Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: The Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is located in a beautiful cobbled courtyard not far from the attention-grabbing Gazi Huzrev-beg Mosque in Sarajevo’s Old Town. Small in size and modestly sign-posted as it is, it nevertheless manages to squeeze several fascinating exhibitions into the old synagogue in which it resides. The history of the Jewish population in BiH is as varied, and at times tortured, as the country itself, and the museum provides an insight into the story of a unique people as they carved out their place in Balkan history.

Although there is evidence of some small and often transient Jewish settlements in the Balkans during the Greek and Roman times, the modern Jewish population largely came to the region following the expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492 (resulting in another unique quirk in Bosnian history, with these early Jewish settlers being Spanish-speakers). After this first influx, Sephardim and Ashkenazi Jews then began to settle in the Balkans. Although under Ottoman rule they had no political rights and were forced to pay higher rates of taxes than the Muslim population (as all non-Muslim groups were), inter-group relations were generally good and the Jewish community began to thrive (as briefly discussed in my last Sarajevo blog, Rise of a Titan). By 1840 Sultan Abdul-Medzid would grant the Jewish population with the rights to open their own schools and enable free use of synagogues, in addition to appointing a hahambasha, or chief priest, for all of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The museum paints a colourful picture of the Jewish community and their mutually beneficial relationships with other peoples in the region. Unfortunately, as history demonstrates, this was not to last forever. Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, took place over the 9^th and 10^th of November 1938 across Germany and Austria and left 91 Jews dead, 7,500 businesses destroyed, and 267 synagogues burned. It was only the start of what was to come as the Nazis began their campaign of annihilation and began to transport their hatred across Europe. The Nazis would succeed in occupying Yugoslavia on 17^th April 1941, and removal of the Jewish people would begin in earnest.

As has been the case with so many of my experiences in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the stories that remain with me from this exhibition are the ones of the people that stood up for what was right in times of such unimaginable desperation. The Righteous Among the Nations are a selection of individuals honoured by Yad Vashem, a Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In the Jewish Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina 54 of these heroic individuals are remembered. Their stories are inspirational and should stand as an example of people’s capacity to do good to other people, even in the darkest of times.

Zora Sebek-Krajina, a woman in the Italian zone of Mostar who housed the German-Jewish refugee Fritz Cahn and then helped him to make contact with Tito’s Partisans to fight back against the Nazi occupiers, and who also helped other Jews to escape by providing them with Muslim clothes and identification so that they could leave Yugoslavia untroubled.

Vid and Mato Milosevic, carpenters in Sarajevo who hired their main competitor, Leon Altaraz, after he was compelled to close his shop by the Nazis, and then began to hide even more Jews in their shop when the Nazi police became death squads. They would eventually be found out and sent to Jasenovac concentration camp in 1941.

Ratko Jankovic, a railway authority employee who smuggled a family out of Sarajevo by getting them to pose as a doctor and sick patient, and guarding their carriage by informing the officers that the disease was extremely contagious and they should not enter. He also provided Muslim clothing and identity papers to Hagara Kajon, who was smuggled out of Sarajevo and would later join the Partisans.

These are just some of the names that should be remembered for outstanding acts of bravery when their own lives were not on the line. The Kristallnacht exhibition ends with a photo of the smashed windows of a Jewish store and the quote: “’Never Again?’ Hardly. The world has stood by and done nothing countless times since 1938, and will doubtless do so again.” Bosnia-Herzegovina knows all-too-well that this seemingly cynical message in fact holds true – the 11-07-95 Srebrenica exhibition just down the road can attest to that – but the Righteous Among the Nations exhibition that closes out the Jewish Museum demonstrates that there are many people out there who do not stand by and do nothing. Unfortunately, these people are often lost in the violence that they stand up against and their actions are forgotten in the face of the evil they rejected.

I have come back to Sarajevo to attend the WARM Festival 2018, which aims to answer the question “Why remember?” after conflict. It seems that we often tend to remember the worst in humanity. But even in those worst of times there are ordinary people doing extraordinary good.  Perhaps it is time to focus on them, and remember those that risked everything for basic humanity.

Sergei Skripal: Facts, Counter-Facts, and a New Type of War

The immediate aftermath of the Skripal poisoning produced some unlikely, Bondesque assassination theories. Many came from the British tabloids; the poisoned beer, the Russian in the rafters of the Zizzi restaurant where Sergei and Yulia had lunch that day or the poison wafted through the air vents of Skripal’s car, and yet even more came from the Russian media, who blamed everyone from terrorists to Theresa May and the CIA. The panellists of the recent Guardian Live event The Skripal Case: A New Cold War? were under no illusion that this attack could have been orchestrated in any way other than through the Kremlin and viewed the Russian response as little more than direct obfuscation and an attempt to muddy the waters as the investigation developed. But then, can we ever really be sure?

Many of the facts that emerged in the aftermath of the poisoning seemed to raise more questions than they answered. Why Sergei Skripal, a retired GRU agent who was surely a nuisance to the Kremlin but had been out of the loop for many years and whose days of selling state secrets were far behind him? And, if they wanted him dead, why use Novichok, an untested nerve agent that caused considerable collateral damage but ultimately failed to kill the target? Surely, the trained killers of Russian military intelligence would not have bungled an assassination attempt so catastrophically? Does that mean Skripal was in fact not the target at all? Why now, at a time of heightened tension between Russia and the West, and during a particularly tempestuous time in British politics (and just two weeks before Russia’s Presidential elections)?

As panellist Steven Morris pointed out, in many cases the point of chemical warfare is to destabilise the target population, as people do not necessarily know what is happening at first, whether there is a continued risk of exposure, or what the effects may be. This can lead to disorientation, false flags for further danger, and sometimes panic. The Skripal attack certainly destabilised not just Salisbury but the British establishment. The calls to hold Moscow to account for the attack were met with rebuttals in Parliament from Jeremy Corbyn, who argued that more evidence was needed before the finger was pointed eastwards. The foreign secretary Boris Johnson fumbled his way through a press conference in which he asserted that the British defence science laboratory at Porton Down (coincidentally located only five miles from Salisbury) had told him “unequivocally” that the Novichok agent had come from Russia, a claim that Porton Down later denied. Theresa May, who was commended for her level-headed handling of the crisis, nevertheless was forced to share high-level intelligence with her French and German counterparts in Brussels to provide evidence of Russia’s involvement at a time where relations between these allies are particularly strained (leaving panellist Anne Applebaum to pose the interesting question of how events may have unfolded had Britain already left the EU and May had been unable to meet with Merkel and Macron in Brussels so soon after the event).

The European and American response to the poisoning did in the end represent a relatively united front against the Russian attack, and yet Moscow continued to deny, deflect, and counter-accuse. It does not appear that they have been successful in convincing anybody in the West that they are innocent of this crime, and yet, as audience member and former GCHQ Director Sir David Omand pointed out, perhaps again the point is not to convince, but to pollute the media and the discourse. This “implausible deniability” has been cultivated by the Putin administration for some time now and is paying dividends in terms of how the president is viewed both at home and abroad.

Much attention has been paid to Putin’s close advisor Vladislav Surkov, who is rumoured to have written a short story under the pseudonym of Natan Dubovitsky, Without Sky, that details “the world’s first non-linear war”, where truth and fiction are blended to confuse and disorient the public, and where the goal of war is not victory but to reach a point where it is hard to know if there is even a war at all. The story, which appeared just one month before Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and subsequent backing down from the brink of full-scale conflict in eastern Ukraine, has been credited as a road-map for Putin’s new “hybrid warfare”, which merges traditionally militaristic posturing with new technologies and covert operations to create disorientation and alarm in the West. The fact that nobody really knows if Surkov is the author of the story or not encapsulates exactly what this new information war is trying to achieve. Historically, propaganda aimed to create a narrative. Today, Putin’s propaganda machine wants to obscure that narrative and leave his audience in a state of unease and instability.

A similar campaign of disinformation to that viewed after the Skripal poisoning emerged following the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, with the Kremlin denouncing investigations identifying a Russian-made missile as a cause of the crash, suggesting that the satellite imagery showed the missile did not come from a rebel-held area, then blaming a Ukrainian fighter pilot for shooting down the passenger flight and even hinting at tacit EU/US involvement. Meanwhile, the rebels themselves first claimed responsibility for the attack through Twitter, then denied it.

The rabbit hole goes deeper as Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election uncovers growing evidence to suggest that collusion between Trump staff and Russian officials was ongoing throughout the election cycle. Trump himself has denounced the investigation as ‘fake news’, but fake news, it seems, is what Putin excels at. Several of the Guardian Live panellists discussed their personal interactions with social media “trolls” who spread misinformation about them that quickly dissipated from social media to news outlets and influential figures such as Julian Assange, who posted inaccurate information about journalist Anne Applebaum that had originated from a “troll”. As the panellists acknowledged, some of these methods are relatively crude, with fake social media bots and individuals posting obviously fake stories or claims about their target, but the US-election meddling claims suggest a far more sophisticated disinformation campaign that may be headed by the Kremlin.

The world of spies and assassination is one that is rife for embellishment and provides a situation where conspiracy theories can run rampant, but with suggestions of interference in foreign elections and the Twitter account of the Russian embassy in the UK posting jokes at Britain’s expense on their feed, this information war is making its way into the mainstream. Journalists and citizens who are careless with their sources can perpetuate these lies, and when enough people believe them they can quickly become truths. Whether it’s a sophisticated propaganda machine orchestrated by the Kremlin, the White House, Downing Street, or a single troll on a computer in their living room, the information age has made deception ever simpler, and it would appear we are teetering on the edge of the abyss of post-truth. It has never been more important to check your sources, question what you are told, and verify information before passing it on. The technological advances of the internet and the instantaneousness of knowledge from around the world has been misused not just by unscrupulous individuals in their basements, but increasingly by the leaders of the world. And this has led us to the brink of the disinformation age.

A big thank you to Guardian Live for chairing an enlightening discussion at their recent event, and to the panellists who gave some unique insight into what the case means for Russia, the West, journalists, and all of us.

Find out more about Vladislav Surkov here https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/26/kremlin-puppet-masters-leaked-emails-vladislav-surkov-east-ukraine

To learn more about the phenomenon of Russian bots you can read this

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/19/russia-fake-news-salisbury-poisoning-twitter-bots-uk

The Imperial War Museum - War, Peace, and Human Nature

The Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum details the slow-burn rise of the Nazis that would culminate in one of the most heinous acts of human history. It demonstrates in often harrowing and graphic detail the acts and the actors that would turn the world’s stomach. Within those walls are images of normal people, helpless families torn apart by industrialised death camps; fathers, mothers, and children would never see each other again. Ordinary soldiers, hardened by years of battle who became violently sick upon discovering the camps. Simple-minded, average bureaucrats who would stoop to the depths of depravity in order orchestrate Hitler’s final solution. One is left to wonder how something like this could ever have happened.

The Holocaust exhibition is just the most extreme example of the exhibits on display at IWM that can lead you to question how inherently ‘good’ people may actually be. From the First World War through Cold War history to the Falklands, Northern Ireland and the current War on Terror, IWM attempts to show how conflicts develop and evolve through their lifespan, as well as focusing on their devastating consequences. You can view the heavily armoured ‘pig’ vehicle that British soldiers used on British soil as Northern Irish families were torn apart by decades-long violence, art depicting the futility and horrors of the most recent War on Terror, First World War gas masks that look like horror film props, and an area dedicated to that most terrifying weapon of all; the nuclear bomb. It is hard not to be shocked by the brutality of conflict.

And yet next to these vehemently anti-war exhibits are others that seem to romanticise warfare, like the Family at War exhibition that details the lives of an ordinary British family surviving the Blitz. I found myself fascinated by their stories, and perhaps spent longer in this section of the museum than any other. At the top floor of IWM is the final exhibit, coming directly after the Holocaust display, entitled ‘Extraordinary Heroes’ and dedicated to telling the stories of Victoria and George Cross medal winners. Again, here I was fascinated by the tales of people who pushed themselves beyond their limits to become role models for bravery and sacrifice.

The IWM captured the dissonance between my disgust at the horrors of war and the deep interest in individual war stories that I continue to have. It begs the question that if I, and so many of us, have a deep aversion to conflict and do not wish to see people harmed or killed, why do we still have such a deep fascination with war? There is something about warfare that seems to be deeply linked to humanity, despite the fact that we often refer to acts committed in conflict as inhuman. Wars have occurred for as long as humans have existed, and there is no denying the political benefits of waging a “good war”. Margaret Thatcher revitalised her support from the UK public by winning a war half a world away in the Falklands, and George Bush surged to a landslide victory in 2004 after launching disastrous campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. A quote that always sticks with me from the documentary that accompanied the incredible TV show Band of Brothers is from the daughter of one of the men of Easy Company, who died in his 90s well over half a century after the war ended, and asked to be buried next to his comrades who had died back in 1944/45. He had come home from war, had a family, an entire new career, made new friends and lived a dozen different lives, and at the end he felt closest to people he had known for no more than a few years a lifetime ago. A quote on the wall of IWM from Harry Patch, the last surviving First World War veteran tells the same story: “I tried for 80 years to forget it, but I can’t.” He died in 2009 and was buried with full military honours nearly a century after his service. Hundreds of people lined the streets to view his funeral procession, waving Union Flags.

People are fascinated by war stories, and there is more to our flirtation with conflict than just the action-movie excitement. As Thatcher’s and Bush’s election victories and the stories of brothers-in-arms demonstrate, war unites people in a way that nothing else does. We are never more together than when we are against someone else. This tribalism has run through the human experience for as long back as you care to look. Petty differences within groups are forgotten when you have to unite against another enemy, and this “us-vs-them” mentality gives life meaning. Humans are a social species, and the need for a strong, positive in-group image is key to our mental health. Our family, friendship groups, and those we associate with make up a huge part of who we are. This is not always a bad thing, but unfortunately the intense comradeship nurtured by warfare demonstrates that all too often our similarities are defined by our opposition to something, or, more specifically, someone else.

Looking at social identity through the lens of conflict highlights the darker side of humanity, the very human phenomenon that we often refer to as inhumane. When we consider someone to be like us we feel a strong connection to them. We want to protect them and that relationship, and when pushed that can lead us down a very dark path. The most extreme form of this is demonstrated by a quote in IWM from an SS colonel on his reasoning behind supplying the Nazi Einsatzgruppen with gas vans to enable their murder of “subhuman” Nazi enemies: “What was uppermost in my mind at the time was that the shootings were a great strain on the men involved and that this strain would be removed by the use of gas vans”. A Nazi commander, directly responsible for one of the most heinous atrocities ever committed, was concerned about the strain that mass extermination was putting on the health of his men. That is why it is wrong to call war and atrocity crimes inhumane. Unfortunately, they are not just a human phenomenon, but a uniquely human phenomenon, caused in part by our desire to protect our own group regardless of the cost to others who we view as different to ourselves.

War can bring out the absolute worst in humanity, but it also brings us together in a way that nothing else does. Why it takes something as extreme as conflict to make us feel united is something to be reflected on. This phenomenon of uniting against a common enemy flows through our culture as well, with any number of films, books, TV series building on that theme of coming together to defeat an evil ‘other’. Even in science fiction, if the Earth is united it is against an alien foe. Are our relationships defined by what we are opposed to? Do we have to have an enemy in order to be united? Could we ever see ourselves as one group, one human race, with no need for an enemy to fight against to give ourselves a sense of meaning? Why am I, as someone who would consider myself to be anti-war in most circumstances, so fascinated by the stories of comradeship, bravery and heroism that warfare produces? Is it in human nature to fight, or is the centuries-long history of global conflict something that we can eventually turn our back on?

The Imperial War Museum cannot answer these questions, but it certainly makes you think about them.

St Anthony’s Eco Project – Education as a Force for Change in Rural India

2016 saw the lowest level of rainfall in 140 years in Tamil Nadu, India. For the rural population of this southern Indian state, the resulting impact on their capacity to meet their basic water needs has been catastrophic. With reports surfacing that the knock-on impact of this drought has been an 80% water deficit for the region and a 42% decline in suitable cropping area, local people are naturally concerned about their future. Attempting to raise awareness around this impending crisis, local environmental campaigners have asserted that this drought is “predominantly man-made”, which has prompted further fears. If this extreme drought is not simply a once in a 140-year occurrence, but rather a result of man-made climate change and regional environmental degradation, then similar events can be expected with increasing frequency and severity. The 2017 monsoon season, while more fruitful than the previous year, still saw below average rainfall.

As unfortunately seems to often be the case, it is the rural populations in Tamil Nadu, who contribute the least to global climate change, that must endure the brunt of its effects. The small village of Kanji, around 5 hours drive from the state capital of Chennai, is no exception. For many of the local families the wells are running dry and the sustainability of their water supply is a long-term concern. Steps must be taken to ensure that local people know how to protect themselves against the drought and how to make the most of their limited resources.

This is a concern that St Anthony’s Matriculation School, an independent school that provides education for many of the poorest residents in Kanji, is taking very seriously. In an effort to educate their students about the importance of being environmentally conscious, the school has founded an Eco Club consisting of a group of 120 students and 10 staff members to lead the way in sustainability initiatives. Despite only being created this year, the club has already run successful campaigns to limit the use of plastic bags and bottles within the school, and to encourage healthy eating practices through a vegetable patch grown on the school grounds. In addition to this, the club arranged a trip to visit a recycling plant to learn more about how to tackle the issue of excess waste.

Perhaps most impressive is the tree-planting efforts of the club, who have designated the first Saturday of every month as “Tree Planting Day” and have succeeded so far in planting over 1,000 trees on school grounds and 600 in the surrounding villages. Trees provide a strong defence against drought and monsoon flooding by absorbing and storing water that may otherwise be lost as run-off, and improve local air quality. Students are encouraged to take ownership of the trees, and tree planting in the villages was suggested as a way to encourage the students to teach their families and friends what they have been learning through the Eco Club.

The club’s future plans are to attend a two-day long eco camp to learn more about environmental conservation, and to organise regular speakers to visit and inspire the students. St Anthony’s School has already achieved so much with its limited resources, and now they are looking ahead to not just educating their students, but to improving the lives of people in their local community through leading the way in environmental conservation under particularly challenging conditions. We could all stand to take notice of their efforts and think about how we can change our habits to protect the only planet that we have. These remarkable individuals, and this remarkable institution, are demonstrating the amazing difference that small, community-led efforts can have on the lives of people facing great uncertainty.

I am very fortunate to be able to hear about the fantastic work of St Anthony’s staff and students through my involvement with The Kanji Project, a UK-based charity that provides support to the school, as well as other community-based institutions in Kanji. We are hoping to help raise the funds required to send these passionate Eco Club members to the eco camp mentioned above. If you would like to find out more, or to help us to achieve this goal, please visit our website (https://thekanjiproject.org.uk/) where you can find ways to get involved and to contact us.

Further reading:

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/drought-in-tamil-nadu-mostly-man-made/article19181865.ece

https://scroll.in/article/840515/not-everyone-gets-a-monsoon-tamil-nadu-is-still-reeling-from-the-worst-drought-in-140-years

The Effects of Natural Disasters on Mental Health

The effects of climate change globally are well-researched and well-known. Increases in the frequency and severity of natural disasters in recent years bear out the evidence that the global climate is becoming more unpredictable. 2017 proved to be the costliest Atlantic hurricane season on record, described as “catastrophic” by NASA, and predictions for 2018 suggest it will also be more active than the average. Of the top 10 costliest Atlantic hurricanes, 9 occurred between 2004 and today (only Hurricane Andrew, 1992, makes the list as the 6^th costliest storm on record). Pacific Cyclone season has similarly been more active in recent years, with 2014, 2015, and 2016 all appearing in the list for most active tropical cyclone seasons. These are just some of the most immediately obvious consequences of climate change, but lower-level flooding, unpredictable monsoon seasons, droughts resulting in wildfires (such as the particularly damaging 2017 California wildfires, the deadliest on record) and other climatic disturbances are affecting and displacing millions of people globally year-on-year. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 24.2 million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2016 alone. This is compared to 6.9 million people displaced by conflict in the same year.

As Professor Helen Berry of the University of Sydney explains, it is now widely accepted that climate change is one of the leading global health risks today, but the effect that it has specifically on mental health has until recently been largely unexamined. This, she argues, does not make much sense, because those who have lost everything in a natural disaster are vulnerable to many of the same mental health issues as those who lost everything to conflict.

Because of the way that we view conflict and warfare, the issue of mental health in refugees is one that has been discussed at length and researched in-depth by academics and humanitarian professionals alike. The International Committee for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (ICRC), the arm of the Red Cross best-suited to responding to conflict, has published guidance on mental health and psychosocial support for those affected by violence and conflict. A 2016 IFRC report examined Syrian refugees living in Sweden and found that one in three of those sampled suffered with depression, anxiety, and some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A paper published in World Psychiatry by Silove, Ventevogel, and Rees (2017) acknowledges that the admission of PTSD into the DSM-III laid the groundwork for studies on refugees, starting with the victims of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody genocide. In this early study, half of respondents met the criteria for depression and 15% for PTSD.  Since then, humanitarians responding in conflict zones have been aware of the threat that violence poses not just to life, but to mental health.

Following the news that suicide rates in Puerto Rico have risen by a third in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which decimated the island in September 2017, more and more people have begun to consider what more extreme weather patterns might mean for the mental health of those affected. If the rising suicide rate in Puerto Rico is a result of the devastating hurricane, it is not difficult to see why. Over six months after the disaster much of Puerto Rico is still in blackout, with no access to electricity at all for most of the island. Despite the official death toll of 64, a recent NY Times report suggests the real number is likely over 1,000. It is estimated that Maria caused over $90 billion worth of damage in Puerto Rico alone, and coming at the end of a decade-long recession from which many were already struggling, this was likely the final nail in the coffin for many residents who were already in dire straits financially.

In examining this problem further, Professor Helen Berry reviewed reports from Public Health England concerning heightened levels of “psychological distress” following extreme flooding, that was still present in respondents up to four years after the event. Rates of PTSD were elevated in flooded areas, even amongst those who were not directly affected by the flooding. The reasoning behind this is interesting to consider.

PTSD has so-long been associated with violence and conflict that the thought that flooding could elicit PTSD symptoms may at first seem surprising. However, an understanding of how PTSD works in fact demonstrates that those affected by natural disasters may in fact be even more susceptible to it than those fleeing violence. Some evidence suggests that the heightened arousal caused by PTSD is a survival mechanism designed to better prepare the individual to deal with similar trauma should the causal event occur again. This is best demonstrated by the stereotypical PTSD sufferer, a combat veteran who has an intense reaction to the sound of a car backfiring once they have returned from war. The perceived similarity of the car backfiring and a gunshot triggers an automatic response. Why though, might this make those who flee natural disasters more prone to PTSD than those who are fleeing conflict?

It could be argued that those fleeing a natural disaster, for which there is often no discernible immediate cause that could predict when the next disaster might happen, would find themselves much more likely to be in a position where they could be re-exposed to the traumatic event than somebody fleeing violence. Consider the current Rohingya crisis. Rohingya refugees, fleeing violence and persecution by their own government in Myanmar, have retreated to the relative safety of Bangladesh. Here, their lives are not immediately threatened by violence. However, the same season of monsoons and cyclones that cause damage in Myanmar also affect Bangladesh, and so the refugee camps there are just as exposed as the homes of the Rohingya back in Myanmar. Syrian refugees fleeing conflict and arriving in Turkey or Iraq no longer need to fear Assad’s guns, but are still faced by the same droughts that plague the entire region. The victims of Hurricanes Maria and Irma, still in the process of desperately trying to rebuild, are now staring down the barrel of the 2018 Hurricane season which is set to begin in May. In essence, the soldier who returned from a war zone is less likely to find himself of the receiving end of gunshots again than the climate migrant fleeing from one town to another to avoid a storm.

Natural disasters often arrive with less warning than conflict, which usually develops from tensions over many years, or at least shows signs of occurring prior to becoming extremely deadly. Even when they are somewhat predictable, such as in hurricane season, the ferocity of an individual storm is often not known until just days before, and even then the extent of the damage it will do is unquantifiable. For other events such as earthquakes, there may be even less warning. A sudden destructive event that fundamentally changes your life, sometimes permanently, is undoubtedly going to leave some form of mental scar.

Thanks to years of research and humanitarian trial-and-error, we know a little bit about the mental health toll that violence and conflict can have on its victims. Whilst lacking in many aspects, our understanding of this relationship is still light years ahead of what we know about the consequences of natural disasters on the mental health of those who survive them. Refugees and climate migrants each face similar challenges when they are forced to leave their homes. It is time to start considering how best we can support those who have no choice but to rebuild their lives from scratch, in a place that is not their home.

You can read more here:

Berry, H. L. et al. (2018) The case for systems thinking about climate change and mental health, Nature Climate Change, doi:10.1038/s41558-018-0102-4

The Looming Crisis in Bangladesh

Since the outbreak of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State in August last year over 1 million Rohingya refugees have crossed the border into Bangladesh, fleeing what the UN has called “textbook ethnic cleansing” by the Myanmar military. Bangladesh, already one of the most densely populated countries in the world and suffering with widespread poverty, is largely ill-equipped to deal with such a massive influx of people in such a short space of time. To give a sense of the scale of the crisis, the Rohingya settlement in Cox’s Bazar has rapidly become the world’s largest refugee camp, double the size of Dadaab camp in Kenya, which previously held the record. In July 2017, the two government-run refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar had a combined population of 34,000 people. Today, Kutupalong camp alone has an estimated 550,000 (compared to Dadaab’s 250,000), with another 25,000 in the neighbouring Nayapara camp.  

The sprawling camps have expanded exponentially in the past few months to accommodate as many of the fleeing Rohingya as possible, but even that has not been enough. Many more thousands of refugees have been forced to set up their own makeshift camps in the surrounding mountains and hills, and to spread deeper into Bangladesh in search of a safe space to survive. For those in the tent cities conditions are poor, with a severe deficit of resources, poor sanitation, and an almost complete lack of medical equipment for the majority of people. But for those who did not fit into Kutupalong or Nayapara, conditions are even worse.

A lot of these makeshift villages have been constructed on hills and mountainsides, completely exposed to the elements. The aid agencies working across Bangladesh are painfully aware of the approaching monsoon season, set to start in May and run through to September. On average, 80% of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall usually occurs between June and October (20 – 30 inches a month at the peak of the monsoon). This brings widespread devastation after the cold, dry winter that leaves the ground more vulnerable to flooding. Such flooding is rampant and, for the Rohingya camps that find themselves on or around the hillsides near Cox’s Bazar, landslides become a very real threat. UNHCR workers in the area have said that widespread flooding and unstable ground make landslides an inevitability. It is not if, but when.

The myriad camps that continue to appear across Bangladesh are not just in the wrong positions to deal with landslides, but they are also structurally unprepared to cope with the monsoon conditions. Camps with hastily-built latrines and sewage systems risk contamination of their water supply, and many of the tent structures are likely to be washed away with the mud beneath them. With no respite to the repression in Myanmar, and nowhere else for the Rohingya to go, these shelters are likely to become permanent housing for the people living there. It is not uncommon for refugees to live in camps like these for 20 – 30 years before they can go home or move on, and so it is vital that food and water supplies are secured for the long-term. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done.

And the threat to the camps does not end there. Bangladesh’s monsoon season coincides with tropical cyclone season. Cox’s Bazar, located on the coast, is regularly in the path of cyclones. In May 2017, Cyclone Mora forced 500,000 people to flee their homes and damaged 20,000 houses of Rohingya refugees who had previously fled Myanmar. This was before the current crisis, at a time when the two main camps in Cox’s Bazar held only 35,000 people between them. Needless to say, a cyclone of that size this year would cause havoc on an unprecedented scale. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) successfully provided aid to the 500,000 people who left their homes before Mora hit, setting up emergency shelter stations in advance of the cyclone making ground and deploying volunteers to help with the clean-up in the immediate aftermath. The scale of the campaign was massive, with around 3.3 million people affected. However, since then the population of the cyclone-vulnerable region around Cox’s Bazar has risen by up to a third, with many of the 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh settling in and around the area.

Aid agencies are already stretched to their limits coping with the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis. The Rohingya have fled their homeland to escape the violence perpetrated against them by their own military, and, with nowhere else to go, have ended up in overcrowded and increasingly precarious camps set to be battered by extreme weather in the upcoming months. Though actual figures are not available, conservative estimates suggest that at least 50,000 Rohingya have been killed in the military ‘clearing operations’ in Myanmar and over 1 million have been displaced to Bangladesh alone, with many more fleeing for Pakistan, India and Indonesia. The nightmare that began in August 2017 is far from over. And, as several aid agencies have cautioned, the real crisis is still to come.

For more information on the current crisis and to see how you can help, visit the IFRC website https://media.ifrc.org/.  

Budapest’s House of Terror: Examining the Dangers of Ideology and the Importance of Self-Determination

The winter of 1944-1945 saw 3,500 murders on the bank of the Danube, executions carried out by fascist Arrow Cross Party militiamen. This would be one of the final terrors the Nazis would inflict upon the people of Hungary, who were to be ‘liberated’ by the Soviets just two months later following the Siege of Budapest. The Soviet chokehold around the city would result in the starvation of 38,000 civilians, but would also force the desperate Nazi occupation to its knees. The unconditional surrender of the city on 13^th February 1945 was a major victory for the Allied powers, and for the Red Army on its long march to Berlin.

What followed was 44 years of Soviet occupation, coming to an end in 1989. For the war-weary civilian population of Hungary, the years of terror were only just beginning. Today, Budapest’s House of Terror tells the story of a nation held hostage by rival ideologies for half a century. For Hungary, the intricacies of the Nazi and Soviet occupations were lost to the overwhelming similarities of their methods. The Hungarian national socialist party, the Arrow Cross, boasted 300,000 members in 1939. Emboldened by the expansion of Germany and subordinate to the Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross recruited thousands from working-class districts around Budapest to march in its rank-and-file. By 1945, these young men and women were rounded up by the Hungarian Communist Party and the Soviet occupiers and forced to renounce their allegiances to the national socialists. An entire society was forced to turn coat overnight. For many members of the Arrow Cross Party, this was as simple as switching out their uniforms. Nazi terrorisers became Communist terrorisers over night through a costume change.

An ordinary Hungarian peasant at the time could be forgiven for not even noticing the dramatic shift of power in Budapest. Widespread land reform that was supposed to secure the livelihoods of peasant farmers made little real difference to their predicament due to the continuation of war time restrictions and compulsory food quotas to supply Soviet troops and their Hungarian lackeys. Those who refused to hand over their quota no longer had to fear the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, however; their fate lay eastwards in the Siberian gulags. Before being sentenced, many in Budapest would be processed at the “House of Horrors” by the State Protection Authority (AVH). Many locals knew of this building as the “House of Loyalty”, once used by the Arrow Cross secret police to ensure allegiance to the fascist regime and now repurposed by the AVH to ensure allegiance to the communists. The methods of physical and psychological torture utilised by the Arrow Cross and AVH at the House looked remarkably similar.    

As the House of Terror Museum demonstrates, these two rival ideologies each created a reality that was largely indistinguishable from the other. Ideology itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but any idea taken to its extremes necessitates imposition of that idea onto others. Often that means against their will. The 400,000 Jews forcibly moved to concentration camps throughout Hungary by the Arrow Cross in the 1940s and the 20,000 wounded and killed by Soviet tanks on November 4^th 1956, following the October revolution, were all victims of ideologies that painted anyone with differing opinions as enemies. Nothing mobilises men and women to kill their neighbours like ideology. But as the speed with which Nazi ideas were dropped and Communist ones adopted by so many complicit Hungarians demonstrates, ideology is usually just an excuse to exert power over others. For every genuine believer in the cause there are a hundred more willing to adopt it for their own personal gain. This includes the people who turn a blind eye to the violence committed in order to protect themselves.

Budapest is a testimony to the power of individuals and their capacity to overcome a uniform ideology. Today you can buy t-shirts depicting communist party members wearing party hats, drink at Communist-themed bars and visit memorials both commemorating the victims and denouncing the actions of those that embraced both Nazi and Communist ideals at the cost of their own sense of humanity. The actions of the parties of terror have become something to mock, and that is a good thing. It is by promoting individuality and encouraging us to see the fallacies in such simplistic thinking that we prevent something like this from happening again. It prevents these excuses for violence from gaining any traction in society. Today we have more information at our fingertips than at any other time in history, and yet many people still choose to listen to only one source, and to accept what they are told as fact because it is what they want to hear. At its most extreme, this kind of behaviour becomes dangerous.

The crushing of the 1956 revolution in Hungary by superior Soviet firepower at first appeared to be a defeat for the first student protestors and their many supporters, but it revealed some of the cracks in what otherwise appeared to be an iron-clad system of rule. Change did not come immediately after these brave actions and sacrifices, but the seeds were sowed. As best said by the House of Terror exhibition itself, “no people can be subjugated forever; one can and must take up the fight even against a power thought to be invincible”. History is awash with examples of dictators failing and regimes built on terror collapsing. The common denominator in those victories is the unwavering humanity of the individuals who fight against those systems of oppression. That is the only ideology worth fully embracing.