#NGO Helping Migrants

[aurovedacharitable]

10 Ways to Give to Refugees

1  Donate money to reputable organizations such as the Auroveda Operating Foundation Charitable Trust.

2  Sponsor refugee families by providing them with financial assistance, housing, and other necessities.

3  Volunteer with local organizations that provide services to refugees such as language classes, job training, and legal assistance.

4  Share information about the refugee crisis on social media to raise awareness and encourage others to take action.

5  Donate items such as clothing, food, and household goods to organizations that provide assistance to refugees.

6  Support businesses owned by refugees to help them integrate into their new communities.

7  Write to your elected representatives to advocate for policies that support refugees.

8  Participate in fundraising events or campaigns to raise money for refugees.

9  Offer to mentor or tutor a refugee child to help them succeed in school.

10  Offer your professional skills, such as legal or medical assistance, to help refugees navigate the complex systems they may encounter.

[sampark25]

Childhood Care and Education Programme for Migrants Children

[ausetkmt]

Video shows migrants waiting before ill-fated migrant boat voyage

03:41 - Source: CNN

CNN  — 

The hull of the fishing trawler lifted out of the water as it sank, catapulting people from the top deck into the black sea below. In the darkness, they grabbed onto whatever they could to stay afloat, pushing each other underwater in a frantic fight for survival. Some were screaming, many began to recite their final prayers.

“I can still hear the voice of a woman calling out for help,” one survivor of the migrant boat disaster off the coast of Greece told CNN. “You’d swim and move floating bodies out of your way.”

With hundreds of people still missing after the overloaded vessel capsized in the Mediterranean on June 14, the testimonies of those who were onboard paint a picture of chaos and desperation. They also call into question the Greek coast guard’s version of events, suggesting more lives could have been saved, and may even point to fault on the part of Greek authorities.

Rights groups allege the tragedy is both further evidence and a result of a new pattern in illegal pushbacks of migrant boats to other nations’ waters, with deadly consequences.

This boat was carrying up to 750 Pakistani, Syrian, Egyptian and Palestinian refugees and migrants. Only 104 people have been rescued alive.

CNN has interviewed multiple survivors of the shipwreck and their relatives, all of whom have wished to remain anonymous for security reasons and the fear of retribution from authorities in both Greece and at home.

One survivor from Syria, whom CNN is identifying as Rami, described how a Greek coast guard vessel approached the trawler multiple times to try to attach a rope to tow the ship, with disastrous results.

“The third time they towed us, the boat swayed to the right and everyone was screaming, people began falling into the sea, and the boat capsized and no one saw anyone anymore,” he said. “Brothers were separated, cousins were separated.”

Another Syrian man, identified as Mostafa, also believes it was the maneuver by the coast guard that caused the disaster. “The Greek captain pulled us too fast, it was extremely fast, this caused our boat to sink,” he said.

The Hellenic Coast Guard has repeatedly denied attempting to tow the vessel. An official investigation into the cause of the tragedy is still ongoing.

Coast guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou told CNN over the phone last week: “When the boat capsized, we were not even next to (the) boat. How could we be towing it?” Instead, he insisted they had only been “observing at a close distance” and that “a shift in weight probably caused by panic” had caused the boat to tip.

The Hellenic Coast Guard has declined to answer CNN’s specific requests for response to the survivor testimonies.

Direct accounts from those who survived the wreck have been limited, due to their concerns about speaking out and the media having little access to the survivors. CNN interviewed Rami and Mostafa outside the Malakasa migrant camp near Athens, where journalists are not permitted entry.

The Syrian men said the conditions on board the migrant boat deteriorated fast in the more than five days after it set off from Tobruk, Libya, in route to Italy. They had run out of water and had resorted to drinking from storage bottles that people had urinated in.

“People were dying. People were fainting. We used a rope to dip clothes into the sea and use that to squeeze water on people who had lost consciousness,” Rami said.

CNN’s analysis of marine traffic data, combined with information from NGOs, merchant vessels and the European Union border patrol agency, Frontex, suggests that Greek authorities were aware of the distressed vessel for at least 13 hours before it eventually sank early on June 14.

The Greek coast guard has maintained that people onboard the trawler had refused rescue and insisted they wanted to continue their journey to Italy. But survivors, relatives and activists say they had asked for help multiple times.

Earlier in the day, other ships tried to help the trawler. Directed by the Greek coast guard, two merchant vessels – Lucky Sailor and Faithful Warrior – approached the boat between 6 and 9 p.m. on June 13 to offer supplies, according to marine traffic data and the logs of those ships. But according to survivors this only caused more havoc onboard.

“Fights broke out over food and water, people were screaming and shouting,” Mostafa said. “If it wasn’t for people trying to calm the situation down, the boat was on the verge of sinking several times.”

By early evening, six people had already died onboard, according to an audio recording reviewed by CNN from Italian activist Nawal Soufi, who took a distress call from the migrant boat at around 7 p.m. Soufi’s communication with the vessel also corroborated Mostafa’s account that people moved from one side of the boat to the other after water bottles were passed from the cargo ships, causing it to sway dangerously.

The haunting final words sent from the migrant boat came just minutes before it capsized. According to a timeline published by NGO Alarm Phone they received a call, at around 1:45 a.m., with the words “Hello my friend… The ship you send is…” Then the call cuts out.

The coast guard says the vessel began to sink at around 2 a.m.

The next known activity in the area, according to marine traffic data, was the arrival of a cluster of vessels starting around 3 a.m. The Mayan Queen superyacht was the first on the scene for what soon became a mass rescue operation.

Human rights groups say the authorities had a duty to act to save lives, regardless of what people on board were saying to the coast guard before the migrant boat capsized.

“The boat was overcrowded, was unseaworthy and should have been rescued and people taken to safety, that’s quite clear,” UNHCR Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean Vincent Cochetel told CNN in an interview. “There was a responsibility for the Greek authorities to coordinate a rescue to bring those people safely to land.”

Cochetel also pointed to a growing trend by countries, including Greece, to assist migrant boats in leaving their waters. “That’s a practice we’ve seen in recent months. Some coastal states provide food, provide water, sometimes life jackets, sometimes even fuel to allow such boats to continue to only one destination: Italy. And that’s not fair, Italy cannot cope with that responsibility alone.”

Survivors who say the coast guard tried to tow their boat say they don’t know what the aim was.

There have been multiple documented examples in recent years of Greek patrol boats engaging in so-called “pushbacks” of migrant vessels from Greek waters in recent years, including in a CNN investigation in 2020.

“It looks like what the Greeks have been doing since March 2020 as a matter of policy, which is pushbacks and trying to tow a boat to another country’s water in order to avoid the legal responsibility to rescue,” Omer Shatz, legal director of NGO Front-LEX, told CNN. “Because rescue means disembarkation and disembarkation means processing of asylum requests.”

Pushbacks are state measures aimed at forcing refugees and migrants out of their territory, while impeding access to legal and procedural frameworks, according to the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). They are a violation of international law, as well as European regulations.

And such measures do not appear to have deterred human traffickers whose businesses prey on vulnerable and desperate migrants.

In an interview with CNN last month, then Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis denied that his country engaged in intentional pushbacks and described them as a “completely unacceptable practice.” Mitsotakis is widely expected to win a second term in office in Sunday’s election, after failing to get an outright majority in a vote last month.

A series of Greek governments have been criticized for their handling of migration policy, including conditions in migrant camps, particularly following the 2015-16 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people entered Europe through the country.

For those who lived through last week’s sinking, the harrowing experience will never be forgotten.

Mostafa and Rami both say they wish they had never made the journey, despite the fact they are now in Europe and are able to claim asylum.

Most of all, Mostafa says, he wishes the Greek coast guard had never approached their boat: “If they had left us be, we wouldn’t have drowned.”

[mariacallous]

It is water resistant, transportable and can charge up to 24 phones per day. It’s the BeeHive, a new phone-charging station created by the Italian NGO One Bridge To-, OBT-, and improved by the collective work of 25 high school students from Verona and the organisation FABlab.

The generator will make it easier for migrants in the Balkans to recharge their phones on their way to the European Union.

“The project was born during Covid, in late 2020,” OBT-’s Pietro Albi, who developed the first prototype, told BIRN. “The first Beehives were brought to Serbia in March 2021, to Sid, Subotica and Belgrade, and distributed to local organisations and NGOs working on the fields”.

The 25 students participated voluntarily in off-school hours, willingly deciding to spend their afternoons improving the BeeHive. After a theoretical workshop about the “Balkan Route” taken by migrants to Europe, the lack of legal pathways to Europe and the reality of migration, they focused on technical aspects like 3D printing, laser cutting and assembling the electrical parts.

The first BeeHive model used a bike engine to recharge phones and weighed around 20kg. The new one, created in collaboration with the students, weighs only around 3kg and uses lithium batteries, which are lighter and more efficient.

The name BeeHive refers to the shape of the generator, which recalls artificial beehives, but also hints at the idea of a safe space – a literal charging station where migrants can recharge their phones while taking a rest from the challenges and violence of taking the Balkan Route.

“The project also allows us to help students realise that what they hear regarding migrants and refugees and the reality of things are really different,” OBT-’s Serena Zuanazzi told BIRN.

“In Europe people often claim that the fact that migrants have a phone is a clear sign that they’re not really refugees in need. The reality instead is that phones are crucial for people on the move, as they need them to communicate with the families back home, with other people that are travelling with them, but also to orientate and keep on travelling.

“They are [also] used more and more to document the violence that people on the move experience, and become a tool to denounce human rights abuses,” she said.

Currently there are five old models of the BeeHive in Serbia, one of the new ones in Bosnia and two in Trieste, the arrival point for migrants taking the Balkan Route, in Italy. New ones will be distributed shortly in Greece, France and other locations in Italy.

“We already have plans to update the current model with a WiFi hotspot that will allow people to connect to the internet even from remote locations and other improvements. If NGOs and organisations working on the ground can use the BeeHive to support people on the move, they can reach out to us, so we can plan the production and the delivery,” Albi concluded.

[gatheringbones]

[“You might be thinking that we seem to be talking about people smuggling rather than people trafficking, and that those two things are different. People smuggling is when someone pays a smuggler to get them over a border: in UK law, human trafficking is when someone is transported for the purposes of forced labour or exploitation using force, fraud, or coercion. It’s tempting to think of these as separate things, but there is no bright line between them: they are two iterations of the same system.

Let’s break it down. It is common for people to take on huge debts to smugglers to cross a border. So far, so good: clearly smuggling. But once the journey begins, the person seeking to migrate finds that the debt has grown, or that the work they are expected to undertake upon arrival in order to pay off the debt is different from what was agreed. Suddenly, the situation has spiralled out of control and they find themselves trying to work off the debt, with little hope of ever earning enough to leave. Smuggling becomes trafficking. The discourse of trafficking largely fails to help people in this situation, because it paints them as kidnapped and enchained rather than as trying to migrate. It therefore seeks to ‘rescue’ them by blocking irregular migration routes and sending undocumented people home— often the very last thing trafficked people want. Although they might hate their exploitative workplace, their ideal option would be to stay in their destination country in a different job or with better workplace conditions; an acceptable option would be to stay in the country under the current, shit working conditions, but the very worst option would be to be sent home with their debt still unpaid.

By viewing trafficking as conceptually akin to kidnap, anti-trafficking activists, NGOs, and governments can sidestep broader questions of safe migration. If the trafficked person is brought across borders unwillingly, there is no need to think about the people who will attempt this migration regardless of its illegality or conclude that the way to make people safer is to offer them legal migration routes. People smuggling tends to happen to less vulnerable migrants: those who have the cash to pay a smuggler upfront or have a family or community already settled in the destination country. People trafficking tends to happen to more vulnerable migrants: those who must take on a debt to the smuggler to travel and who have no community connections in their destination country. Both want to travel, however, and this is what anti-trafficking conversations largely obscure with their talk about kidnap and chains.

Our position is that no human being is ‘illegal’. People should have the right to travel and to cross borders, and to live and work where they wish. As we wrote in the introduction, border controls are a relatively new invention – they emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of colonial logics of racial domination and exclusion. (ICE, the brutal American immigration enforcement police, was only created in its modern form in 2003; the previous iteration of it is as recent as the 1930s, an agency called Immigration and Naturalization Services.) The mass migrations of the twenty-first century are driven by human-made catastrophes – climate change, poverty, war – and reproduce the glaring inequalities from which they emerge. Countries in the global north bear hugely disproportionate responsibility for climate change, yet disproportionately close their doors to people fleeing the effects of climate choas, leaving desperate families to sleep under canvas amid snow at the edges of Fortress Europe. As migrant-rights organiser Harsha Walia writes, ‘While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies and the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others.’

A system where everybody could migrate, live, and work legally and in safety would not be a huge, radical departure; it would simply take seriously the reality that people are already migrating and working, and that as a society we should prioritise their safety and rights. Some journalists and policymakers argue that migration brings down wages. However, the current system, wherein undocumented people cannot assert their labour rights and as a result are hugely vulnerable to workplace exploitation, brings down wages by ensuring that there is a group of workers who bosses can underpay or otherwise exploit with impunity. Low wages and workplace exploitation are tackled through worker organising and labour law – not through attempting to limit migration, which produces undocumented workers who have no labour rights.

However, instead of starting from the premise of valuing human life, the countries of the global north enact harsh immigration laws that make it hard for people from global south countries to migrate. You don’t stop people wanting or needing to migrate by making it illegal for them to do so, you just make it more dangerous and difficult, and leave them more vulnerable to exploitation. Punitive laws may dissuade some from making the journey, but they guarantee that everyone who does travel is doing so in the worst possible conditions. Spending billions of dollars on policing borders actively makes this worse, without addressing the reasons people might want to migrate – notably, gross inequality between nations, which in large part is a legacy of colonial – and contemporary – plunder and imperialist violence.”]

molly smith, juno mac, from revolting prostitutes: the fight for sex workers’ rights, 2018

[bighermie]

Muckraker Releases Several "Mass Migration Blueprints" Used by Leftwing NGOs and the UN in the Planned and Organized Invasion into America | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft

[gale-in-space]

Very quietly slides you all a link to a gofundme that you can donate to in order to help migrants crossing into the US. Funds enable volunteers to gather resources like food, medical supplies, blankets, and materials for building shelters—all things that are desperately needed and are never competently provided by the US government itself.

The gofundme that is linked is a little bit on the lacking side when it comes to a description of the work that is being done. As such, I highly recommend tuning into this episode of the podcast It Could Happen Here for more information on the types of volunteer and NGO work that is done to keep migrants warm and fed (the linked gofundme is also discussed in the episode and can be found in the episode description).

[tunneldweller]

tw: human rights violations, injuries, death

In early August 2021, asylum seekers started showing up in unusually large numbers in Poland near the border with Belarus. The border area is mostly covered with forests and bogs with farming villages past the woods. It's chock full of gorgeous landscapes, including Europe's largest remaining stretch of primeval forest west of Russia - the Białowieża Forest, a largely pristine ecosystem with so damn much biodiversity. Bison, lynx, three species of shrew, the last remaining European populations of various insects, tons of birds, fungi, mosses, you name it. Scientists and environmentalists love it [and forestry officials want to manage it, but that's a story for another day].

So: asylum seekers. Hungry, filthy, exhausted people from places like Afghanistan or Syria, which incidentally do not share a border with Poland. The locals, being decent folk, started feeding and helping these new arrivals, because that's just what you do when a tattered wraith shows up on your doorstep speaking some weirdass language and making the universal gesture for "I'm hungry". The Border Guard, being in violation of national laws as well as international conventions Poland had ratified, started trucking these asylum seekers back to the border and forcing them to cross back to Belarus, which is called a pushback. The Polish government, elected in part due to vicious anti-refugee propaganda, stated that the border must be reinforced to prevent the entry of "waves of unauthorized persons" participating in "hybrid warfare" and declared a state of emergency along the entire border. These migrants, they said, were extremely dangerous. Culturally foreign.

Why would seeking asylum be considered hybrid warfare? This links back to Europe's last remaining dictator west of Russia: Alaksandr Lukashenka, Supreme Ruler and Deathless Emperor of Belarus. His people allegedly came up with a clever racket: they started selling Belarusian visas in various poorer countries many people want to emigrate from and transporting migrants to the Polish border, claiming that this would be their gateway to a better life in the European Union.

So: asylum seekers. According to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. [Incidentally, Poland is a signatory of the UDHR.] Regardless of their country of origin, people crossing over from Belarus have the right to request asylum in Poland. And they do. Every time they get caught. In English, in Polish, in their native languages… Upon hearing a request for asylum the Border Guards are supposed to transport the migrants to a processing center where they would then wait for their application to be reviewed. But because these migrants are extremely dangerous, the Border Guards trash their belongings and dump them on the Belarusian side without shoes, without meds, phones, jackets, in any kind of weather, regardless of any injuries. And there are many. The terrain can be tricky to cross if you're not used to this type of boggy temperate forest. Or if you haven't had your meds in a while. Or if you're six. It won't be easy even if you're a - just like the current government's fearmongering election ads warned a few years ago - healthy young male with a cell phone.

When Belarusian Border Guards come across these ejected migrants, they force them back toward the Polish border. People keep ping-ponging between two walls of armed, uniformed enforcers who are getting more violent with every passing week. Some manage to get through and make it to Germany to request asylum in a law-abiding country. Others don't. 48 bodies were recovered along the border so far. NGO workers creep through the woods handing out hot soup and donated shoes to migrants; according to them, this is a fraction of the real number of casualties and some bodies will simply never be found. Volunteer medics get their tires slashed, aid workers get harassed, detained and charged. But the Border Guards don't kill, yet. Not directly. We're Europeans, after all! We're civilized!

It's a humanitarian crisis and an international shame. And the [abridged] wall of text above provides the necessary context to why I can't schadenfreudenly cackle over the latest government scandal, even though I love to point and laugh when that bunch steps on a rake.

See, earlier this month a Deputy Foreign Minister got fired for helping with a work visa racket. When the border crisis began to unfold, he'd already been ~facilitating procedures~ for like a year. This country needs workers; a significant chunk of the workforce up and emigrated, including many healthy young males, and the national birth rate is still failing even though the government did everything like the Catholic Church said. The deputy minister wouldn't even come up with a list of in-demand jobs; diplomatic missions are slammed with work after other changes he did implement, so he'd personally order consulates in some Asian and African countries to expedite certain applications. And all that time his party has been openly approving of unconstitutional pushback procedures targeting people from similarly "culturally foreign" [read: Muslim] countries. Incidentally, this far-right party is called Law and Justice. Hypocrisy is a virtue and cruelty is the point.

I wanted to end this with a punchy, quotable call for action, but my words ran out. The border crisis is still happening, even though it's clear by now that Poles and Poland can handle an influx of refugees far larger than the groups coming through Belarus. Summer is almost over and the coming months are likely to be cold and rainy. All I can do is signal boost and donate to aid groups.

[chterzidislaw]

⚖️ JUDICIAL SUCCESS IN MIGRATION LAW!

⚖️ 🏛️ The Administrative Court of First Instance of Thessaloniki orders the Administration to allow our client's temporary stay in Greece until the decision is issued and to refrain from any action that would result in his forced departure from Greece.

✅ In this way, he is not at risk of arrest and deportation !!!

💼 As a greek law office, we provide legal assistance to refugees and migrants in Greece. Christos M. Terzidis, a Greek migration lawyer with a PhD title from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and former legal advisor to the NGO 'ARSIS' on refugee and migrant issues, is greatly experienced and specializes in Migration Law.

⚖️ We protect the human rights of refugees, providing legal assistance to refugees and migrants,undertaking cases that deal with refugee and immigrant residence permits (issuance and renewal) , application for political asylum and support at all stages of the process , appeals , protection from deportation and protection from administrative detention, deposition applications and their presentation and support before the Administrative Courts , presentation and representation before the Appeals Authority and its competent committees , passports (issuance-renewal) , family reunifications, Golden visa cases and so on.

✍ We prepare each case methodically with the outmost care and attention.

🆘 There is a 24-hour service available for emergency cases (like arrests and so on).

📞 You can reach us on 00306977424779 , so that we help you resolve your legal issues!

[aurovedacharitable]

How You Can Help Refugees | Auroveda Foundation

Whether you want to donate to help refugees, volunteer with refugees in your community, or advocate for refugee rights, there is a charity for you. Keep Whether you want to donate to help refugees, volunteer with refugees in your community, or advocate for refugee rights, there is a charity for you. Keep reading to learn more about what the best charities for helping refugees are all about, how they work, NGO Helping Migrants, Best NGOs in India, How to help refugees and what your best way would be to make a contribution. https://auroveda.org/

[sampark25]

Children of Devadasis: Challenges and the Need for Future Reforms

While the existing devadasis continue to suffer repercussions of their dedication, the children of Devadasis too face and grapple with the undeserved struggles that have become bitter remnants of the past – a past which risks ruining their present and future.

Present Challenges

According to a study conducted by Sampark, 62 of 70 Devadasi respondents reported that they had children. When asked if they had ever considered dedicating their children, all made it clear that they would never wish such a life upon their children. Yet, the wishes of a few suffering, helpless women are not what society considers. Despite the practice being illegal, young female children are pressured to become Devadasis to support their families. More often than not, the Devadasi and her children are ostracised by the village community, forcing them to live a life of neither respect nor acceptance.   

Early years education and childcare NGO In terms of education,  the scenario isn’t great either. Even if one ignores the uncivil comments passed, these children are usually deprived of a good education. The figure below illustrates the answers to the question, “Have your children been educated?” A whopping 23 mentioned that not all of their children had completed schooling, and 12 respondents said that none of their children had. The main reasons cited for non-completion of even primary levels of education were usually a lack of financial security, which forced them to drop out and contribute economically. Another frequently cited reason was the lack of interest from students.

Additionally, the documentation process in most institutions mandates the filing of the father’s name but not the mother’s. Devadasi children are neither allowed to take the names of their fathers nor exercise a right over their properties. 

This brings forth the challenge of inheritance and maintenance. While these are important rights in civil law, in the case of Devadasis, since there is no marriage, the children traditionally are considered to be born out of wedlock and are the children of the Devadasi alone. There is an operational hurdle too. Since some Devadasis may cohabit with more than one partner, there are difficulties in ascertaining parentage, responsibility and benefits. The onus of proving parentage is also upon Devadasis which is difficult and compounded by the social dynamics (NCW 2016). 

There is thus, at least societally, no onus on the partner to provide for the child. In fact, in the study conducted by Sampark, 42% of respondents mentioned that their partners did not provide for the children at all, while some had not even seen their faces. Similarly, in the NCW study, 82% of Devadasis themselves opined that their children were not able to inherit the property of the father or use their name, while only 6% asserted that they are expected to inherit (NCW 2016). This deprives the children of crucial financial support and assets that could assist social mobility but instead places the burden of care entirely on the Devadasi who is usually already economically vulnerable herself. 

What Needs to be Done?

Out of the overall help and support that is provided to Devadasis and their children, the majority comes from NGOs and through informal sources; no absolute help is received from the government especially in terms of rights, healthcare, education and law. Consequently, Devadasis have limited support systems; while the pension provided by the Government helps to a limited extent, more such systems need to be in place. One mechanism is to ensure that the Devadasi community can be channelized in support of each other. While the Government can play some role on this front, an important stakeholder to take this forward would be Civil Society Organizations. Apart from this, steps must be taken to legally ensure that Devadasis receive support from their partners. This can be done by recognizing the partners of Devadasis as has been done in the case of the Domestic Violence Act in the case of Live-in Relationships. The support thus garnered may not necessarily be beneficial directly for Devadasis but may aid them in the development of their children.

Education-wise, these children are eligible to join any course – medical, engineering, IAS, KAS, etc. For the children to have a good foundation, the government must develop measures that ensure that no child is left behind. This must include some form of financial incentives or reservations as well as support in terms of easing their enrolment and access to schooling and higher education. The existing scheme for daughters of Devadasis also needs to be further publicized and possibly reviewed to ensure improved uptake. They also need to be added as beneficiaries of schemes that children of other backward classes are eligible for. 

Childcare NGO in Bangalore. Once a good foundation is laid through education, the next key step is to ensure access to good quality livelihoods which also ensures dignity of labour. To achieve this, there needs to be a targeted skill development approach. This will ensure that some of the challenges mentioned by Devadasis concerning their children accessing jobs can be overcome.

[mchiti]

please ignore this post but if I never talk about my job it’s because I work for an ngo that works primarily with migrants and sometimes they let me stay in the room while lawyers that collaborate with us and mediators and even psychologists talk with them and ask them questions so we can assist with their refugee status applications. I mostly help out with arabic speaking people as I know arabic but today I also assisted with three boys from Mali in french. And I know these stories, I’ve heard them plenty of times, and I can’t go into details but you have to believe me I spent my day crying. This is not about me but I can’t talk about them either.

fuck europe. fuck also every african who agrees on exploiting their brothers. fuck lybia and tunisia and yes even my own country for making their brothers’ life hell on heart. Fuck lybian lagers. Fuck the west. Fuck FAKE muslim solidarity which maybe doesn’t exist because if existed wallah. Those boys today. Those literally kids. 15,16,18 year old. Muslim brothers like me and they are safe now Hamdollah but it should not be this way. Fuck malta coast guards. Fuck italy coast guards. Fuck everything. Allah knows.

[transbookoftheday]

The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine

By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island.

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.

Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

[desdasiwrites]

I think most people have heard about the terrible earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria early Monday. WHO are worried that many more people are going to die in the rubble, here's a few links to how to help. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

[mariacallous]

A group of policemen in body armour and helmets burst into a mosque during prayer, released tear gas and shoved men, women and children to the ground. This event in the Moscow suburb of Kotelniki in July was widely reported in the Russian press. The disturbing footage was first shared on a popular xenophobic Telegram channel.

It was one of dozens of raids targeting migrant workers in Russia this year. A large-scale campaign against illegal migrants known as ‘Nelegal-2023’ was carried out by law enforcement in two stages in June and October. Russia’s Interior Ministry told the newspaper Izvestiya last month that over 15,000 migrants have been deported from the country in the course of the campaign.

With the help of our interns, Bellingcat collected and analysed imagery of these raids and detentions shared on social media channels. We found 60 videos and photos depicting 50 raids between May and August, the chief period of focus of our research. This was a particularly active period which included the first stage of Nelegal-2023. We found 29 videos filmed during this time, 27 of which we were able to geolocate.

We also discovered extensive footage of subsequent events during and after the second stage of Nelegal-2023 in autumn, though this period was not monitored as closely by our researchers. Overall we found 14 videos which depict law enforcement committing violence against migrants between May and November, 13 of which could be geolocated. This is far from an exhaustive survey of the available open source evidence.

A key source of footage of these raids was a series of xenophobic Telegram channels, such as Многонационал (‘Multinational’), Русская Община (‘Russian Community’). The same footage also surfaced on other xenophobic channels including Северный Человек (‘Northern Man’) and smaller far-right groups. Bellingcat has chosen not to link to these channels to avoid amplification.

As their names suggest, these channels have strongly nationalist positions and have shared videos of police detentions of migrants since at least 2019. Similar examples could occasionally be found on smaller local interest Telegram channels focused on particular districts of large cities.

We also found indications that members of these channels don’t just comment approvingly on police raids against labour migrants in Russia – they are actively involved in instigating these raids. They regularly publicise events or the addresses of places where migrants – or those they perceive to be migrants – gather with a view to alerting law enforcement. When police raids follow, members of these xenophobic groups are on the scene with their smartphones to record detentions of migrants, which they share with their hundreds of thousands of approving followers. Russia’s Ministry of the Interior did not respond to Bellingcat’s requests for comment.

Far-right anti-migration activism has risen drastically since the start of 2023, states Vera Alperovich, an expert with the Moscow-based SOVA Centre, an NGO which monitors nationalism and racism in Russia. “No longer limiting themselves to the role of the critical observer, nationalists have started to create newsworthy events themselves, joining a battle in the name of local residents”, she wrote in a monitoring report for SOVA Centre in June.

Gyms, Mosques and Cafes

Apart from the aforementioned case of the raid on the mosque in Kotelniki, several other videos of detentions of migrants have surfaced on social media since the first stage of Nelegal-2023 began. Most of the raids analysed by Bellingcat took place in Moscow or cities in the surrounding Moscow Region. Still, there were also a few cases in Krasnodar, Samara, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg and the Siberian cities of Chelyabinsk, Blagoveshchensk and Irkutsk. These raids have taken place at migrants’ places of work, such as construction sites and markets; their places of residence, such as apartments, hostels and dormitories; and , places for public gatherings, including a Central Asian cafe, gyms, and a football field. In several cases, the far-right Telegram channels appear to have played a role in inciting the raids. One such incident on May 28 was recorded extensively from the football field at School No.811 in Moscow’s Mozhaysky District (55.711889 37.400803). That morning, the ‘Russian Community’ Telegram channel shared a video compilation which began with schoolchildren complaining that a group of migrants had forced them off the playground and verbally abused them and their parents. In the same clip the men can later be seen playing football, as a woman can be heard complaining to the camera. 

The clip includes close-up footage of men being led away by police, who lay some of the men on the ground and beat them with truncheons. It ends with representatives of the movement on the same football field talking about the successful operation and urging Russians to contact them if they encounter similar problems.

According to the text of the Telegram post, the parents had complained directly to ‘Russian Community’, which filed a complaint with the police with legal assistance. “While our guys on the front are beating the enemy, on the home front, the Russian Community is defending our families” it declares. A few hours later, the channel posted again to claim that 49 migrants had been detained during the event.

These arrests were celebrated by other xenophobic Telegram channels such as ‘Multinational’, which shared two of the same clips of police violence against the migrants at the football field it said was now “free from foreign occupiers”.

A further video shared by the Tajik YouTube channel Bomdod TV on June 1 shows a group of men sitting beside outdoor exercise equipment near the football field as police beat and kick them. The impact of the kicks is audible even though the cameraperson is filming from behind a fence several metres away from the scene.

A survey of the Telegram channel shows that this wasn’t the first time the ‘Russian Community’ had confronted migrants on football fields in Moscow, usually by sending members to ‘have chats’. However, it appears to be the first in which they successfully called on the authorities to help. Two months later, the channel decried ‘persecution’ of the police officers involved after revealing that a complaint had been filed against them.

On July 31, the ‘Russian Community’ turned its attention to two ‘migrant boxing clubs’ in Moscow. In a video shared on its Telegram channel, migrants are made to lie on the floor of the gym with their hands behind their necks. Several of them wear only underwear. They are made to do squat jumps in a line on the tarmac outside. The cameraperson accompanied police on the raid. However, the cameraperson can’t be seen in the video and at no point do they appear in a reflection or move in view of the lens, making it impossible to determine whether they were a civilian or a member of law enforcement.

In contrast to the incident on the football field, ‘Russian Community’ did not claim that any locals had complained about the migrants, simply asserting without evidence that such martial arts clubs attracted ‘criminal elements’. However, this concern about martial arts is only apparent when migrants or those perceived to be migrants are involved. One of the two gyms, in Moscow’s Tagansky District (55.738105,37.666178), is located in the same building as a knife fighting club with a Russian Imperial military coat of arms and the name ‘Patriot’. It did not attract the same scrutiny from the Telegram community.

The same post claimed without evidence that a half and a third of those whose documents were checked by police at the two gyms had violated migration law.

Open source information indicates that riot police raided at least a dozen Central Asian restaurants over June, July and August – during and in the months immediately after the first phase of Nelegal-2023. Most of them were in Kotelniki, 22 kilometres from Moscow. On July 13 the ‘Russian Community’ Telegram channel wrote of raids on four restaurants leading to the detention of 30 people, “one in five of whom was illegal!” A video shows the police forcing the clientele and staff of the Didor Restaurant (55.66047160167306, 37.85544956623931) onto the ground, some of whom they then beat and kick. Didor is a Central Asian restaurant; traditional flat bread can be seen on the tables and the word ‘Didor’ derives from a greeting in Tajik.

Once again, as in the case of the prayer room in the same town and the football field in Moscow, the ‘Russian Community’ claims that the raid took place after complaints by locals. Once again, the cameraman accompanies the police during the raid though they cannot be identified. These clips and others showing the same events were also shared by ‘Multinational’.

Raids also took place at construction sites. On May 21 a post appeared in the ‘Right View’ Telegram channel containing two videos showing what it said were police detentions of migrants in Kotelniki – one showed men fleeing a cafe during a raid, the other an altercation between migrant construction workers and police. This channel is explicitly far-right and proclaims its support for a ‘White Europe’.

The second of these two videos appeared later that day in the Overheard in the Police and National Guard Telegram channel. Geolocation reveals that this second scene in fact took place outside the Lakhta Centre in St Petersburg’s Primorsky District (59.988985, 30.174993).

Two police officers are seen kicking and beating a man as his fellow workers in hard hats and high-visibility jackets stand and watch. They may be construction workers at the nearby Lakhta Centre 2, which will become the tallest skyscraper in Russia upon completion. Soon afterwards the policemen shove him onto a bus packed with other workers as they check passports. The migrant is heard saying that he did not have his documents with him as he had stepped out for lunch, to which a person in civilian clothes replies, “have your lunch at work, not here”.

Two weeks later, the cameraman in a video posted by ‘Multinational’ walks around the same area and complains about a street market where dozens of construction workers are seen buying food. The post garnered over 100,000 views. The very next day, the same channel posted that riot police had raided the area and detained several migrants – a claim backed up in two videos showing the same street. In July, the channel complained about the same area. Raids in September followed; a police officer kicked over boxes of bread, which construction workers scurried to pick up off the ground.

On October 30, Russian police raided an Azerbaijani wedding in the Kurakina Dacha restaurant in St Petersburg and, according to Azerbaijani media, detained five men. CCTV footage from the event uploaded to Telegram shows police beating two of the guests.

More recently, on November 15, police burst into a birthday party at the Fort restaurant in the city of Voronezh and detained a number of Azerbaijani men who were reportedly then requested to attend the military recruitment office. The ‘Multinational’ Telegram channel celebrated both incidents — the post below notes that ‘we need to pay more attention to weddings and birthday parties’. It is not clear whether the channel helped organise the raids. However, there is no evidence that ‘Multinational’ has shown the same scrutiny towards mass events or celebrations by ethnic Russians. 

Most of these incidents show some level of coordination between Russian law enforcement and several xenophobic, nationalist online communities that frequently claim to be addressing the concerns of local Russian residents. Bellingcat used reverse image searching of screenshots of these videos and specific keyword searches to establish the origin of these videos. In most cases, we were unable to find these particular pieces of footage shared online earlier than when the aforementioned Telegram channels first posted them. Bellingcat was also unable to find clear statements from police that they support or monitor these channels. However, the correlation between the xenophobic channels’ reports on ‘migrant activity’ followed by rapid police raids suggests that one exists. Detentions of migrant workers continue to take place at a large scale across Russia; these channels continue to post about them supportively.

‘Raids at the Request of the Russian Community’

In the first stage of Nelegal-2023 alone, Bellingcat found five instances where police raids immediately followed xenophobic channels posting the location of ‘migrants’. A large proportion of the videos showing Russian police detentions of migrants were taken from Russian nationalist Telegram channels. The two largest were ‘Russian Community’ and ‘Multinational’, which have 150,000 and 206,000 subscribers respectively. They also openly boast of their ‘coordination with law enforcement’, such as in a July 4 post by the former thanking the police for raids ‘at the request of the Russian community’.

Some closed nationalist Telegram channels also reportedly inform police about gatherings of labour migrants. According to Al Jazeera, the closed group ZOV is one of them and is run by a former staffer at Tsargrad TV, a nationalist media network funded by oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev. The group’s name translates as ‘call’ and refers to three Latin letters that have become symbols of the invasion of Ukraine.

A look at the posts on ‘Russian Community’ and ‘Multinational’ both before the start of Nelegal-2023 and at the time of writing shows that their members are staunch supporters of Russia’s war against Ukraine. For example, they collect donations for the military. ‘Russian Community’s main channel includes the phrase ZOV in its title; the group also runs a channel for occupied Mariupol in Ukraine.

Andrey Tkachuk, the coordinator of Russian Community, set out his vision for Russian migration policy in a video in July. He demanded the institution of a visa regime with Central Asian and South Caucasus states, an end to ‘easy’ acquisition of Russian citizenship after permanent residency and spoke against the existence of informal community organisations for migrants. Tkachuk, who stated that his was not a fascist or far-right movement, said in the same video that ‘there is no such thing as Ukraine’.

Bellingcat found several posts from these groups criticising even small attempts by Russian officials to improve relations with migrant communities.

These groups have also developed conspiracy theories to justify their xenophobia. In an April 23 post on ‘Russian Community’s Telegram account, the movement blamed ‘western security services’ for trying to create a ‘new proletariat’ in Russia to act in their interests: ‘millions of migrants, called by somebody to Russia’. This portrayal of migrants as a ‘fifth column’ can be found in older posts on these Telegram channels.

It is clear from these channels’ posts that they attempt to direct police towards areas where ‘migrants’ congregate – including, as shown above, areas which may be frequented by Russian citizens with origins in Central Asia or the Caucasus, such as mosques and certain restaurants.

For example, on June 21 the Russian Community Telegram channel stated that they were responsible for enforcement discovering two apartments full of ‘migrants’. When some migrants resisted arrest, ‘our guys’ fought them off, claims the channel. However, it is not clear whether ‘our guys’ refers to the police or members of the channel.

And the police appear to be watching. As mentioned earlier, the majority of videos of police raids against migrants occurred in the Moscow suburb of Kotelniki. Here, a Russian Community Telegram post from June 14 claims that ‘according to local activists, the chat is regularly monitored by representatives of the Kotelniki district police’.

The ‘Russian Community’ have also claimed to carry out their own ‘raids’. In some cases they have tried to incite police raids in person, not merely by posting addresses online. One such example can be seen outside the central market of Novosibirsk (55.042847, 82.923846), which was uploaded to the group’s Telegram channel on June 23.

A group of men surround a fruit seller on the street and demand that he show them his documents to prove that he is there legally on the grounds that they are customers. His requests to not be filmed are ignored. They ask him who gave him permission to be there, then accuse him of evading taxes and selling food without a licence.

The leader of the group then takes out his telephone and calls the police on the scene, telling them to come to the spot where he has registered a ‘case of illegal trading’. The accompanying post states that the police did not arrive on the scene at Russian Community’s request – which they cite as evidence that the ‘illegal traders’ have some kind of protection.

The same post containing the video ends with a statement that Russian Community continues to monitor the situation and to carry out ‘our own raids’:

These communities also appear to eager to see their members within the ranks of law enforcement. On September 3, ‘Multinational’ posted a link to two job vacancies in a Moscow police department, promoting it as an opportunity ‘to fight against criminality, including ethnic criminality, and to take part in raids’.

Bellingcat was also unable to find any statements from Russia’s police or Ministry of the Interior about these channels nor whether their employees monitor them. Russia’s Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for law enforcement, did not respond to Bellingcat’s requests for comment about whether police used information from the aforementioned Telegram channels or allowed their members to accompany police on raids. ‘Russian Community’ did not respond to Bellingcat’s request for comment. However, an administrator of the ‘Multinational’ Telegram channel called us ‘enemies of Russia’ and said that he refused answer our questions, only to then answer two of them. “We carry out our activities independently from any state structures and there are no employees of any law enforcement agencies among our leadership”, he answered in a Telegram message.

Old Trends, New Alliances

This wave of arrests is far from the first in Russia, which has a history of violent police arrests of labour migrants. However, speculation about the motivation for recent raids abounds, given that they occur against the backdrop of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov writes that ongoing arrests may be a further attempt by the Russian military to replenish its depleted ranks without resorting to a general mobilisation. New decrees in 2022 permit foreign citizens to sign contracts to serve in the Russian military.

In the case of some channels, the motivation to send ‘migrants’ to fight in Ukraine is more explicit. Below, a flyer circulated by the ‘Northern Man’ Telegram channel repurposes ‘The Motherland Calls’, a famous Soviet propaganda poster from 1941. The poster reads ‘If your neighbour is a migrant, call the military recruitment office!’ Although the text of the Telegram post announces an ‘initiative of the residents of the Moscow region to help the military enlistment office search for illegal migrants‘, the text on the scroll in the poster urges supporters to look for ‘newly-minted citizens of the Russian Federation… who have forgotten to sign up’.

However, Valentina Chupik, an activist and lawyer from Uzbekistan whose NGO defends the rights of labour migrants in Russia, told Bellingcat in an interview that she did not believe conscription was the primary goal for the latest wave of police raids on labour migrants — whatever may motivate such xenophobic channels.

Most labour migrants from Central Asia, she explained, are not Russian citizens. Those men detained during police raids who then receive military summons may be Russian citizens of Central Asian descent or domestic migrants from majority-Muslim areas of Russia, said Chupik. The xenophobic channels’ assumption that those present at Central Asian restaurants or mosques must be ‘illegal immigrants’ suggests that anti-migrant activists do not distinguish between these two groups, she continued.

“What makes this year different is the lower number of migrants in Russia, more violence, and more coordination with the Nazis”, she said. Based on the number of migrants who have appealed to her colleagues for assistance, Chupik says that she knows of around 18,000 detentions of migrants in Russia this year so far — a scale, she says, much lower than the average of 25,000 detentions in the early to mid-2010s. This she attributes in part to the lower number of labour migrants in Russia following the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic disruption following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Yes, there’s coordination”, Chupik remarked. “But the leading role here isn’t played by the Nazi organisations. The police use them to track those places where migrants can be found. The police are lazy; the Nazis are the dependent side here… They are prepared to work with these people for as long as it profits them”, she concluded.

The activities of groups like the ‘Russian Community’ are a good example of the Russian far-right’s adaptation to new political realities, wrote Alperovich, the SOVA Centre expert, in the same report from June. “They position themselves as social, not political movements and declare that they are not interested in fighting for power. They defend conservative morals and Orthodox values but most of their activity is directed at the fight against migrants”.

[beechicory]

So uh... at Jacumba, near San Diego... the US is keeping people in open-air (e.g. outdoors, on the fucking ground) detention camps, in the freezing cold, and AREN'T GIVING THEM FUCKING FOOD.

OR SHELTER.

They're barely even giving them any water, Jesus Christ.

There are literally *babies* there.

Only volunteer groups - such as AL Otro Lado and Border Kindness - are helping them. No federal agencies or big NGOs will do anything?!?!?

Like people have *begged* NGOs to help, and they won't.

Apparently people are crossing over the border near this location, so the border patrol agency has made it an "unofficial" detention camp, where they keep people outdoors - no food, no shelter - until they are transferred to a 'proper' (e.g. INDOOR) detention facility.

They keep people there for days, in the freezing cold, no food, no shelter, no fucking blankets, but oh the guards sure have guns and won't let anybody leave, either.

And these desperate volunteer groups are the only ones doing anything. Making sandwiches and soup and *running out of food* before they can feed everyone, and desperately trying to find blankets and tents and tarps and clothes for hundreds of people. Who are sleeping on the dirt, trying desperately to keep their children from freezing.

I only found out about this from a twitter thread by James Stout:

This is absolutely monstrous.

To donate to AL Otro Lado, go here

To donate to Border Kindness go here.

They also have an Amazon wishlist.