The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

  The internet is often derided as a medium of inherent inaccuracy, the phrase "But I read it on the internet!" a punch line. But for Adolat, the internet serves as a way to turn Uzbekistan's lip-service law into something sincere - an inversion of Uzbekistan's cynical political culture, which extends to the Uzbek language itself.

  Uzbek legal language implies that justice is an arbitrary construct. In layman's terms, a defense attorney is an oqlovchi, literally a "whitener", and a prosecutor is a qoralovchi, or "darkener". Uzbek lawyers "whiten" or "darken" the aybdor - a term which means the defendant but literally translates as "the guilty one". Justice is reduced to theatrics and spin, fodder for jokes and sarcasm. The grim practices of Uzbekistan's legal system underline this fact. One Uzbek former state official, when I asked him to define "guilt", told me to look up "suspicious" - because "in reality, suspicious is the same as guilty".

  A growing trend in Central Asia

  In contrast, Adolat takes care to explicate Uzbekistan's legal code as well as introduce Uzbeks to unfamiliar legal concepts. A recent article was titled "Presumption of innocence [in Uzbek, literally "guiltlessness"]: a history and explanation" - a concept foreign to Uzbekistan in both theory and practice.

  "Presumption of innocence" is one of many terms pertaining to law and politics entered into Uzbek language via the internet. Several years ago, the Birdamlik Movement, an Uzbek opposition group, tried to bring the phrase "non-violent protest" into Uzbek online discourse. The term was met with confusion not because Uzbek protest is violent, but because it is almost non-existent. One Uzbek, after reading the definition, asked whether a protest would still be considered non-violent after the government had killed the protesters.

  Adolat's efforts are part of a growing trend in Central Asia of citizens filling in where their states have failed. In Tajikistan, lawyers have created a similar online service for citizens to seek advice on legal affairs. In Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and to a lesser extent, Uzbekistan, volunteer organizations have emerged to carry out civic acts the governments fail to accomplish: rebuilding infrastructure, providing childcare and issuing loans. While many of these informal groups have been criticized by state officials, their numbers continue to grow. One analyst credits this trend to "a spirit of civic volunteerism that has existed in Central Asia for centuries".

  And that is the tragedy of this situation. A new class of young, enterprising Central Asians has emerged, committed to the rule of law and ready to serve their countrymen - if their governments would only let them.

  --Originally published June 14, 2012

  Water is a human right, but who is considered a human being?

  Water is a basic human right.

  Few dispute this. From the Talmud to the Bible to the Quran, from the European Federation of Public Service to the United Nations, societies throughout history have recognized water as a public good. To treat water as a commodity instead of a right is an act of violence. In May 2014, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon argued that "preventing people's access to safe water is a denial of a fundamental human right." He added: "Deliberate targeting of civilians and depriving them of essential supplies is a clear breach of international humanitarian and human rights law."

  Water is a right for all human beings. The question is: Who counts as a human being?

  Not the poorest residents of Detroit, a US city which has cut off water to citizens at a rate of 3000 people per week since the spring, totaling about 125,000 people at present. Local activists estimate that up to 300,000 people - nearly all poor and African-American - will ultimately lose access to water. The reason for the cut, officials claim, is that residents cannot pay their water bills, which have spiked 120 percent in the last decade.

  Detroit is one of the poorest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Detroit is also surrounded by the largest supply of fresh water in the world. The US does not lack for money, and Detroit does not lack for accessible water. What Detroit lacks are people viewed as worthy of the compassion and resources given to their richer, whiter peers. They lack the rights and respect most US citizens take for granted.

  At a rally in June, life-long Detroiter Renla Session spoke out for her community: "These are my fellow human beings. If they threatened to cut off water to an animal shelter, you would see thousands of people out here. It's senseless ... They just treat people like their lives mean nothing here in Detroit, and I'm tired of it."

  When rights are considered privileges, only the privileged have rights.

  "They treat people like animals in Detroit," an auto worker complained in July, but the US treats its poorest citizens worse. When the government shut down in late 2013, the food program for impoverished women and children was suspended - but the animals in the National Zoo stayed fed. More attention was paid to the shutdown of the PandaCam, a livestream of a bear cub, than to the suffering of the US' poorest citizens.

  Water is a human right, but who is a human being? Corporations, the US supreme court ruled in June, as the parched citizens of Detroit started filling up at water fountains.

  "In its last day in session, the high court not only affirmed corporate personhood but expanded the human rights of corporations, who by some measures enjoy more protections than mortals - or 'natural persons'," wrote Dana Milbank at The Washington Post.

  The mortals of Detroit enjoy no such protection. Perhaps that is why the city's corporate venues - like its high-end golf club, hockey arena, football stadium, and over half of the city's commercial and industrial users - still have their water running despite owing over $30m, while its most impoverished residents have their water, and their rights, taken away.

  In Detroit, corporations are people. Their worth is unquestioned because it is measured in dollars. The worth of the residents of Detroit is measured in utility, and so their utilities are denied.

  'War on poverty'

  Human rights may be guaranteed by law, but one's humanity is never a given. The US was built on the labour of slaves considered three-fifths of a person. Today, one's relative humanity - and the rights which accompany it - is shaped by race, class, gender, and geography. Citizens may be subject to the same written laws, but they are not equally subject to the same punishments and practices. Water is a litmus test of how much of a "person" you are allowed to be.

  For decades, marginalized peoples of the United States have struggled with lack of access to water. Today nearly 40 percent of the 173,000 Navajo, the largest Native American tribe, do not have a tap or a toilet at home. Appalachia, a historically impoverished region of the US, was the focal point of the 1960s "war on poverty" after its lack of basic public services was publicized.

  "This legislation marks the end of an era of partisan cynicism towards human want and misery," President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in 1965. "Wherever we have our commitments, whether to the old and the strong or to the young and the weak, we shall match our words with deeds."

  In January 2014, Freedom Industries, a chemical and mining company, dumped a toxic chemical into an Appalachian river, poisoning the water for up to 300,000 residents of West Virginia. Hundreds were hospitalized. Locals were shocked, but not surprised, by the horror that ensued. It was West Virginia's fifth major industrial accident in eight years.

  "Charleston's nickname is Chemical Valley, and our life expectancy rates reflect this, even in the diaspora," wrote one West Virginia writer. "Environmental injustice and trauma become part of your veins and cells, enamel and marrow, and it permeates the economies which underpin our existence. I have tried, but you can't outrun a system."

  When the water crisis hit West Virginia, many were horrified, but others mocked the impoverished state - including a Detroit journalist, unaware her city was next. President Johnson's war on poverty long ago turned into a war on the poor, and residents of both places have been blamed for their own plight. They elect bad leaders and support corrupt companies, people said of West Virginia. They should have paid their bills, pe
ople say of Detroit.

  Which leads to the question: so what? Then they should not drink or bathe? They should swallow poison or roam the streets in search of water fountains? Their children, who have no stake in this battle, are supposed to suffer, and their parents are supposed to watch? Is that the lesson we are passing on - that poor children are inherently undeserving of a basic provision in one of the richest countries in the world?

  A Third World problem?

  US citizens denied clean water often compare their situation with that of distant, disenfranchised lands.

  "It's frightening, because you think this is something that only happens somewhere like Africa," a mother in Detroit told the LA Times. "It's like we're living in a Third World country," a West Virginian told The New Yorker.

  The circumstances differ, but the outcome is the same. Water is a right, and denial of water is a form of social control.

  In Ukraine, water and electricity were cut off in certain regions following the Russian incursion. In Syria, multiple political groups manipulated the water supply at different times, leaving roughly one million people without access to clean water or sanitation.

  In Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lack water, including those living in hospitals and refugee camps. On July 15, citizens of Detroit held a rally in solidarity, holding signs that said "Water for all, from Detroit to Palestine". A basic resource has become a distant dream, a longing for a transformation of politics aimed at ending suffering instead of extending it.

  Water is a legal right ignored in places where law is selectively enforced. To merit the protection of the law one must be acknowledged fully as a human being. What the water crisis shows is who is considered human - and who is considered disposable.

  --Originally published July 23, 2014

  The telegenically dead

  In the beginning, they were the "telegenically killed". That is what Charles Krauthammer, in his July 17 Washington Post column "Moral Clarity in Gaza", called the victims of Israeli airstrikes. Children shelled while playing on the beach, a father holding a plastic bag of his two-year-old son's remains: To Krauthammer, Palestinians are not people but production values. War does not destroy families: It "produces dead Palestinians for international television."

  Three days later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed the Palestinians "telegenically dead", lifting Krauthammer's language in one example of the US media-Israeli government echo chamber that has been reverberating all summer. "You forfeit your right to be called civilians," a Wall Street Journal columnist told Gazans on July 21, stating that children of Hamas supporters are fair game. "There is no such thing as 'innocent civilians,'" proclaimed Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel's National Security Council, on August 5.

  Unthinkable sentiment has become sanctioned, commonplace. You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment, because at least that means you had expectations.

  Who are the telegenically dead? The telegenically dead are the dead, plain and simple. That we see them is the novelty, that we grieve them is human, and to be human, today, is a hostile act. To grieve is to acknowledge loss, to acknowledge loss is to affirm life, to affirm life is to contemplate how it was taken.

  A child is not a shield or a lawn to be mowed. "Telegenic" means you see a body where you were supposed to see an abstraction.

  Inconvenient death

  In 1960, Elie Wiesel published Night, a memoir of the Holocaust which portrayed, in intimate and graphic detail, Nazi cruelty and public complicity.

  "Was I still alive? Was I awake?" Wiesel wrote, describing Nazis throwing Jewish babies into a bonfire. "I could not believe it. How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true."

  In July 2014, Wiesel took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to support Israel in what he terms "a battle of civilization versus barbarism". As Palestinians stored corpses of babies killed by Israeli strikes in ice cream freezers, Wiesel proclaimed that "Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it's Hamas' turn." He condemned the "terrorists who have taken away all choice from the Palestinian children of Gaza."

  He is right. The Palestinian children of Gaza do not have a choice. But Israel does.

  Hamas is a violent organization which commits reprehensible acts. But it was not Hamas who killed Palestinian children playing on the beach. It was not Hamas who killed children sleeping in UN shelters. To argue, as many US and Israeli authors have, that merely being in the proximity of Hamas renders one a legitimate target is terrorist logic - particularly in Gaza, where there is nowhere else to go. In what other "hostage situation" are the hostages targeted - and their deaths justified by stripping away their civilian status, their innocence, their humanity?

  A baby killed by soldiers is a baby killed by soldiers. It is not a shield and not a pawn. The death of any child is a tragedy regardless of their race, religion, or parentage. That this is debated is its own tragedy.

  In 1941, Nazi official Joseph Goebbels complained that Jewish children captivated too much public sympathy: "One suddenly has the impression that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies. The Jews send out the pitiable."

  Three years later, the Nazis sent the teenage Wiesel to a concentration camp.

  Let me be clear: What is happening in Gaza is in no way comparable to the Holocaust in scope, scale, organization or intent. Yet similar rhetoric portraying dead children as complicit or inconvenient emerges - rhetoric not unique to the Middle East, but used all over the world, all throughout history, to mitigate or justify the slaughter of innocents. One would hope that those who so vividly documented the killing of children would protest it being practiced. That hope seems in vain.

  "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," George Santayana famously said. Those who can, repeat it too.

  Who is human?

  Social media has been described as "humanizing" the Palestinian victims. Television may be decried by politicians and pundits, but the internet is where Gaza's story is told firsthand by its residents, where graphic images of the grieved are shared.

  If you are being "humanized", you are already losing. To be "humanized" implies that your humanity is never assumed, but something you have to prove.

  "What am I supposed to do/be to be qualified as a human?" Maisam Abumorr, a writer and student in Gaza, asks. "As far as I can tell, I live like normal humans do. I love, I hate, I cry, I laugh, I make mistakes, I learn, I dream, I hurt, I get hurt… I still have not figured out what crime I have committed to endure this kind of wretchedness. I wonder what being human feels like."

  For every group that uses media to affirm its humanity, there is another group proclaiming that humanity as irrelevant, or inconvenient, or a lie. One can see this not only in the Middle East conflict, but in movements like Nigeria's "Bring Back Our Girls", frequently proclaimed "forgotten" due to their so-called "nameless and faceless" victims. But the girls were never nameless and faceless to the Nigerians who fought, and continue to fight, for their survival. They have names that few learned, faces from which many turned away. The people who refuse to forget are the ones the West has now forgotten.

  In all documentation of violence, from memoirs to social media, lies a plea to not forget. There is a reason Netanyahu fears the "telegenically dead". They haunt the world like ghosts - a reminder of what we have done, what we are capable of doing, and the lengths gone to justify it.

  Those dehumanized in life become humanized in death. With this realization you mourn not only the dead. You mourn the living too.

  --Originally published August 14, 2014

  CODA

  In Defense of Complaining

  In 2006, the Reverend Will Bowen launched a movement called A Complaint Free World. The goal of the movement was to get people to stop expressing "pain, grief, or discontent".

  Th
e best way to stop expressing pain, grief or discontent was to buy purple bracelets from Bowen's website. The bracelets serve as a sartorial censor for those compelled to discuss their problems. Every time you complain, you must switch the bracelet to the other wrist. If you go 21 consecutive days without complaining or switching the bracelets, you are rewarded with a Certificate of Happiness.

  "Our words indicate our thoughts," the certificate says. "Our thoughts create our world."

  In an America built on the reinvention of reality, critical words make people uneasy - and so do those who speak them. In 1996, Alan Greenspan famously chided the financial community for "irrational exuberance". They ignored him, and America became a bubble economy - housing, credit, technology, higher education. Those who warned of collapse were derided and dismissed: they were only complaining.

  When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining - things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining - this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.

  The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivializes the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one's position is more important than another one's pain. People who say "stop complaining" always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.