Month: July 2022

Abnormal dryness is present in parts of Mali, Nigeria, and South Sudan

A poor March to May rainy season cased severe drought across much of East Africa, including north-central and eastern Ethiopia, Kenya-Ethiopia border areas, much of Somalia, and southern Kenya.

Insufficient rainfall has caused abnormal dryness in central South Sudan.

Insufficient and uneven rainfall since the start of the monsoon season has caused significant abnormal dryness and drought in northeastern Nigeria.

Heavy rainfall over the past several weeks has triggered landslides in coastal areas of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Poor rainfall accumulation since May has led to abnormal dryness in central Mali.

Source: Famine Early Warning System Network

GENEVA — Millions of Ukrainians are suffering from acute shortages of food, water, shelter and other basic needs more than four months after Russia’s invasion, U.N. agencies say.

U.N. agencies are trying to provide assistance to Ukrainians in light of Russia’s invasion, but they say destruction from Russian airstrikes and artillery fire, plus security concerns, make delivery to some areas difficult. They say it is not possible to enter and provide relief supplies to Kherson and Mariupol, cities that have been pummeled into rubble by Russian airstrikes.

Speaking from Kyiv, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Ukraine, Osnat Lubrani, says an estimated 10,000 civilians have been killed and injured, adding this is probably a fraction of the true number. She says nearly 16 million people in Ukraine need humanitarian assistance and protection.

“We are making every effort to support the people whose lives have been torn apart because of this war,” Lubrani said. “But the Russian Federation—also the Ukrainian government—have to do more to protect the people of this country and to make our work possible.”

Lubrani says the U.N. and private aid agencies have provided assistance to nearly 9 million people in every region in Ukraine. She adds nearly 2 million have received cash assistance for basic needs.

The Ukrainian crisis also is having a global impact. Russian ships are blockading Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, preventing the country from exporting its wheat and grain to the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia. The United Nations warns this is causing a global hunger crisis.

World Food Program Deputy Emergency Coordinator Kate Newton says without the Black Sea ports it is not possible to get anywhere close to the export levels Ukraine needs.

“However, we are doing everything we can, which means by road, by rail and now by river, to try to get close to the maximum output,” Newton said. “And at the moment, we think it is about 1 million metric tons a month and maybe we can push up to 2 million, but we urgently need access to the Black Sea.”

Ukraine is considered one of the world’s breadbaskets. It provides about 10% of global wheat exports and nearly half the world’s sunflower oil.

The World Food Program says Ukraine exported up to 6 million tons of grain a month before the war. It says about 400 million people worldwide consumed Ukrainian products last year. Now that exports have largely stopped, WFP says about 20 million tons of grain are stuck in storage in Ukraine.

Source: Voice of America

In West Africa, staple food prices increased and remained significantly above average due to below-average production, rapid depletion of stocks, various national bans on cereal outflows, and persisting — or escalating — insecurity disrupting trade flows. In Coastal countries, atypical high prices were driven by strong export demand, lingering COVID-19 impacts on shipping, and currency depreciation. Surging global commodity and fuel prices, exacerbated by the conflict in the Black Sea region, have affected markets and prices throughout the region. Prices are projected to remain above average with new record levels during the lean season.

In East Africa, staple food prices were stable or increased marginally in Ethiopia and South Sudan due to adequate market supplies from the October-to-December harvest, inflows of imported staples in Somalia, and in Burundi due to the forthcoming start of June-to-July harvest. Prices increased typically in Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya as supplies started to tighten, and in Tanzania as adequate supplies were yet to reach the markets. Below average harvest, enduring currency depreciation, and high inflation heightened food commodity prices in the region

In Southern Africa, maize price trends were mixed across the region as harvesting of the 2022 crop continued against a backdrop of high fuel and transportation costs and strong demand for maize. Maize prices increased in South Africa, Tanzania, and Malawi. Strong demand and increased input and transportation costs put upward pressure on prices and inflation. Currency depreciation also continued across much of the region.

In Central America, markets were well supplied with local and imported goods and operated normally. White maize and beans prices increased seasonally, while rice prices remained stable. In Haiti, market operations and food supply were average, except for Port-au-Prince due to gang activity. Increased fuel and transportation costs drove inflation.

In Central Asia, rising global grain and energy prices, and economic fallout from the Black Sea conflict, continued to increase pressure and uncertainty on import-dependent local markets driving prices upward. In** Yemen**, commodity prices increased, tracking international trends while the continued ceasefire and favorable monetary policies allowed for renewed imports and a stable currency.

International staple food markets were well-supplied. Rice and wheat prices continued to increase due to geopolitical tensions and higher freight and fuel costs. Efforts to mitigate these risks will be essential to monitor as well as the weather and its implications for crop development.

Source: Famine Early Warning System Network

Thirst and hunger are driving people to make perilous journeys on foot to reach safety

They buried five-year-old Mohamed in a shallow grave, in a place unknown, where his family had briefly stopped to rest. “We had no food, no water … he was malnourished and exhausted and he didn’t survive,” says his mother, Mido.

With four other children to care for and many days of travel ahead, the 25-year-old said a short goodbye and carried on walking. Eventually, the young family made it to the Kabasa camp in Dolow, a town on the banks of the Dawa river, along the border of Somalia and Ethiopia.

I meet Mido and her 12-month-old daughter, Fatun, at a health centre funded by the World Food Programme (WFP), some ten days after their arrival there. Her feet are finally starting to heal from the month-long journey, but her grief is raw. Like her children, she is thin and hungry.

“We left our home because we had nothing left – we just had drought and hunger,” says Mido. “We were pastoralists and had cattle and camels, but we lost all our livestock and when our final animals died that was it. There was no water, no food for my children, no way to get money.”

In the days that follow, I talk to other women. Ambiyo, Ayan and Dahera all tell versions of the same story of hunger and years of relentless drought – dwindling resources, dying and dead livestock, no rain, no food.

They each recount long journeys walking day and night, carrying and cajoling small children to keep them moving in search of refuge. Sparse sips of dirty water, worried that waterborne diseases will take their children if the thirst and hunger do not. Or worse: that if they stop walking, armed men will take them all. All of the women tell me that they feel safer here in Dolow but they need more help – because can’t I see that the rains have not arrived?

Drought drives the threat of famine

The drought is most visible from the air. Rivers and tributaries that should be flowing stretch out across the landscape, cracked and grey. I’m visiting in what should be a rainy season, but no rain falls. Even if it did, it would be too little too late.

The patterns of rain in this part of the world mean that traditionally there are two growing seasons each year; and every few years or so communities brace for, and can cope with, drought. In times of scarcity families would stockpile food, or sell off prized livestock to provide a financial buffer to purchase food and water. Things would be lean, but they’d be able to cope until the rains came again.

Increasingly, however, the rains aren’t falling. When they do, they’re inconsistent and short. Scorching temperatures are pummelling the region on a more frequent basis. Since 2008 there has been a drought every single year; 2011’s led to widespread famine across the Horn of Africa. Now, the risk of famine looms over Somalia again.

“In the past few weeks, we have seen malnutrition rates triple,” says Jama Mohamud Ahmed, a WFP programme policy officer in Dolow. “These families have now lived with drought for years and women and children are walking 200-300 kilometres to come here because they know they can get support.

“When they get here, they need immediate life-saving assistance, but we don’t have the resources we need to support all those at risk. And both the drought and the ongoing insecurity will mean that more and more people will continue to arrive in need of our help.”

In recent months, WFP has been drastically scaling up the life-saving food and nutrition assistance that it provides in Somalia, racing against time to avert another famine. With the support of donors and partners, we’re now reaching more people than ever before in the country with desperately needed relief: more than 3.5 million in June alone.

But as the devastating drought continues, the numbers of hungry people keep growing. More than 7 million people face critical food insecurity. And while we are working to scale up even further, aiming to get food and nutrition support to almost 5 million Somalis in coming weeks, there is no immediate end in sight to the crisis. Early forecasts for the next rainy season are dismal.

WFP needs sustained resources, close to US$300 million over the next six months, to avoid the worst outcomes of the drought – and to continue our investments in longer-term livelihoods, food systems and resilience projects that will enable Somalis to better cope with climate crises.

The day we arrive in Dolow there is a red alert, which means that United Nations workers are at an increased risk of attack or kidnapping. At WFP we’re familiar with working in fragile contexts but the alert is a reminder of how difficult the situation is here – conflict is compounding the climate crisis in Somalia and impacting our ability to reach those most in need.

Dolow has been shaped by successive influxes of people fleeing conflict, drought or, more often, a combination of both. Families are drawn by the relative safety and access to assistance that humanitarian organizations cannot provide in other parts of the country.

“We came here as we heard we would get some help,” explains 24-year-old Ayan. “We left our home because there was no water and our livestock had died.” She adds that Al-Shabaab, one of a number of armed non-state groups driving conflict in Somalia, made the family’s problems worse: “They were attacking us day by day and we lived in fear of them.”

While families like Ayan’s are fleeing direct insecurity within Somalia, they are also indirectly impacted by a conflict that is raging thousands of kilometres away. The war in Ukraine is causing a ripple effect that is compounding a global food crisis, further driving up food prices that were already soaring due to drought, and pushing more families to the precipice of starvation.

WFP estimates that over 880,000 people are struggling for survival as they endure catastrophic hunger in Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen.

These terrible conditions impact the most vulnerable first. Ayan’s 18-month-old daughter, Mushtaq, was so severely malnourished when they arrived in Dolow that she weighed just 6.7 kilograms. Four months pregnant, Ayan was barely clinging to life. Today WFP is supporting them both with nutritional therapy and fortified cereals – and prioritizing others, like them, who are most at risk. Yet even then, the help we can offer sometimes comes too late.

I meet 24-year-old Ambiyo in the health centre where her youngest child, Abdi, is receiving therapeutic treatment for malnutrition. “The drought killed everything. Al Shabaab used to target our village as well, so it wasn’t safe where we lived. It took us about a month to get to Dolow. We had to make the kids walk and it is a hard journey – we would rest only when we had to. Fudosa (aged 3) was seriously ill – very malnourished and sick from the dirty water … she died when we got here.”

They buried Fudosa in a small grave, on the outskirts of the camp – in this place where they finally found safety.

Source: World Food Programme

The first ship carrying Ukrainian grain was on its way to Istanbul after it set off from the Black Sea port of Odesa on August 1 under a UN-brokered deal, raising moderate hope that a looming global food crisis could be averted.

Ukraine and Russia signed agreements with Turkey and the United Nations on July 22 in Istanbul to free up three of Ukraine’s ports — Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Pivdenniy — which had been blockaded since Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Ukrainian Infrastructure Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said the Razoni cargo ship, flying the flag of Sierra Leone, left Odesa on the morning of August 1, and Turkey’s Defense Ministry said in a statement that the vessel was expected in Istanbul on August 2.

“The first grain ship since #RussianAggression has left port. Thanks to the support of all our partner countries & @UN we were able to fully implement the agreement signed in Istanbul,” Kubrakov wrote on Twitter.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba hailed the departure of the first shipment of grain as a “relief for the world.”

“The day of relief for the world, especially for our friends in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, as the first Ukrainian grain leaves Odesa after months of Russian blockade. Ukraine has always been a reliable partner and will remain one should Russia respect its part of the deal,” Kuleba tweeted.

The Joint Coordination Center, the Istanbul-based organization overseeing the exports, said the Razoni is carrying “over 26,000 metric tons” of maize.

Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar told state-owned Anadolu news agency on August 1 that the Razoni would anchor off the coast of Istanbul around noon GMT on August 2 for a joint inspection.

The news was hailed by the international community, with UN chief Antonio Guterres “warmly” welcoming the move.

“The Secretary-General hopes that this will be the first of many commercial ships moving in accordance with the initiative signed, and that this will bring much-needed stability and relief to global food security, especially in the most fragile humanitarian contexts,” the UN said in a statement.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg thanked alliance member Turkey for its “pivotal role.”

“I welcome the first shipment of Ukrainian grain from Odesa under the UN-brokered deal. I thank our ally Turkey for its pivotal role,” Stoltenberg tweeted.

“NATO allies strongly support the full implementation of the deal to ease the global food crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine,” he added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov hailed the news that the Razoni left Odesa as a “very positive” development and a “good opportunity to test the effectiveness of the mechanisms that were agreed during talks in Istanbul.”

Russia had bombed Odesa a day after agreeing to the deal, raising questions about its commitment to the agreement.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Club of Agrarian Business Associations (UCAB) said on August 1 that Ukraine exported 3 million tons of agricultural produce last month, bypassing its Russia-blocked seaports.

In a statement on Facebook, UCAB said agricultural exports last month grew 12 percent from June, while grain exports rose 21 percent to 1.7 million tons.

More than 20 million tons of grain from last year’s harvest are still awaiting export, according data from Ukraine.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said last week that Ukraine is ready to start shipping the millions of tons of grain sitting at its southern ports.

Ukraine and Russia are two of the world’s largest grain exporters.

News of the expected resumption of grain shipments came as Russian missiles pounded the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolayiv on July 31, killing the owner of a major grain exporter, while a drone strike hit Russia’s Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol.

Oleksiy Vadatursky, 74, founder and owner of agriculture company Nibulon, and his wife were killed when a missile hit their home, Mykolayiv Governor Vitaliy Kim announced on Telegram.

Headquartered in Mykolayiv, a strategically important city that borders the Russia-occupied Kherson region, Nibulon specializes in the production and export of wheat, barley, and corn. The company maintains its own fleet and shipyard.

Zelenskiy described the death of Vadaturskiy, who had received the Hero of Ukraine award, as a great loss.

The southern Ukrainian city of Nikopol also came under heavy attack, the governor of Dnipropetrovsk, Valentyn Reznichenko, wrote on Telegram.

He said up to 50 Grad rockets had hit residential areas in Nikopol on July 31, wounding one man and damaging homes and gas and water pipes.

In eastern Ukraine, Russia continued to attempt tactical assaults on the Bakhmut axis, northeast of Donetsk, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in its daily bulletin on August 1, adding that the Russians only managed to make slow progress.

British intel suggested that Russia is probably adjusting its offensive in the Donbas after failing to make a decisive operational breakthrough under the plan it had been following since April.

Zelenskiy has called on the remaining residents of the Donetsk region to urgently evacuate in what he called a “government decision.”

“Everything is being organized. Full support, full assistance — both logistical and payments. We only need a decision from the people themselves, who have not yet made it for themselves,” he said in his nightly address on July 31.

“The sooner it is done, the more people leave Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian Army will have time to kill,” Zelenskiy said.

In Russia-occupied Sevastopol, five Russian Navy staff members were wounded by an explosion after a presumed drone flew into the courtyard of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the Crimean port city’s Moscow-appointed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, told Russian media.

Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036.

Vincent Wong, an assistant professor of law in Canada, researches racial capitalism, the process of extracting social and economic value from a person of a different racial identity. The theory asserts that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing. In his 35-page article titled “Racial capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: analyzing the political economy of racialized dispossession and exploitation in Xinjiang,” which will appear in the fall 2022 edition of the African Journal of International Economic Law, Wong argues that the racial capitalism paradigm can be used to understand the governing logics of political economy behind the development and justification of technologies of repression in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). “The contemporary human rights catastrophe that faces Uyghurs and other non-Han Indigenous peoples in the XUAR is made possible through a latticework of overlapping legal, political, and economic imperatives: settler colonial policies, global economic integration (including the BRI), insufficient international environment and labor protections, the global war on terror, and private-public carceral investments,” he writes. Wong spoke with RFA Uyghur reporter Nuriman Abdureshid about his theory or racial capitalism, how it pertains to Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and why Han Chinese abroad have an obligation to speak up about rights abuses in China’s far-western region. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

RFA: What do you want people to know about your latest article?

Wong: What I’ve tried to do with it is almost like a theoretical intervention to change the way we approach or we think about what is going on here and what are the connections of what is going on in terms of exploitation in the Uyghur heartland with other things that are going on in the world, so that it’s not an isolated [case], but [to think about it in terms of] what is going on in connection with other technologies and the logics of oppression and colonialism to better understand the dynamics.

What I mean by ‘racial capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ without going into too much academic jargon is a particular outlook on governing in China that has emerged since the 1990s. I argue that communist government has moved away from its 1950s’ ideals of socialist multiculturalism, economics and equality towards all ethnicities and has moved towards market liberalization and developmental capitalism, [and] has created exploitative economic structures that have to be justified and managed. I argue that the way this is justified and managed is strongly in part to create racial relations. I argue that they mobilize pre-existing cultural differences — language differences, differences in religion, differences in looks — and create a racial relationship to justify these inequalities, to turn the region into a place where you could have resource extraction [and] labor extraction that [occurs] on a very oppressive and exploitative level. It’s a way of going beyond the human rights frame. The human rights frame is very important, but it just tells us what is going on; it doesn’t tell us much about why it’s going on and who is benefiting from these human rights abuses that dehumanize and subordinate people and that kick people out of their native homes and into prison camps — how race is being deployed for the profit of some and for the dehumanization of others.

In a broad way, what I mean by ‘racial capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ is a theoretical lens to think more deeply about what is happening in Xinjiang [and] how it’s tied to what is happening in many other places in the world, but in different ways and with different histories. What I’m talking about is a particular form of colonial capitalist accumulation that is about the taking of land and resources and appropriating them from some other group and rendering those people exploitable to take away their rights. Then, it’s very easy to create a large labor pool in which we can exploit for profit for capitalist accumulation.

I start with the fact that the relationship between China and this region of the world has always been colonial in nature, but it hasn’t always operated in exactly the same way. For many years, even though China has made a territorial claim to this region, it was largely segregated. You had Han who lived in generally Han areas, and you had Turkic Muslim folks and other ethnicities that lived there, and generally, there wasn’t a lot of assimilation. There wasn’t that much interaction. This changed a lot in the 1990s [with] prominent Han economic migration, what I call settler migration and the need to transform this land for Han Chinese economic purposes … [and] natural resource extraction especially in the Tarim Basin. To do this would be environmentally destructive and a hugely environmentally transformative natural resource extraction industry. In order for China to do this, it has basically followed the pattern of settler colonial capitalist structures in many other places in the world, including in Canada and the U.S. But the history is a little bit different in that there is the actual need to completely transform these areas. To take the land and to extract the resources require removing the people who have native claims to that land in a certain way, so you have to take them out in order to do this kind of colonial capitalist move. That’s part of the reason why you see the massive transformations of the Belt and Road Initiative. It was announced in 2013, but it really started in 2015 and 2016. Around the same time, you saw in 2016 and 2017 the massive increase in securitization in the boarding schools that were created [and the] concentration camps. But it’s not just the concentration camps. That’s what I’m trying to get at. It’s an entire system that’s created to take one group of people or people who are negatively racialized and to strip away their rights through the carceral system and to create a hyper exploitable group of labor for predominantly the benefit of Han Chinese settler interests. The genocide is a result of that. It has a functional operation within this colonial capitalist system.

Making the argument that this is what is happening now is situated in a longer colonial history. Since the Chinese government, the Communist Party, took over in 1949, this is the way that they’ve been talking about it. By tracking the history of the Bingtuan [the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, also known as XPCC, which is a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region] and its modern establishment in 1954, you can see how the colonial project has developed and evolved through this one organization which is almost 90% Han Chinese. It says that it is a colonial paramilitary organization. I tracked the history of its origins because it has shifted a little over time. In the beginning, it had three frontier order goals: the development of land and commercial interests, the settlement of primarily Han Chinese settler migrants in the area, and frontier security. This organization had a very different, almost a subsistence, military form for a very long time until 1988 when it had an enormous transition. The idea that it was going to be playing a much stronger, more powerful role in the transition from a centrally planned socialist economy into a much more developmental capitalist economy and to connect the economy of Xinjiang with global trade, global markets and global capital markets. So the XPPC then blew up and became incorporated. It has over 3 million people right now and controls an enormous kind of GDP and an enormous variety of commercial and land interests. This has been increasing ever since the late 1990s. The Bingtuan is also creating many cities that are preplanned Han Chinese settler cities similar to other settler colonial projects in history and are essentially colonial urban land grabs. To have a settlement city for XPCC commercial folks and their families, they have to displace the native populations. We’ve seen this over the last five or so years. The XPCC system has very powerful and large cotton and tomato interests. It has a weird kind of rivalry with the XUAR regional government because they are supposed to be on a similar level. They are like colonial rivals. Drawing the history of the Bingtuan tells us a lot about the colonial relationship between settlers and Uyghurs and other non-Han folks.

RFA: There have been reports on how the Chinese government is totally changing Uyghur identity, including culture and the way of life. How do you see this?

Wong: Han settler tourism is an industry that is really growing. The [Han Chinese] want to go to Xinjiang and spend their money to see certain kinds of cultural commodities, whether it’s in the north or south. They want to eat the food, see the dances, and to a certain extent see some of the more beautiful mosques. They want to see the traditional clothing. We see this in many places in which there is kind of a colonial imperative. You can have cultural identity, but only if it is commercialized and put into this box to sell, and it’s completely depoliticized from the history, from the colonial relationship, from the relationships of power and exploitation. So, racial capitalism is a really helpful lens. It occurs because it makes money, because the tourist industry wants to sell a vision of Xinjiang that is both safe, interesting and culturally relevant with the dancing, the costumes and the food. But it’s stripped of the cultural struggle, the ongoing fight to save language rights, the ongoing mass incarceration and exploitation of the Uyghur people, the ongoing removal of Uyghur people, and other negatively racialized people from their native land who are put into carceral institutions and unfree labor arrangements. Racial capitalism gives us a tool to understand this better, and who profits from it and why. This is the power of colonial racism and colonial racial discourse. That is so powerfully obvious when you talk to somebody who is different culturally. It says all Uyghur people, all Turkic Muslim people, are potentially terrorists. They’re infected with this extremism tied to their regular everyday activities in terms of their Islamic religious activities or the way they look or, or whether they decide to grow a beard or what they wear. The government is going to go in and help these people become good Chinese citizens. That is the evilness of this colonial civilizational language. If you call it out for what it is, I think it becomes obvious. But the government is able to package it in a way that obscures what is actually happening.

RFA: Why did you tweet that you feel you have an obligation as a Han Chinese to write about this?

Wong: Of course, the personal is political. But it’s also that the situatedness of humanity is really important. Not many people are talking about this or seeing the horrendous things that have happened in the last five years. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It’s an escalation of a previous problem. They are not seeing it as a problem of rising Han ethno-nationalism. People call it different things like chauvinism and Han supremacy, but it’s similar to the rise of ultranationalist politics in a lot of places. In neighboring India, we’re seeing Hindu supremacy create a certain politics there. We see the reemergence of white supremacy in a lot of places. So, I think because of the way that China is perceived as somehow different, completely outside of global patterns and ultra-nationalism, this is an import created by under Xi Jinping, a rising sense of ultra-nationalism and not just Chinese ultra-nationalism, but Han Chinese ultra-nationalism privileging and normalizing that those perceived characteristics of Han Chinese as above others in the Chinese ambit right of power, and therefore more civilized. These are many of the same arguments that other colonial projects make. So, as a Han Chinese person, it is super important and incumbent on us who do not agree with this and are really staunchly opposed to it to step into our identity and say that they should not be doing this. It is absolutely atrocious morally and ethically and economically. From our positionality, we are going to be part of the solution, we’re not going to be part of continuing the problem even though the system is supposed to be to the benefit of our group identity.

RFA: What’s your message to Han Chinese living abroad?

Wong: As Han Chinese people, we have to step into our identity to fight against what we see as Han ethno-nationalism, the impacts of which are felt most starkly in places like Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia. The fight against colonial racism is a global one and it’s a noble one. When you’re part of this fight, it doesn’t matter which race or what nationality you are. It might take a long time, but I believe we will win the struggle. There are a lot of allies out there in the fight against colonial racism, the type of colonial racism that Uyghurs, Tibetans and others face right now. History tells us that even the most powerful and oppressive empires eventually fall and wain away because of organized resistance by people who are fighting oppression. There’s nothing in history that can’t be changed, and there’s nothing about the present condition of what is going on that can’t be changed.

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