as a “very successful action”.

As the truth began to emerge of what actually took place, a rudimentary enquiry headed by British legal officials in the colony was conducted and concluded within a matter of days.

Based on statements from the soldiers, and not the villagers, the conclusion was that nothing had occurred in Batang Kali that “justified criminal proceeding”.

A protester representing a British soldier portrays the Batang Kali massacre scene during a protest in front of the British High Commission building in Kuala Lumpur in December 2008. British troops during the ‘Malayan Emergency’ said they severed the heads of suspected rebels for identification purposes [Saeed Khan/AFP]

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Communities on US LNG front line ask Biden to reject export terminal | Business and Economy

Travis Dardar, a fisherman and member of the Isle de Jean Charles Tribal Community off the coast of Louisiana, has twice been displaced by fossil fuels.

Rising sea levels forced him and his tribal nation to move in 2016 from the island where they had settled in the 1830s to escape the Trail of Tears, the forced displacement of Indigenous tribes by the US government. “If anybody’s seen climate change, I’m that guy. I watched that place disappear right before my eyes,” he told Al Jazeera.

He resettled in Cameron Parish, a Louisiana coastal community where he could make a living working in one of America’s largest fishing industries, but he was displaced again in August by the construction of Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2, a liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal that is being built to ship fossil fuels overseas. He took a buyout in August and moved away from the site and is now commuting two hours to Cameron for oyster season.

He said LNG terminals are threatening his livelihood in the fishing industry.

After a decade-long fracking surge, the United States has become the world’s largest LNG exporter. The Gulf of Mexico sits at the front lines of America’s LNG export boom with massive terminals expanding along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Called “clean energy” by the fossil fuel industry, LNG is in fact mostly methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.

President Joe Biden’s administration now faces a huge climate decision: whether to approve Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), one of more than 20 proposed LNG export terminals. CP2 can’t export to certain countries unless the Department of Energy rules it is in the public interest. The LNG would mostly be exported to Europe, which is moving away from Russian gas due to the war in Ukraine.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will make a decision on CP2 as soon as this month. After FERC’s decision, the Department of Energy will determine whether an export licence for CP2 is in the public interest.

Venture Global did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, the company has argued the project will bring more than 1,000 permanent jobs to Cameron Parish and LNG can replace coal in some countries to bring down emissions.

But a new paper by a leading methane scientist found that, when the entire lifecycle of exported LNG is considered, it can be 24 percent worse than the lifecycle of coal.

‘A shrimp-pocalypse’

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster took four years to clean up [US Coast Guard handout via EPA]

In November, Dardar travelled to Washington, DC, along with other Louisiana activists to protest CP2 in front of the Department of Energy and Venture Global buildings. He helped deliver a petition to the department with 200,000 signatures against the project.

Louisiana is the largest seafood producer in the lower 48 US states. The industry has retail, import and export sales totalling more than $2bn and employs more than 26,000 people in the state.

But Dardar said LNG companies have bought up and torn down the fishing docks, and the Coast Guard tells fishermen to get out of the way of the LNG tankers or they will be arrested. He said last year, a huge wave from a tanker ripped pieces off his boat.

The oyster, shrimp and fish populations are vulnerable to climate change and oil spills. The region suffers frequent oil spills, including BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010, which spilled 200 million gallons (760 million litres) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and took four years to clean up. Most recently in November, 1 million gallons (3.8 million litres) of oil leaked off Louisiana’s coast.

If LNG construction continues, Dardar fears the fishing industry will collapse. “You’re talking about a shrimp-pocalypse,” he said.

The US, the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, is on pace to set a record for extraction of fossil fuels. That includes breaking records for gas production. In the process, not only is the US not on track to meet its emissions reduction targets, the emissions from exported LNG are not included in the domestic math and remain uncounted.

Environmental groups, members of Congress and Louisiana residents are calling on the Biden administration to deny the CP2 permit.

A group of lawmakers sent a letter in November asking Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reject the project, saying the lifecycle emissions of all existing proposed LNG terminals would be equivalent to 681 coal plants. CP2 alone would amount to 20 times the emissions of the Willow Project, a controversial oil drilling project in Alaska that the Biden administration approved in March.

Senator Jeff Merkley, one of the letter signers, told Al Jazeera: “The United States has been promoting a massive myth, which is that fossil gas is better than coal for the climate. That is a huge disservice to the world because it is scientifically wrong, and also it undermines our legitimacy in the climate conversation. It’s convenient because we’re shutting down coal mines and instead we’re increasing fracking and gas.”

“We’ve built seven export facilities, and the next one, CP2, becomes a point where we can focus our attention on this — what is essentially a big myth, or a big lie perpetrated by the US government that undermines our efforts to have humanity address this key problem,” Merkley said.

He said if the US isn’t doing its part on climate, it allows other countries to continue to extract fossil fuels too. “Because if America isn’t going to change its habits when it’s the biggest historical producer of carbon dioxide, [others can say] why should we change ours?”

Health impacts

Residents living near the LNG plants are experiencing health effects alongside those of climate change [Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo]

The fishing industry is not the only community impacted by the LNG boom. Residents living near the LNG plants are experiencing health impacts alongside climate change.

Roishetta Ozane, founder and director of the Vessel Project of Louisiana and a mother of six children, was one of the activists who delivered the petition to the Department of Energy in Washington.

She said the LNG terminals are polluting the air and sea level rises from climate change are submerging wetlands and replacing groundwater with saltwater.

“There is nothing safe about LNG — it’s greenwashed and should be called LMG [liquefied methane gas] because of the methane pollution it emits,” she wrote in a text to Al Jazeera. “There’s only one person who can put a stop to this injustice: President Biden.”

Cameron resident John Allaire, who worked for decades in the oil and gas industry before he retired, stood on his porch and looked down the coast, where only a mile (1.6km) away, he can see a huge flare from Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass, an existing LNG plant. The company’s proposed CP2 terminal would be built nearby. A horn sounded as a tanker next to the plant prepared to leave the dock.

When Allaire first moved to his property in the 1990s, there was no industrial pollution, and he could see the stars at night. Now the flares light up the sky “like Las Vegas”. He and his wife often smell fumes from the plant. “When we get the wind out of that direction, it literally gets hard to breathe out here,” he said.

He has experienced powerful hurricanes, including one in 2005 with a storm surge so high that it swept his house out to sea. The hurricanes leave debris in their wake that dries out and becomes fuel for wildfires. This year, Louisiana saw an extreme drought, and a wildfire threatened Allaire’s home before it was extinguished.

“It’s silly, what we’re doing — this huge experiment to see how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere,” he said.

He described a rush now to get oil and gas out of the ground and sell it as fast as possible. “It’s capitalism at its finest — just monetize it as quick as you can and to heck with the consequences.”

Back on his boat, Dardar said he hopes the Department of Energy rejects the permit for CP2.

“Don’t nobody come to Louisiana to see LNG plants. They come for the seafood. They come for the Cajun music. They come for the gumbo,” he said.

“If they give them their permits, we’re gonna continue fighting, that’s for sure. I’m gonna fight until they put me in the ground if that’s what it takes.”

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In Mexico, a community gathers to celebrate a quinceañera — for the elderly | Arts and Culture

Mexico City, Mexico – It was the eve of Lupita Rivera’s 84th birthday, but she had chosen instead to go back in time and celebrate her 15th.

Hard of hearing and reliant on a wheelchair most of the time, Rivera was decked out in a bronze-coloured ballgown, sparkly nail polish and baby pink lipstick as she attended her “Quinceañera de Oro”, a twist on a centuries-old coming-of-age tradition in Mexico.

Normally, a quinceañera party is held on a girl’s 15th birthday, to mark her entry into adulthood. But the organisers behind the annual “Quinceañera de Oro” event want to offer the opulence of a quinceañera to elderly, blue-collar women who never had the opportunity to participate.

Rivera, for instance, grew up on a ranch in the southern state of Oaxaca. She remembers watching as the girls from town held quinceañera bashes, complete with traditional folk dances. It was a custom her rural family did not subscribe to, nor could afford.

“I made little sacrifices, lots of little sacrifices, and worked and worked, and then when I was able to give my own daughters quinceañera parties, I felt enormous pride,” Rivera said. “Now I can’t believe I’m here doing it myself.”

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Iraq’s marshes are dying, and so is a civilization | Climate Crisis

Mohammed Hamid Nour is only 23 but is already nostalgic for how Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes once were before drought dried them up, decimating his herd of water buffaloes.

Even at their centre in Chibayish, only a few expanses of the ancient waterways – home to a Marsh Arab culture that goes back millennia – survive, linked by channels that snake through the reeds.

Pull back further and the water gives way to bare, cracked earth.

Mohammed has lost three-quarters of his herd to the drought that is now ravaging the marshes for a fourth consecutive year. The United Nations said it is the worst in 40 years, describing the situation as “alarming”, with “70 percent of the marshes devoid of water”.

“I beg you, Allah, have mercy!” Mohammed implored, keffiyeh on his head as he contemplated the disaster under the unforgiving blue of a cloudless sky.

As the marshes dry out, the water gets salty until it starts killing the buffaloes. Many of Mohammed’s herd died like this, others he was forced to sell before they too perished.

“If the drought continues and the government doesn’t help us, the others will also die,” said the young herder, who has no other income.

In the 1990s, Iraq’s former strongman President Saddam Hussein drained the marshes – which were 20,000sq km (7,700sq miles) – to punish the Marsh Arabs, diverting the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers away from the land.

It was only after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that people began to dismantle the Saddam-era infrastructure, allowing the marshes to refill slightly, but they are still only 4,000sq km (1,500sq miles) by the latest estimates – also choked by dams on the Tigris and Euphrates upstream in Turkey and Syria and soaring temperatures of climate change.

Iconic culture

Marsh buffalo milk is an iconic part of Iraqi cuisine, as is the thick, clotted “geymar” cream Iraqis love to have with honey for breakfast.

The buffaloes are tricky to raise and their milk cannot be mass-produced, and their rearing is tied to the marshes

Both the Mesopotamian marshes and the culture of the Ma’dan – Marsh Arabs – who live in them, have UNESCO World Heritage status. The Ma’dan have hunted and fished there for 5,000 years, building houses from woven reeds on floating reed islands where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together before pouring into the Gulf.

Even their beautifully intricate mosques were made of reeds.

Today, only a few thousand of the quarter million Ma’dan who lived in the marshes in the early 1990s remain.

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With Europe’s help, a Libyan brigade accused of killings returns refugees | Refugees

Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities.

A shadowy Libyan armed group accused of unlawful killings, torture, arbitrary detention and enslavement, with alleged links to Russia’s Wagner Group, has been forcibly returning refugees with the help of European authorities, a new investigation has found.

On several occasions this year, GPS coordinates released by Europe’s border agency Frontex have ended up in the hands of the Tareq Bin Zayed (TBZ), allowing militiamen to haul back hundreds of people at a time from European waters to eastern Libya.

The pullbacks described by witnesses, which often involve violence, are illegal. Under international law, refugees cannot be returned to unsafe countries such as Libya, where they are at risk of serious ill-treatment.

The joint investigation by Al Jazeera, Lighthouse Reports, the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism (SIRAJ), Malta Today, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, involved months of researching the latest pullbacks, including extensive interviews with witnesses, experts and officials.

The TBZ pullbacks from European waters began in May. Al Jazeera and its partners investigated five that took place this year, which overall saw hundreds being returned and many abused. The TBZ is also known to drag people back from Libyan waters.

The pattern that emerged suggests that European powers are working directly and indirectly with the TBZ, amid their efforts to curb refugee arrivals.

These institutions are well aware of the TBZ’s alleged human rights abuses but do nothing to stop the brigade acting as a coastguard partner, even though it is closely tied to Khalifa Haftar, the renegade general at the helm of the eastern Libyan administration which is not recognised by the international community, including the European Union.

The bloc also understands the TBZ’s connections to Wagner, the Russian mercenary force accused of atrocities from Africa to Ukraine.

The investigation found that Malta appears to be playing a direct role. During one incident in August, an audio recording strongly suggests that a Maltese air force pilot relayed the coordinates of a boat in distress to the TBZ.

Several refugees who have been intercepted by the group told Al Jazeera and its partners that TBZ militiamen have tortured, beat, and shot at them. One said they witnessed a killing. Others, having paid vast sums to smugglers, said TBZ forced them to pay ransom or made them work for their freedom.

“Frontex and national rescue coordination centres should never provide information to any Libyan actors,” said Nora Markard, an expert on international law at Germany’s University of  Munster. “Frontex knows who TBZ is and what this militia does.

“What the militia is doing is more of a kidnapping than a rescue. You only have to imagine pirates announcing that they will deal with a distress case.”

Several hundred refugees have been pulled back to eastern Libya in the TBZ’s boat, pictured here, which is named after the brigade [Screengrab/Al Jazeera]

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