The Weekly Lift - May 26, 2022

This week's selection of positive headlines and articles*:

Ukraine Crisis: In Zelensky’s Blue-Collar Hometown, Praise For The President’s ‘Steel’

The New York Times (US) reports that "Sergiy Milutin first saw Volodymyr Zelensky when they were both 17 years old — competing against each other in a popular televised improv and comedy writing competition. Zelensky won, and even Milutin, then his rival, begrudgingly admitted that Zelensky was a captivating performer. He had a “crazy energy” that kept your attention, he said.

Nearly three decades later, Milutin now seeks out Zelensky’s appearances every night. The Ukrainian president’s evening speeches — now deadly serious — have become routine for many in the country over nearly two months of war with Russia.

“The whole country can only go to sleep after we’ve seen his latest video,” said Milutin, the deputy mayor of Kryvyi Rih, an industrial city of nearly 700,000 in Ukraine’s heartland and Zelensky’s hometown.

Zelensky has become the unshaven face of a Ukrainian resilience and defiance that has captivated the world. His daily briefings to Ukrainians have evolved from selfie-style videos on the streets of Kyiv — proof that he had not bolted from a country under attack — to more-formal addresses from behind a lectern, dressed in military-green fatigues. They’re a must-see, immediately shared across social media channels.

On the international stage, he has challenged the West’s commitment to supporting Ukraine, criticizing countries and world leaders by name for their economic relationships with Russia or reluctance to provide Ukraine with heavy weaponry.

And in Kryvyi Rih, where people have monitored Zelensky’s rise from local boy to star comedian to surprising presidential hopeful to brave wartime leader, Zelensky has come to embody the steel city’s blue-collar strength. With the war now entering a second phase — what Zelensky this week referred to as the “Battle for Donbas,” Ukraine’s eastern region — people here and across Ukraine are again looking to Zelensky to steer them through it.

“He’s become a symbol not just of Ukrainian unity amid war but also a symbol of the changing principles of the world order,” Milutin said.

Kryvyi Rih has not painted murals or erected statues in Zelensky’s honor. His presence is most directly acknowledged in large yellow signs around various buildings noting that their renovation is part of the Ukrainian president’s infrastructure initiative. Zelensky, meanwhile, gave a nod to his hometown when he named his television production company “Kvartal 95,” referring to the district of town where he grew up. His father is a professor at a local university, and people here are impressed that the Zelenskys carried on with life as normal in the city even after their son swept to an unexpected presidential victory in 2019.

Nowadays, city officials ask journalists not to visit or photograph Zelensky’s childhood home, because it might spook nervous neighbors who fear Russia could target the house with a missile strike as a sort of personal revenge.

Russian President Vladimir Putin falsely depicted his country’s attack on Ukraine as being against Zelensky’s “neo-Nazi” government. The Kremlin’s initial plans, analysts have said, largely leaned on the assumption that Zelensky would flee the same way Afghan President Ashraf Ghani did last summer when the Taliban closed in on Kabul. Instead, he stayed, and Ukrainians rallied around him.

His hometown has been spared any major attacks, but even as the fighting shifts to the east, Kryvyi Rih sits on a key axis. It’s due north of Russian-annexed Crimea, where the Russian military has several bases, and it is a sort of halfway point between the contested eastern Donbas region and Ukraine’s major Black Sea port of Odessa — considered a potential target.

Hunched over a map of Ukraine in his office, Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the Kryvyi Rih Military Administration, dragged a pen over the current front line between Ukraine and Russia, some 25 miles south of Kryvyi Rih in the Kherson region.

Moving the pen to create a vertical line from where Russia’s forces were to Kryvyi Rih, he said if the Russian plan is to attempt to encircle Ukraine’s military in the Donbas region, as many suspect, then Kryvyi Rih is in the line of fire as a western boundary point for that operation. And if the plan is to launch an offensive along Ukraine’s Black Sea shore, Kryvyi Rih is still a city the Russian forces will have to get through. “We’re standing in the way no matter what,” Vilkul said. “It’s all pretty obvious on the map.”

Coined the “longest city in Europe,” Kryvyi Rih’s wide roads were built for military aircraft to be able to land on them. Vilkul said Russia’s forces attempted an air assault on the city in the war’s first days to use it as an “air bridge” for its paratroopers. He ordered large semi-trucks to be parked across the runway at the airport as an obstacle to landing.

Once the practical defense measures were in place, Vilkul took a symbolic step. At the city’s main World War II monument downtown, Vilkul tied a Ukrainian flag into the sculpture soldier’s outstretched hand — a not-subtle response to Putin’s neo-Nazi narrative about Zelensky’s government. “Back then, we fought German Nazis,” Vilkul said. “Well, now this is a war against Russian fascists.”

With other industrial centers in Ukraine’s east, especially Mariupol and Kharkiv, still under heavy bombardment, Kryvyi Rih’s importance is expected to increase. ArcelorMittal, Ukraine’s largest integrated steel company, restarted production in the city last week — and some of its work is probably dedicated to supporting the war effort.

The opportunity for work in the industrial sector and the hard-nosed identity of the city has made it an appealing landing spot for the thousands of people displaced from Donbas, which is Ukrainian coal country. Some have started calling this area “Kryv-bas.” “You have to keep your word here and you need to be a strong person here,” Milutin said. “Our president is like that.”

Even amid the war, Kryvyi Rih kept to a spring tradition Saturday — a sort of cleaning day for the city. Volunteers planted trees at local parks and swept the sidewalks. Maria Mirchenko, 37, was picking up trash at a square downtown. The night before, she watched Zelensky’s latest speech and then went to bed feeling reassured, even as Ukraine has been plunged into uncertainty.

“I would be proud of him to be our president even if he wasn’t from here,” Mirchenko said. “You have to be a steel person to withstand all of this. He’s steel, just like Kryvyi Rih.”

International Relations: Azeri and Armenian leaders meet on Nagorno-Karabakh

The Jerusalem Post (Israel) reports that "the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia met on Sunday in Brussels to discuss a peace plan for?Nagorno-Karabakh that has stoked a wave of protests in Yerevan over opposition claims that?Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is being too soft.

A simmering dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan flared into a six-week war in 2020.

Azeri troops drove ethnic Armenian forces out of swathes of territory they had controlled since the 1990s in and around Nagorno-Karabakh before Russia brokered a ceasefire.

European Council President Charles Michel held bilateral talks with both Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Pashinyan before they had a trilateral meeting at which Karabakh was discussed.

Baku said Aliyev told Michel "that Azerbaijan had laid out five principles based on international law for the normalization of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and for the signing of a peace agreement."

"The president expressed his hope that the process of drafting the peace agreement between the two countries would be accelerated," the Azeri presidential office said in a statement.

Armenia's Pashinyan discussed with Michel the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh, and humanitarian issues and stressed the need to resolve them, the Armenian prime minister's office said. But Pashinyan is under pressure at home from opponents who say he mishandled the 2020 war and claim his recent public statements indicate he is giving up too much to Azerbaijan.

Pashinyan has faced a series of protests over recent weeks in Yerevan since he said the international community wanted Armenia to "lower the bar" on its claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. The unrest also coincides with Russia's war in Ukraine, which has prompted many former Soviet neighbors to reassess their own security just as Moscow is preoccupied with the biggest confrontation with the West for generations."

Diversity: Teen Mother. Housekeeper. Activist. Colombia's Vice President?

The New York Times (US) reports that "in the streets of Cali, a cradle of Colombian culture and protest, a crowd stretched for blocks, flying white campaign flags and wearing T-shirts that read “the people will not surrender!”

Amid the throng was a famous singer, an important senator, a well-known journalist, a child rapper and a cluster of local dignitaries. But the real celebrity was about to take center stage.“We love you, Francia!” shouted hundreds of people.

Addressing the crowd, microphone in hand, was Francia Márquez, 40, who once worked as a housekeeper and is now Colombia’s leading vice-presidential candidate as the nation prepares for elections later this month.

For the first time in Colombia’s history, a Black woman is close to the top of the executive branch. Wearing a printed blue and orange blouse that paid homage to Afro-Colombian style, Ms. Márquez called on the country’s marginalized peoples — Indigenous, Black, rural — to unite. She laid into the elite, who “have condemned our people to misery, to hunger, to desolation,” and evoked the Black Lives Matter movement by appealing to supporters “to break the structural racism that has not allowed us to breathe.”

“The moment has arrived to go from resistance to power!” she shouted before the crowd. Then she invoked the most Colombian of phrases, as the crowd exploded in cheers: “Que viva la berraquera, carajo!”Roughly: “Long live our strength, damn it!”

In a matter of months, Ms. Márquez, an environmental activist from the mountainous department of Cauca in southwestern Colombia, has become a national phenomenon, mobilizing decades of voter frustration to win third place in a March presidential primary, and compelling the country’s leading presidential candidate, Gustavo Petro, to name her as his running mate.

On the campaign trail, Ms. Márquez’s persistent, frank and biting analysis of the social disparities in Colombian society has cracked open a discussion about race and class in a manner rarely heard in the country’s most public and powerful political circles.

Those themes, “many in our society deny them, or treat them as minor,” said Santiago Arboleda, a professor of Afro-Andean history at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. “Today, they’re on the front page.”

Ms. Márquez’s rise is significant not only because she is Black in a nation where Afro-Colombians are regularly subject to racist insults and treatment and must contend with structural barriers, but because she comes from poverty in a country where?economic class so often defines a person’s place in society. Most recent former presidents were educated abroad and are connected to the country’s powerful families and kingmakers.

Despite economic gains in recent decades, Colombia remains starkly unequal, a trend that has worsened during the pandemic, with Black, Indigenous and rural communities falling the farthest behind.

In all, 40 percent of the country lives in poverty. Ms. Márquez has chosen to run for office, she said, “because our governments have turned their backs on the people, and on justice and on peace.”“If they had done their jobs,” she said of the political establishment, “I wouldn’t be here.”

To a segment of Colombians who are clamoring for change and for more diverse representation, Ms. Márquez is their champion. The question is whether the rest of the country is ready for her. Her more generous critics have called her divisive, saying she is part of a leftist coalition that seeks to tear apart, instead of build upon, past norms.

“She is part of the polarization of this country,” said érika Ibargüen, an Afro-Colombian accountant who recently ran for Congress as a part of a centrist coalition. “We are part of the change of this country, but from the center.”

She has never held political office, and Sergio Guzmán, director of Colombia Risk Analysis, a consulting firm, said that “there are a lot of questions as to whether Francia would be able to be commander in chief, if she would manage economic policy, or foreign policy, in a way that would provide continuity to the country.”

Her more extreme opponents have taken direct aim at her with racist tropes, and criticize her class and political legitimacy, expressing sentiments that continue to pervade and sway portions of Colombian society.

In recent weeks, a well-known Colombian singer and television host has called her King Kong; a popular right-wing senator has suggested she should be “coherent” and change her name from Francia, a nation that was a “slaveholding colonizer”; and the head of the senate has called her the candidate of the National Liberation Army, a violent rebel group that claims to defend the poor. “She has too much resentment to be vice president,” said José Luis Ni?o, 68, a taxi driver. “Maybe she should go run a town in Africa,” he said.

Ms. Márquez grew up sleeping on a dirt floor in the community of La Toma, near Colombia’s Pacific Coast, in a region battered by violence related to the country’s long internal conflict. She became pregnant at 16, went to work in the local gold mines to support her child, and eventually sought work as a live-in maid.

Her mother, a midwife, gave birth to her alone, Ms. Márquez said in an interview, because no one else was home. Ms. Márquez became an activist when she was around 13, amid a proposal to expand a dam project that would have diverted a major river in her region, upending community life. She eventually went on to law school, winning a legal campaign to stop major mining companies trying to move into the area.

In 2014, she drew national attention when she led a 400-mile march from Cauca to Bogotá, demanding that the government stop illegal miners with backhoes who had invaded her community. The march ended in a sit-in at the Interior Ministry, and an accord with the government. For her work, Ms. Márquez won the Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes called the “environmental Nobel.”

Colombia’s presidential election is May 29, and it comes at a critical inflection point in the country. For generations, national politics have been driven by opposition to a brutal leftist insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. But in 2016, the insurgents signed a peace deal with the government, laying down their arms and ending a decades-long conflict that had helped conservatives stay in power for so long.

The end of the war between the government and the FARC has since opened space in the political discourse for left-wing movements that cannot be so easily dismissed as violent rebels. And it comes just as the most educated generation in the country’s history comes of age, with many young people?expressing frustration?with the low salaries and persistent barriers to economic ascension that they say they feel unable to escape.

So far, Mr. Petro, a former Bogotá mayor and a ex-member of a rebel group called M-19, is leading the polls against Federico Gutiérrez, a former mayor of Medellín representing a right-wing coalition.

Mr. Petro has rankled the right, and parts of the center, with his proposals to halt oil exploration and overhaul the pension system, while also drawing criticism from former allies, some of whom say he is an incapable administrator.

If Mr. Petro wins, Ms. Márquez is sure to try to push him toward a more feminist platform, and she has at times openly criticized his record on women’s issues.

In one presidential debate, Mr. Petro declined to offer full support for abortion rights, instead saying he would push for pregnancy prevention programs that would bring the country to “abortion zero.”

On the debate stage, Ms. Márquez turned to her ally: “I ask Petro, how many women have to die, how many women have to go through these painful situations until ‘zero abortion’ arrives?”

Today, for the first time, five of the country’s vice-presidential candidates are Afro-Colombian, something Mr. Guzmán attributed to Ms. Márquez’s rise. “Once Francia became a candidate, inclusion became a central narrative in the election,” he said.

Like many activists in Colombia who challenge the status quo, Ms. Márquez has received repeated death threats. At the campaign event not far from her hometown, Ms. Márquez stood surrounded by the Indigenous guard, a traditional security unit that carries wooden staffs meant to represent peace and strength.

Nearby was a squad of stone-faced plainclothes bodyguards, and beyond them, a circle of police officers in green.

In the crowd, amid a marimba player and a banner that read “dare to vote,” stood a cross-section of Colombia, including many women in turbans, which have come to symbolize Afro-Colombian struggle and strength.

Melba Sánchez, 67, in a purple turban, said she was there because “discrimination is what I have experienced most in life.” On stage, Ms. Márquez said that if she’d followed the rules, she’d be washing dishes in a wealthy family’s kitchen.

“Part of what disturbs the elite,” she boomed, “is that a woman who was working in their homes, today is going to be their leader.”

Human Rights: Taliban Ordered Afghan Female Newscasters To Cover Up. Men Joined In Protest

The Washington Post (US) reports that "the Taliban has ordered all female newscasters to cover their faces while on air, as part of?broader rules requiring all women in Afghanistan to cover head to toe.

It’s dangerous for women to refuse to comply. So some male colleagues have donned face coverings in protest. “We are in a deep grief today,” Khpolwak Sapai, deputy director of Afghanistan’s ToloNews, said in a Facebook post Sunday the day after the Taliban’s edict went into effect.

He shared photos of male and female staff members sitting together in an office full of screens, all wearing black masks. It’s a simple act but one that could come at a heavy price under the Taliban. The extremist group has whipped, beaten and arbitrarily detained journalists since it retook power nationwide in August.

The international community has refused to formally recognize the Taliban government because of its poor treatment of women, as well as its repression of religious minorities and political freedoms. The Taliban, citing a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law, has banned women from traveling without male guardians, and limited women’s and girls’ access to education and employment.

But as Afghanistan’s economy continues to crumble and its humanitarian crises grow, the group’s leaders have urged international donors to re-engage and send aid, arguing that they have changed since last in power during the 1990s.

Yet this messaging is rebutted by a decree issued May 7 ordering women to cover head to toe while in public — as was required when the Taliban last ruled — according to a?statement from the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. “This decision contradicts numerous assurances regarding respect for and protection of all Afghans’ human rights, including those of women and girls, that had been provided to the international community by Taliban representatives.”

The decree did not at first apply to Afghanistan’s cohort of female journalists who came of age in the two decades of burgeoning freedoms following the Taliban’s initial ouster.

But on Thursday, the Taliban’s Ministry of Vice and Virtue said it was extending the ruling to include female newscasters and anchors starting May 21. The ministry?told Reuters that surgical masks could count as a face covering.

On Saturday, female news anchors briefly refused to comply. But by Sunday, they were presenting the news in face coverings after the Taliban ramped up pressure on media companies, ToloNews reported.

“I was called on the telephone yesterday and was told in strict words to do it,” Sapai of ToloNews told AFP. “So, it is not by choice but by force that we are doing it.”

The Taliban had previously required women to?have their head covered in a veil while on air. “It’s okay that we are Muslims, we are wearing hijab, we hide our hair, but it’s very difficult for a presenter to cover their face for two or three hours consecutively and talk like that,” Farida Sial, a presenter with ToloNews,?told the BBC. “They want to erase women from social and political life,” she added.

Photos of Afghan journalists, both male and female, wearing masks have circulated online under the English hashtag #freeherface. “The rule blatantly violates women’s rights to freedom of expression, as well as personal autonomy and religious belief,” New York-based Human Rights Watch?said in a statement Monday.

Former Afghan president Hamid Karzai told CNN on Friday that female television presenters should refuse to comply with the rule, as “it is not an Afghan tradition.”

Since the Taliban takeover, some 230 media outlets have closed, and more than 6,400 journalists lost their jobs, according to a December survey by Reporters Without Borders and the Afghan Independent Journalist Association. ?Female journalists have been hit hardest, with 4 of every 5 no longer working in the field.

The United States is in “dialogue” over gender rights with Amir Khan Muttaqi, the Taliban-led government’s foreign minister, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West?said in a tweet Saturday.

West said he and Rina Amiri, the U.S. special envoy for Afghan women, girls and human rights, spoke with Muttaqi on Saturday and “conveyed unified int’l [international] opposition to ongoing and expanding restrictions on women and girls’ rights and role in society.”

Washington withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan on Aug. 30, two weeks after the Taliban seized control of Kabul. “Believe me, we lost our way,” Benazir Baktash, a 26-year-old local television presenter in Kabul, told the Washington Post after the May 7 announcement.

The Taliban is “busy with very small issues, and there is a lot of other things to be done for the country,” she said. “They should issue rulings to decrease poverty and help people find jobs.”

Civil Rights: Argentina Conducts Census Of Its Afro Community For The First Time

El Pais (Spain) reports that "Nélida Wisneke is Afro-Argentine. This teacher and writer recounts that her ancestors were slaves who fled from Brazil in the 19th century. At 55 years old, for the first time she will see her ethnic identity recognized in the new national census:?Argentina is asking all the country’s inhabitants if they are descendants of Africans or indigenous people, one of the main novelties of the census and much celebrated by the entire Afro-Argentine community.

“The state is beginning to repay the historical debt it owes us. For the community it is extremely important, because based on these data it will be possible to develop public policies to get out of invisibility and be able to access basic rights,” adds Wisneke, author of the novel?No te olvides de los que nos quedamos?(or?Do Not Forget About Those of Us Who Remain).

“I think this is a historic moment for the Afro-Argentine community because this census represents the fruit of many years of struggle. Beyond the statistical data on economic and sociodemographic conditions, which are important to advance towards a more inclusive society, it is also very important that it makes the community visible. It changes the?Eurocentric and colonial paradigm with which our society was conceived,” says musician Emanuel Ntaka, today in charge of the Afro Program of the Argentine Ministry of Culture.

In the previous census, carried out in 2010, there was a question about Afro-Argentine identity as a sample in some of the forms, but not in all. Now, it is one of the 61 questions included in the survey that will be carried out throughout the country. The 2010 census recorded that nearly 150,000 people perceived themselves as Afro-descendants, 10 times less than the estimate made by community leaders.

In the 12 years that have passed since then, Ntaka explains, Afro-descendant organizations have worked to try to reverse decades of?policies of invisibility and social homogenization. Still, there is a possibility that the number is lower than the real number because there are people of African descent who choose not to perceive themselves as such.

Prejudices are installed from childhood, even at school. “In school events, the representation of the Afro-Argentine is picturesque. They are the empanada sellers, the porridge sellers, the laundresses… that is the place that we Afro-descendants occupy in the construction of this country. But in reality, the African influence is everywhere, from the war of independence to culture, with the influence in music, in cuisine, in language,” Ntaka points out.

In an official video released this past week for the census, prominent Afro-Argentine figures appear proudly talking about their ancestors. “I am Miriam Victoria Gómes, I was born in the province of Buenos Aires, and I belong to the Cape Verdean community of Dock Sud,” says one of the people featured in the video. Ntaka details that he is the son of a teacher from the Argentine province of Santiago del Estero and a South African singer and activist father. “Collecting data on our living conditions is going to be a necessary instrument for public policy,” says actress Silvia Balbuena, a descendant of slaves who arrived in Argentina in the 15th century.

One of the community’s goals is to combat structural racism in Argentine society. Wisneke experienced it first hand: she is the only one of 10 siblings who has completed her studies. Born into a peasant family in Misiones, in the extreme northeast of Argentina, this teacher says that her ancestors were slaves. “They came from Brazil and settled in Misiones. They were part of the quilombos [settlements], of which nobody talks here,” she points out as an example of the visibility of this community in a country that is proud of its European roots but not of others. “Very recently, in the city of Córdoba, a plaque was inaugurated in commemoration of the first sale of slaves, in 1588. The African presence in Argentina is very old,” Wisneke underlines.

Ntaka was 23 years old when a group of skinheads attacked him at a bus stop in 2001. “You fucking Black, go back to your country,” he heard them scream before they began to beat him until he was unconscious. To which country did they want him to return if Argentina was the country in which he was born? With that question in mind, the attack became the starting point of his activism promoting the rights of the Afro-Argentine community. The census will offer a first x-ray of who they are and how they are faring."

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