The New Yorker: Colombia's Guerrillas Come Out of the Jungle

By the terms of the peace treaty, which he had helped negotiate, some seven thousand farc fighters will submit to a process of transitional justice. In exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims, those who committed war crimes will receive “restorative sanctions,” which offer the possibility of community work rather than prison. The farc will become a political party, and, before long, former guerrillas will be able to run for public office. [...]

As the conflict dragged on, successive Colombian governments held peace talks, but the state did not always operate in good faith. In the mid-eighties, the farc agreed to call a truce and to recast itself as a political party—only to see thousands of its loyalists murdered by government death squads and paramilitary vigilantes. But the farc did little to maintain moral superiority; at one point, it was kidnapping as many as three people a day, including landowners, military officers, tourists, congressmen, even a Presidential candidate. Some were held for years, in appalling conditions. Eventually, the farc moved into Colombia’s booming drug business, levying taxes on coca growers and cocaine traffickers. After a new round of peace negotiations failed in 2002, the fighting became more vicious; Lozada moved from Bogotá to the jungle, and began leading combat operations. [...]

As President, Uribe negotiated with the paracos, even as he escalated the war against the farc. One of his schemes, which offered rewards to soldiers who killed guerrillas, led to the murder of more than two thousand civilians—a campaign that became notorious as False Positives. With the aid of a multibillion-dollar U.S. program called Plan Colombia—which included financial and intelligence assistance, a fleet of Blackhawk helicopters, and a contingent of American advisers—Uribe began landing decisive blows. During an Army attack in 2007, Lozada was shot in the back. Unable to walk, he crawled through the jungle as soldiers combed the area for survivors. In agony, he contemplated ending his life, until he was rescued by a guerrilla named Isabela. In Yarí, he lifted his T-shirt to show me the ugly scar on his back. [...]

On the show, Lozada and Timochenko spoke of the threat of renewed violence. A few months earlier, one far-flung rebel unit, linked to drug trafficking, had announced that it would remain in the jungle, rather than join the peace process. More pressing, as the farc withdrew from territory, the paramilitary narco-gangs were moving in, killing as they came. A pamphlet had circulated in San Vicente del Caguán, a town near farc territory, bearing a stencilled machine gun and the insignia of the fearsome paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia. The text read, “We have arrived . . . and have come to stay,” adding that the group’s purpose was to purge the town of farc supporters. Three local peasant leaders had been shot, and left-wing activists accused the mayor, a follower of Uribe, of ordering the murders. (The mayor denied involvement.) According to human-rights observers, more than seventy such activists were killed last year, inspiring fears of an extermination campaign. “A culture of violence has been formed,” Timochenko said. The society itself needed to change.

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The New York Review of Books: Syria: The Hidden Power of Iran (April 13, 2017)

Consider the array of forces now in play: in Syria, the war on ISIS has been led by Syrian Kurds affiliated with the PKK, the militant Kurdish party in Turkey, which has been in conflict with the Turkish state for the past 33 years—another US ally.  In Iraq, there are the peshmerga, the fighters of a rival Kurdish party, who are competing both with the PKK and with Iraqi Shia militias for control over former ISIS territory. There is Turkey, an avowed enemy of Assad that is currently at war with the PKK and its Syrian affiliates, and has moved troops into both northern Syria and northern Iraq in order to thwart the PKK. There is Russia, which, in intervening on behalf of Assad, has created a major shift in the conflict.

And finally, there is Iran, which has made various alliances with Assad, Shia militias, and Kurdish groups in an effort to expand its control of Iraq and, together with Hezbollah, re-establish a dominant position in the Levant. Moreover, Iran has also benefited from another tactical, if unofficial, alliance—with the United States itself, in their efforts to defeat ISIS in neighboring Iraq.  [...]

It is striking that, throughout the region, both states and non-state groups like ISIS and the Kurds draw on language of encirclement and victimhood in their struggles for power. Perceptions can often count more than reality, leading to tensions and military actions that might otherwise be easily avoided. For example, Saudi Arabia sees a revolutionary and ascendant Iran gaining power and increasingly encircling it, in a region the Saudis thought they dominated—in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain, Yemen, the Red Sea. As a result, Saudi leadership has not only backed various rebel groups fighting the Assad regime, but also launched a war against the Houthis in Yemen—which it regards as proxies of Iran. [...]

The human cost of these rivalries has been extraordinary. Over 3.3 million people are currently displaced in Iraq, a population that suffers from shortages of food, clothes, shelter, and basic services while contending with a variety of forces hostile to them. In Mosul, another major threat to civilian life is the Mosul dam just upstream on the Tigris, which has been dangerously weakened by structural flaws and years of neglect. It has held while engineers feverishly add grout to all the necessary places. Those with knowledge of the matter anxiously watch the sky, praying for no rain: it takes a damaging drought to prevent a killer flood.

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Social Europe: Does Social Background Determine Life Chances In Europe?

The report looks at absolute social mobility or the extent of broader occupational change and societal progress as well as relative social mobility which measures chances of moving (up or down) between occupational classes.

Analysis of the European Social Survey shows that there has been an improvement in relative social mobility over time and also a certain degree of convergence in relative mobility across Europe, but social mobility has not increased everywhere. Although it rose in most countries from the generation born before 1946 to the baby boomer generation (born 1946-1964), the picture after this is much more complex: in some countries social mobility has been decreasing (for example Austria, Bulgaria, France and notably Sweden and, to a lesser degree, Germany, Spain and Hungary) for the youngest generation. In several countries, meanwhile, social mobility has continued to increase across the board, for example Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands.

The research also shows that it is important to examine patterns of social mobility for men and women separately as the overall country patterns hide gender differences. In several countries it is men, especially those of Generation X, that have started to experience decreasing levels of social mobility: this is the case in the UK but also in France, Sweden, Austria, Estonia and Bulgaria. In contrast, social mobility among men has increased in Germany and Spain as well as in those countries where overall levels have been high for both sexes (the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Belgium and Greece). [...]

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this new research is that we need to think more holistically from a life-cycle perspective when designing policies for improving equal opportunities and promoting upward social mobility. These ideally should start before birth and extend through childcare and school years into working life. This could also help to address widespread feelings of social exclusion and injustice now, especially when deep-rooted structural changes have contributed to widening inequalities in European countries.

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Slate: The Forgotten Secret Language of Gay Men

Vada (“look at”), dolly eek (a pretty face), and chicken (a young guy) are all words from the lexicon of Polari, a secret language used by gay men in Britain at a time when homosexuality was illegal. Following a rapid decline in the 1970s, Polari has all but disappeared. But recently it’s been popping up again, even appearing in the lyrics of a song on David Bowie’s final album.

Polari is a language of, in linguistic professor Paul Baker's words, "fast put-downs, ironic self-parody and theatrical exaggeration." Its vocabulary is derived from a mishmash of Italian, Romani, Yiddish, Cockney rhyming slang, backslang—as in riah to mean “hair”—and cant, a language used by 18th-century traveling performers, criminals, and carnival workers. Many of the words are sexual, anatomical, or euphemisms for police.

Historically, people who spoke Polari "were generally ‘the oppressed,’ the bottom of the rung,” says Jez Dolan, a Manchester artist whose work focuses on queer culture. "Polari is very much a working-class thing." During the 19th- and early 20th centuries, the language was used by merchant seafarers and people who frequented the pubs around London’s docks. In the 1930s it was spoken among the theater types of the West End, from which it crossed over to the city’s gay pubs, gaining its status as the secret language of gay men.

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The Guardian: 102 villagers, 750 refugees, one grand experiment

ne day in October, after a thousand years of evening gloom, a work crew arrives and lines the main avenue with LED street lamps. The lights are a concession to the villagers – all 102 of them – from their political masters in the nearby town of Amt Neuhaus, who manage Sumte’s affairs and must report to their own masters in Hanover, the state capital of Lower Saxony, who in turn must report to their masters in Berlin, who send emissaries to Brussels, which might as well be Bolivia, so impossibly distant do the villagers find that black hole of tax euros and goodwill.

It’s this vague chain of command that most alienates the people of Sumte. They are pensioners and housepainters. They are farmers, subsistence and commercial. They are carpenters, clerks and commuters who cross the River Elbe by ferry every morning, driving to jobs in Lüneberg or Hamburg, 90 minutes away. More than a few are out of work. Nobody tells them anything. [...]

Until the moment Richter received the phone call, the most contentious municipal issue Amt Neuhaus had ever faced was the proposed construction of a bridge across the wide and placid Elbe – a project that has united residents against the feckless local government for approximately a century and a half. A bridge would shorten commute times and attract more investors. A bridge could change everything for these dying towns. Now imagine that your mayor gathers the entire community into a cramped and crumbling East German banquet hall and announces that the federal government has ordered not the long-desired bridge, but a refugee centre, one that will require expensive renovations and have unknown consequences. The atmosphere in the room is not good.

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Political Critique: Meet the Women at the Centre of Ukraine’s Resurgent HIV epidemic

On International Women’s Day in early March, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published a report stating there is an “urgent need” to increase HIV treatment and prevention for women and girls around the world. “Girls and women are still bearing the brunt of the AIDS epidemic,” Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, laments in the report’s introduction, pointing to stigma, discrimination and violence as factors that make women more vulnerable to HIV than men. [...]

Prior to 2014, Ukraine was putting up a strong fight against one of the worst HIV epidemics in Europe. Thanks to concerted efforts from government, civil society and international donors to provide treatment and prevention programmes to at-risk populations, by 2012 Ukraine had actually reported a decline in new HIV cases for the first time. It looked as though the country was about to turn a corner. [...]

The trends over the last year are worrying. According to the most recent statistics from Ukraine’s Public Health Center, part of Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, the number of new officially registered people with HIV/AIDS rose by almost eight percent in 2016; most (62%) of new infections came from sexual intercourse, while 22% from intravenous drug use. While deaths from HIV-related causes have been on a decline worldwide, the mortality rate from HIV-related causes increased in Ukraine by seven percent in 2016 – the majority (52%) caused by tuberculosis.

These official Ukrainian government statistics don’t include Crimea or the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts not controlled by Ukraine (the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”). This means these figures could actually be an underestimate, especially since Donetsk, says UNAIDS Ukraine country director Jacek Tymszko, has long been an epicentre of Ukraine’s HIV epidemic. More than half of all officially registered Ukrainians living with HIV live in Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts as well as in Kyiv.

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The Conversation: Australian values are hardly unique when compared to other cultures

There has been much talk recently about “Australian values”. The new citizenship test will require aspiring Australians to demonstrate they possess them, or can at least reproduce them under exam conditions. This raises the question of what these distinctly Australian values might be.

Politicians and commentators have made a variety of suggestions. Malcolm Turnbull proposes “respect, the rule of law, commitment to freedom, democracy”. Other contenders include mateship, tolerance, belief in reward for effort, a resilient can-do attitude, egalitarianism, larrikinism and the storied “fair go”. But are there any singularly Australian values at all? [...]

The most well developed understanding of cultural values can be found in the work of social psychologist Shalom Schwartz. Schwartz and a large ensemble of international collaborators have established that cultural values are best captured by seven distinct orientations. Each culture can be positioned somewhere along each dimension, from low to high, based on the degree to which its people endorse each set of values. [...]

So just how unique are Australian values overall? One way to answer that question is to add up how much Australia deviates from the international average over the seven dimensions. By this metric, Australia is the second least distinctive culture of all, beaten to the gold medal by Brazil.

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Al Jazeera: What is happening in Macedonia?

You rarely get to hear about Macedonia, but in the Balkans, it is something of a bellwether. A decade ago, it set an example of a multiethnic democracy - fragile and dysfunctional, to be sure, yet somehow keeping afloat and gravitating towards the European Union and NATO. More recently, however, it morphed into a one-party state, a replica of Viktor Orban's Hungary with a Balkan twist - a combination of old-fashioned clientelism and kitsch nationalism. [...]

Led by Nikola Gruevski, a one-time technocrat who turned into a populist in the mould of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban, VMRO-DPMNE has been in charge for more than a decade. Marred by high-level and pervasive state capture, their rule came under attack in 2015 when Zaev produced incriminating tapes implicating Gruevski and his close entourage, including family members, of abuse of power on a grand scale. After a wave of protests, Macedonian parties agreed under EU mediation to hold early elections and set up a special prosecutor to investigate the tapes. [...]

But the Macedonian President George Ivanov, elected on a VMRO-DPMNE ticket, refuses to hand the mandate to the Social Democrats. The justification for breaking the constitution is the threat of SDSM "Albanianising" Macedonia. The real reason: Gruevski does not want to be in opposition. 

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Quartz: Hong Kong just got a major ruling on rights for same-sex spouses

In 2014, Hong Kong immigration officer Leung Chun-kwong married his partner of about a decade in New Zealand, where same-sex marriage had become legal the previous year. On Friday, a High Court judge in Hong Kong, which doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, said that Leung’s husband was entitled to the same benefits available to the spouses of heterosexual employees of the civil service, the South China Morning Post reported over the weekend.

The judge disagreed with the civil services’ stance that extending the benefits would undermine the integrity of marriage in Hong Kong, the Post reported. A lawyer for Leung said the decision was a major one—an instance of “rare judicial recognition” of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the city. [...]

But there may be other ways in which Hong Kong law is ripe for further legal challenges. The judge in this case didn’t overrule the tax department’s decision not to extend married status to the couple, noting the tax department has defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. However, an interpretation guide (pdf) from the tax department also states that overseas marriages should be recognized—”the validity of a marriage is determined by the law of the place where it was celebrated”—which appears to create a contradiction in the regulation.

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