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BEIJING - From his pigeon house, Wan Lianxi overlooks a sea of misshapen roofs and walls overgrown with weeds. He recently added a corrugated plastic roof for shade.
Wan started raising homing pigeons in downtown Beijing 40 years ago - when he was still a teenager. Today, he has about 100 of them. During races, in fall and spring, his fastest birds are released a couple of hundred kilometers from Beijing. An electronic chip allows judges to measure the birds’ speed and make sure that they make it home safely.
If Wan was living in another neighborhood of Beijing, far from this hutong (narrow lane), he would either have to be very rich to own a home with a pigeon house on the roof - or have to build one of the illegal aviaries hidden on netted balconies which city officials are waging a war against.
Beijing’s traditional hutong neighborhoods – which have survived several waves of demolitions – have a countryside feel. We are southwest from Qianmen, “the gate of the Zenith Sun,” which once guarded the southern entry into the old Tatar city – where another hutong neighborhood was recreated. It now hosts many fast food restaurants and souvenir shops. This enclave seems unaffected by time: overgrown trees have made the job of builders and electric post fencers even harder. The prettiest houses are covered in yellow flowers about to grow into endless cucumber plants. Courtyards are filled with junk, which has also taken over delivery bicycles and windowsills. Bedding, pajamas and underwear dry in the hot August sun. You can tell where the public toilets are by their smell and the comings and goings around them. In the hutong, few houses have their own toilets. These ones, like most public toilets in China, don't have doors.
Standing on a prehistoric-looking bike, a copper-skinned eighty-year-old knife sharpener offers his services. “Who has got knives to sharpen?” he asks repeatedly. At night, on Zongshu Xiejie (Palm Trees Alley), locals set tables on the street to play cards, checkers and mahjong. People are coming home from work while others are leaving. “You have to go to Bada Hutong – one of the eight great hutongs – to play mahjong. There are great sets made of bones, solid wooden tables and there are beautiful girls,” wrote intellectual Liang Shih-chiu about this neighborhood, which was once famous for its brothels.
Palm Trees Alley, where bird lover Wan was born and raised, used to be called Wang’s Widow Street. Wang’s widow’s brothel was one of the street’s most famous. Is it the former bathhouse next to Wan’s house, with two balconies on each floor overlooking an inner courtyard? Nobody knows – all they know for sure is that it was turned into a youth center after the Cultural Revolution. There are 16 electric meters in the lobby – one for each apartment – or hut - converted by previous or current tenants. In November 1949, a month after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, communist leaders declared war on Bada Hutong: the new public security secretary launched a huge cleaning operation of the brothels the same night, “freeing” 1000 girls. They were immediately sent to re-education camps, to be released less than a year later.
What remains of Bada Hutong is unlikely to change – it is too close to the historical center to be turned into tower blocks. It will probably not be subject to gentrification either, as the square-shaped courtyards that foreigners love so much are in dire conditions. A few inns still try to attract foreign travelers with signs in English. The scar of the past might just save the neighborhood from urban renewal.
Inhabitants of Bada Hutong are diverse: there are retired families, like Qi Renmin's (whose first name means “people”), who mostly rent cheap state-owned houses. Mr. Qi pays a dozen Yuan a month (less than $2) for 11m2, since his Beijing retiree status enables him to receive a monthly housing benefit of 3000 Yuan ($473). If they can afford to, the children of these Lao Beijing (“true Beijingers”) move to the neighboring tower blocks or the suburbs.
Then there are the waidiren - the outsiders - who are slowly transforming Beijing’s low-income neighborhoods. Yuan Yu, 40, comes from Hunan. She opened a foot massage parlor a year ago on Palm Trees Alley. A 45-minute session costs only 30 Yuan (almost $5), which is much cheaper than in anywhere else in the center of Beijing. Zhao Nuo, 20, originally from Harbin, and his partners started a printing and binding business. His parents followed suit and opened a jiaozi Chinese dumpling restaurant, further down the alley. Since renting a room or a store is cheap, a growing number of people are settling in Bada Hudong – yet it is not as visible as in the city’s suburbs - nicknamed Beijing’s “ant colonies.” Life here, like it is there, is peaceful – just like a village.
Thousands of Maasai people in Tanzania met brutal police repression when they demonstrated against being expelled from their land, laying bare both how ineffective and inhumane the conservationist movement can be.
The Maasai people are an ethnic group living in Kenya and northern Tanzania.
LOLIONDO — "Loliondo is bleeding..."
An SMS woke me up on the morning of June 10. Scrolling through my phone were dozens of horrifying images of Maasai men and women with wounds on their legs, their backs and their heads. Lots of blood. And then, videos of Maasai running away from the Tanzanian police, who were shooting at them.
The pictures looked like war images. Like so many other people in the Global North, I was shocked. How could the idyllic images of zebras, giraffes and lions that the Serengeti ecosystem evokes in Western minds be transformed into this scene of brutal violence?
The Maasai, an ethnic group inhabiting Kenya and northern Tanzania, have always known what war is. They generally live close to the many game parks around the African Great Lakes, and as they put it to me: "Your conservation areas are a war zone for us."
They have known for a long time that this moment would come. The government has tried to confiscate 1,500 km2 of their ancestral land for years in order to use the land for trophy hunting, elite tourism and conservation. Behind these attempts has always been the Otterlo Business Company (OBC), a company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) that organizes hunting expeditions for the royal family and their guests and that apparently will control commercial hunting in the area.
Maasai people perform the traditional adumu or "jumping dance" in Maasai Mara, Kenya.
However, the UAE royals are not the only ones interested in the area around the famous Serengeti National Park. The Maasai were expelled from those lands before by British colonialists in 1959. Conservationists operating in Tanzania, such as the German Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), advocate for a racist and colonial conservation model.
The FZS claims that the local population and their livestock constitute one of the crucial threats to the survival of the ecosystem, thus promoting the myth of a “wild flora and fauna” without human presence, which has been the philosophy behind the evictions of Maasai since the beginning.
Just as dangerous for the Maasai are the tourists, who feed upon media images, documentaries and textbooks that sell the idea of "nature without people" and who expect to find only wild animals on their safaris. Indeed, the Maasai not only face the myth of wildlife without humans, but also a deeply entrenched racism. In April, a famous U.S. journalist, Peter Greenberg of CBS News, called the Maasai "primitive" when he was taking a walk with the Tanzanian president.
As one Maasai man said: “The Tanzanian government doesn't like the Maasai because the people who come don't want to see the Maasai. Before we didn't think much (or too badly) about tourism, but now we understand that tourism is people who come with money, which makes the government think that 'if we displace the Maasai, more people with money will come'."
In early June, the Tanzanian government announced its plan to "elevate" the Loliondo Game Controlled Area in northern Tanzania to the status of a Game Reserve, which in practice means that Maasai dwellings and grazing will be prohibited. On June 8, dozens of police vehicles and some 700 agents arrived in Loliondo to demarcate this new area. On June 10 they opened fire on a group of Maasai who were protesting against this attempt to expel them.
At least 18 men and 13 women suffered gunshot wounds and many more from machetes. Two people have been confirmed dead. In the following days, police raided Maasai villages from house to house, beating and arresting those they believe have distributed images of the violence or participated in the protests. A 90-year-old man was beaten by the police because his son was accused of having filmed the attack. Thousands of Maasai, including children, are said to have fled into the forest. A dozen people are detained.
The Maasai people face confiscation of their lands for trophy hunting, elite tourism and conservation.
It will seem absurd to many that such a well-known indigenous community is victim of such brutal violence in the name of conservation. The Maasai are a herding society, closely linked to the land.
An old Maasai told me: “I love this place and I am not ready to leave because it is my home. I have lived here since we were expelled from the Serengeti. It is an excellent land with sufficient water. It is the only place where I can proudly say to my descendants: this will be yours."
However, for those who know the history of conservation, this will not surprise them. The brutality in Loliondo shows the true face of conservation: daily violations of the human rights of indigenous people and local communities so that wealthy tourists can hunt or go on "safari" in so-called “Protected Areas”. These abuses are systemic and are an intrinsic part of the racist and colonial conservation model that prevails in Africa and Asia.
Just as the Tanzanian government pushes the Maasai out of their homes, the Indian government is illegally dispossessing the Adivasis ("indigenous peoples") of the lands they have always lived on, and always protected, to make way for tiger reserves where tourists are welcome. And this is despite the fact that Indian law specifically protects the right of Adivasis to remain on their ancestral lands. They accuse indigenous peoples such as the Jenu Kurubas or the Baiga tribe of harming wildlife.
However, far from killing tigers, many tribes worship them as gods and take care of their environment better than anyone else. Where the right of indigenous people to remain within a tiger reserve has been recognized, the number of tigers has increased.
The Loliondo events should be a lesson to everyone. Indigenous peoples have inhabited the most biodiverse places on the planet for generations: these territories are now considered important nature conservation areas precisely because the original inhabitants have cared for their land and wild flora and fauna.
We cannot continue to tolerate human rights abuses committed in the name of conservation. This conservationist model is profoundly inhumane and ineffective and needs to change now. Protected Areas do not save biodiversity and alienate the local population, which is best suited to protect their land. As a Maasai leader told me: “Without us, the animals will be slaughtered. We are the real conservationists. This is our land and we will not leave.”
* Fiore Longo is a researcher for Survival International, the global movement for indigenous peoples. She is also the director of Survival International Spain. She coordinates Survival's Decolonize Conservation campaign and has visited many communities in Africa and Asia that experience brutal human rights abuses in the name of nature conservation.
Thousands of Maasai people in Tanzania met brutal police repression when they demonstrated against being expelled from their land, laying bare both how ineffective and inhumane the conservationist movement can be.
Russia's blockade of the Black Sea has sent food prices skyrocketing around the globe, with poorer countries being affected most severely. But if the blockade continues, then the cost of a vast variety of foods looks set to go even higher.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Ukrinform via ZUMA Press Wire
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.