VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” saying God loves all his children just as they are and called on Catholic bishops who support the laws to welcome LGBTQ people into the church.
“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said during an exclusive interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
Francis acknowledged that Catholic bishops in some parts of the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality or discriminate against the LGBTQ community, and he himself referred to the issue in terms of “sin.” But he attributed such attitudes to cultural backgrounds, and said bishops in particular need to undergo a process of change to recognize the dignity of everyone.
“These bishops have to have a process of conversion,” he said, adding that they should apply “tenderness, please, as God has for each one of us.”
Francis’ comments are the first uttered by a pope about such laws, but they are consistent with his overall approach to the LGBTQ community and belief that the Catholic Church should welcome everyone and not discriminate.
Some 67 countries or jurisdictions worldwide criminalize consensual same-sex sexual activity, 11 of which can or do impose the death penalty, according to The Human Dignity Trust, which works to end such laws. Experts say even where the laws are not enforced, they contribute to harassment, stigmatization and violence against LGBTQ people.
In the U.S., more than a dozen states still have anti-sodomy laws on the books, despite a 2003 Supreme Court ruling declaring them unconstitutional. Gay rights advocates say the antiquated laws are used to harass homosexuals, and point to new legislation, such as the “Don’t say gay” law in Florida, which forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, as evidence of continued efforts to marginalize LGBTQ people.
The United Nations has repeatedly called for an end to laws criminalizing homosexuality outright, saying they violate rights to privacy and freedom from discrimination and are a breach of countries’ obligations under international law to protect the human rights of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Declaring such laws “unjust,” Francis said the Catholic Church can and should work to put an end to them. “It must do this. It must do this,” he said.
Francis quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church in saying gay people must be welcomed and respected, and should not be marginalized or discriminated against.
“We are all children of God, and God loves us as we are and for the strength that each of us fights for our dignity,” Francis said, speaking to the AP in the Vatican hotel where he lives.
Francis’ remarks come ahead of a trip to Africa, where such laws are common as they are in the Middle East. Many date from British colonial times or are inspired by Islamic law. Some Catholic bishops have strongly upheld them as consistent with Vatican teaching, while others have called for them to be overturned as a violation of basic human dignity.
In 2019, Francis had been expected to issue a statement opposing criminalization of homosexuality during a meeting with human rights groups that conducted research into the effects of such laws and so-called “conversion therapies.”
In the end, after word of the audience leaked, the pope didn’t meet with the groups. Instead, the Vatican No. 2 did and reaffirmed “the dignity of every human person and against every form of violence.”
There was no indication that Francis spoke out about such laws now because his more conservative predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, recently died. The issue had never been raised in an interview, but Francis willingly responded, citing even the statistics about the number of countries where homosexuality is criminalized.
On Tuesday, Francis said there needed to be a distinction between a crime and a sin with regard to homosexuality.
“It’s not a crime. Yes, but it’s a sin,” he said. “Fine, but first let’s distinguish between a sin and a crime.”
“It’s also a sin to lack charity with one another,” he added.
Catholic teaching holds that while gay people must be treated with respect, homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.” Francis has not changed that teaching, but he has made reaching out to the LGBTQ community a hallmark of his papacy.
Starting with his famous 2013 declaration, “Who am I to judge?” — when he was asked about a purportedly gay priest — Francis has gone on to minister repeatedly and publicly to the gay and trans community. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he favored granting legal protections to same-sex couples as an alternative to endorsing gay marriage, which Catholic doctrine forbids.
Despite such outreach, Francis was criticized by the Catholic LGBTQ community for a 2021 decree from the Vatican’s doctrine office that said the church cannot bless same-sex unions.
In 2008, the Vatican declined to sign onto a U.N. declaration that called for the decriminalization of homosexuality, complaining the text went beyond the original scope. In a statement at the time, the Vatican urged countries to avoid “unjust discrimination” against gay people and end penalties against them.
By SARAH EL DEEB, ANASTASIIA SHVETS and ELIZAVETA TILNA
October 13, 2022 GMT
Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry.
The kids had spent their vacation at a resort in the port city, as usual. But this time war with Russia had broken out, and her little ones — always terrified of the dark — were abandoned in a besieged city with no light and no hope. All they had now was her oldest son, Timofey, who was still himself just 17.
The questions looped endlessly in her head: Should she try to rescue the children herself — and risk being killed, making them orphans yet again? Or should she campaign to get them out from afar — and risk them being killed or falling into the hands of the Russians?
She had no idea her dilemma would lead her straight into a battle against Russia, with the highest stakes of her life.
___
Russia’s open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is already well underway, in one of the most explosive issues of the war, an Associated Press investigation shows.
Thousands of children have been found in the basements of war-torn cities like Mariupol and at orphanages in the Russian-backed separatist territories of Donbas. They include those whose parents were killed by Russian shelling as well as others in institutions or with foster families, known as “children of the state.”
Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can’t be reached. But the AP found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.
The investigation is the most extensive to date on the grab of Ukrainian orphans, and the first to follow the process all the way to those already growing up in Russia. The AP drew from dozens of interviews with parents, children and officials in both Ukraine and Russia; emails and letters; Russian documents and Russian state media.
Ukrainian orphans board buses in the Donetsk region, left, and another group disembarks in Moscow, before meeting their new guardians. (AP Video, left, and RTR)
Whether or not they have parents, raising the children of war in another country or culture can be a marker of genocide, an attempt to erase the very identity of an enemy nation. Prosecutors say it also can be tied directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has explicitly supported the adoptions.
“It’s not something that happens spur of the moment on the battlefield,” said Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues who is advising Ukraine on prosecutions. “And so your ability to attribute responsibility to the highest level is much greater here.”
Even where parents are dead, Rapp said, their children must be sheltered, fostered or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia.
Russian law prohibits the adoption of foreign children. But in May, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Russia to adopt and give citizenship to Ukrainian children without parental care — and harder for Ukraine and surviving relatives to win them back.
Russia also has prepared a register of suitable Russian families for Ukrainian children, and pays them for each child who gets citizenship — up to $1,000 for those with disabilities. It holds summer camps for Ukrainian orphans, offers “patriotic education” classes and even runs a hotline to pair Russian families with children from Donbas.
“It is absolutely a terrible story,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, who claims hundreds of children were taken from that city alone. “We don’t know if our children have an official parent or (stepparents) or something else because they are forcibly disappeared by Russian troops.”
Russia portrays its adoption of Ukrainian children as an act of generosity that gives new homes and medical resources to helpless minors. Russian state media shows local officials hugging and kissing them and handing them Russian passports.
It’s very hard to pin down the exact number of Ukrainian children deported to Russia — Ukrainian officials claim nearly 8,000. Russia hasn’t given an overall number, but officials regularly announce the arrival of Ukrainian orphans in Russian military planes.
Governor of the Moscow region Andrey Vorobyov greets Ukrainian children as they receive Russian citizenship on July 5, 2022. (Governor of Moscow region via AP)
In March, Russian children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova said 1,000 children from Ukraine were in Russia. Over the summer, she said 120 Russian families had applied for guardianship, and more than 130 Ukrainian children had received Russian citizenship. Many more have come since, including a batch of 234 in early October.
Lvova-Belova has said these children need Russia’s help to overcome trauma that has left them sleeping badly, crying at night and drawing basements and bomb shelters. She acknowledged that at first, a group of 30 children brought to Russia from the basements of Mariupol defiantly sang the Ukrainian national anthem and shouted, “Glory to Ukraine!” But now, she said, their criticism has been “transformed into a love for Russia,” and she herself has taken one in, a teenager.
“Today he received a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation and does not let go of it!” she posted on Telegram on Sept. 21, along with a photo. “(He) was waiting for this day in our family more than anyone else.”
Lvova-Belova has been sanctioned by the United States, Europe, the U.K., Canada and Australia. Her office referred the AP to her reply in a state-owned news agency that Russia was “helping children to preserve their right to live under a peaceful sky and be happy.”
In August, a post from a senior official at the Moscow Department of Labor and Social Protection thanking the Russian foster families declared: “Our Children…Now they are ours.”
___
As Lopatkina agonized over what to do, her teenage son’s childhood came to an abrupt end in Mariupol.
Suddenly, Timofey had become the father to all his siblings. Three had chronic illnesses or disabilities, and the youngest was just 7.
As intense shelling broke the glass around them, they cowered in a basement. When the younger ones were scared, Timofey carried them in his arms. After one airstrike, they moved their beds closer together next to the thickest wall.
But no wall could keep out the war. Every day, Timofey awoke at 6 a.m. in the bitter cold and chopped wood for a bonfire to cook food. All he wanted to do was to finish his work and sleep — only to have to wake up and do it again.
Calluses built up on his hands. His skin grew thicker in other ways. When airplanes rumbled overhead, he no longer ran for shelter.
“When you walk and see brains of people on the road, right on the pavement, nothing matters,” he recalled.
He promised his mother he would look after the younger children. But then the power went out, and he lost touch with her completely.
A friend who had joined the fighting offered to take him out of Mariupol. He refused. He knew he would never forgive himself if he left his siblings behind.
Finally, a local doctor from Mariupol arranged an evacuation to elsewhere in Ukraine. But pro-Russia forces at a checkpoint refused to recognize the children’s documents, photocopies of official papers identifying them and their parents. Timofey’s pleas went nowhere.
Instead, the children ended up in a hospital in the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DPR, a separatist Russian-controlled area in Ukraine. Timofey was only months away from turning 18 — the age when he would be drafted into the DPR army against his homeland.
“For the DPR, I would never go to fight in my life,” he said. “I understood that I had to get out of there one way or another.”
At least, Timofey thought, he could tell his mother he had kept the children safe. He was close to his mother, and they were alike, he and she — both tough survivors who would stick it out to the end no matter what.
Or so he thought, until he reached her.
“It’s great that they are alive,” she replied. “But we are already abroad.”
Timofey was utterly devastated. His parents had fled Ukraine without him. He felt they had thrown him away like garbage, along with five children he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t know how to protect.
“Thanks for leaving me,” he wrote back, furious.
___
The children of Mariupol aren’t the first Russia has been accused of stealing from Ukraine.
In 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, more than 80 children from Luhansk were stopped at checkpoints and abducted. Ukraine sued, and the European Court of Human Rights found the children were taken into Russia “without medical support or the necessary paperwork.” The children were returned to Ukraine before a final decision.
Kateryna Rashevska, a human rights defender, said she knows of about 30 Ukrainian children from Crimea adopted by Russians under a program known as Train of Hope. Now, she said, some of those children might well be Russian soldiers. Since 2015, the Young Army Cadets national movement has trained youth in Crimea and Russia for potential recruitment into the military.
This time around, at least 96 children have been returned to Ukraine since March after negotiations. But Ukrainian officials have tracked down the identities of thousands more in Russia, and the names of many others simply aren’t published.
“We cannot ask the Russian Federation to return the children because we don’t know who they should return,” said Rashevska, with the Ukrainian organization Regional Central for Human Rights.
Kira, a 12-year-old girl who saw her father shot and killed, was evacuated from Mariupol to Donetsk with shrapnel wounds on her ear, leg, neck and arm. Kira was reunited with her grandparents only after the office of the Ukraine deputy prime minister got involved.
Her grandmother, Svitlana Obedynska, said Kira had become withdrawn and lost interest in everything, and negotiations were “very difficult.”
“It was not decided at our level,” she said. “She wants to be with her family. After all, she has no one else.”
Russia justifies the deportation of children by saying it has annexed four territories in Ukraine, but the U.N. and the rest of the world called the move in late September a sham. The governor of one of those territories, Serhiy Haidai of Luhansk, has accused Russian officials of drawing up documents that deprive Ukrainian parents of their rights. He too fears that Ukrainian children will be enlisted in the Russian military.
Other officials in occupied territories loyal to Moscow have a more benign view of what Russia is doing. Olga Volkova, who heads an institution for children in Donetsk, had 225 kids evacuated to an area near the Russian seaside city of Taganrog, and 10 were taken in by Russian families in April. After DPR and Russian officials make a list of suitable candidates, her boarding school secures citizenship for them and sends them to new families in Russia.
If there are Ukrainian relatives, they can stay in touch, call and perhaps eventually meet, Volkova said. In the meantime, while the war is ongoing, she noted, the children now still have families of a sort.
“Everyone wants to have a mother, you see?” Volkova said.
___
Olga Lopatkina was a teacher of music and the arts who had lived a hard life. Now a middle-aged woman with red and pink streaks in her hair fading to white, she lost her own mother as a teenager. In 2014, when fighting with Russian-backed forces broke out in Donetsk, she also lost a home.
But this nightmare with her children, she thought, was the hardest thing yet. Although Mariupol was less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) away from her home in Vuhledar, it was impossible to reach safely because of bombardment. In the meantime, her 18-year-old biological daughter, Rada, was at a boxing competition near Kharkiv, another front-line city.
She told herself every day that the war would end fast. It was the 21st century, after all. Instead, it edged closer.
Lopatkina took in two refugee families from a city near Mariupol, who confirmed her worst fears. One woman said her husband was killed in front of her, and she had to step over his corpse.
Lopatkina hounded Ukrainian officials, the local governor, social services, anybody who could evacuate her children. In calls, Timofey told his mother he was looking after his younger siblings. She was proud and slightly reassured.
Then, on March 1, their connection was lost. She thought her kids were going to be evacuated to Zaporizhzhia, so she and her husband went there, with books of fairy tales and other treats. But two days after they arrived, the state ordered Zaporizhzhia itself to be evacuated instead.
Lopatkina had to make yet another painful decision. Should she wait for an evacuation from Mariupol that might never happen? Or should she go to collect her oldest daughter before losing contact with her too?
“Let’s go,” she told her husband, Denys.
Lopatkina escaped with Rada to France. In one final plea, she wrote to the governor of Donetsk: “Don’t forget my orphans.”
When she received the message from Timofey accusing her of deserting them, she was stung but not surprised.
“I can’t even imagine,” she said, her voice breaking as she started to cry. “If I were him, I would have reacted the same way, and maybe even worse.”
Lopatkina continued to push Russian and Ukrainian officials incessantly. She sent them photocopies of Ukrainian documents proving her guardianship. She told them some of the children were sick, and worried that nobody had even asked about their medication.
The children were paraded on Russian television and told she didn’t love them. It broke her heart.
“Every day they turned the children against us,” she said. “‘Your parents abandoned you … We will transfer you to the best families. Here you will have a better life.’”
She got a job in a garment factory in France and bought furniture, clothes and toys for children who might or might not return. She chose their bedrooms in her small duplex in the northwest, in Loue. She planned celebrations for missed birthdays.
Then, much to her dismay, she found out that other Ukrainian orphans who were with her children had been issued new identity documents for the DPR. The Donetsk authorities dropped a bombshell. She could have her children back — if she came through Russia to Donetsk to get them in person.
Lopatkina feared a trap. If she went to Russia, she might never be allowed to leave.
“I will sue you,” she threatened Donetsk officials in an email on May 18th. “You took my kids. That is a crime.”
___
For some Russian families, taking in Ukrainian orphans isn’t a crime. It’s a gift.
One professional foster mother was called in by the Moscow social services to “come and look” at the eastern Ukrainian kids who had recently arrived. She already had six Russian foster kids under her roof, some with disabilities. She took in three more from Mariupol.
“We still have love untapped,” she said. “There are children who need to be given affection, love, care, family, mom and dad. If we can give it, why not?”
She said she had reached out to the children’s Ukrainian foster mother, who didn’t mind the arrangement.
The AP couldn’t reach the Ukrainian mother. But the children didn’t hide their resentment of her, described life with her as constrained and made no effort to call her.
They said she had dropped them off at a bunker in Mariupol. The Russian military got them out, and they had to choose between adoption by a Russian family and life in a Russian orphanage.
After a guardianship trial in now-occupied Mariupol, the Russian mother has custody of the children. They have become Russian citizens and call her mom, she said.
“We don’t talk about the war,” she said. “Politics remains politics. This is not our business.”
At her house with a courtyard and inflatable swimming pool, the children said they felt welcome and accepted. The 15-year-old girl is eager to start a new life in Russia — but in part because returning to her old one is impossible. Her school was bombed, one of her classmates died and almost everyone has left.
“Trying to start on a new page is never bad,” she said. “Why not?”
Her 17-year-old foster brother interrupted. Two of his friends had died also, he said.
He thinks starting his life anew will give him experience, and he looks forward to seeing Russia. But he is also worried about not being accepted as a Ukrainian. He will give it a go for a decade to try and make a fortune, and then return to Ukraine.
“My friends are there, they can support me,” he said. “I was born there … I know everything there, I’m just used to it.”
Hundreds more orphans from Ukraine were housed in a leafy seaside camp near Taganrog, an upscale facility with a large dining room and playgrounds. Yaroslava Rogachyova, 11, had been evacuated from a children’s institution in Donetsk, and was waiting to be sent to a foster family in Moscow with her two sisters. She said she will miss the sea and Donetsk, but she has already met her new family and likes them.
“I’m going to Moscow, I’ve already seen the family and everyone,” she said. “I liked the mom from the very beginning.”
__
In the DPR, Timofey didn’t want a new life — he wanted his old one back. Angry and miserable, he argued with officials and ate almost nothing.
His only escape was reading a book he never finished, and sneaking out to see a girl. One day he returned with a tattoo of three daggers on his legs, which could symbolize protection, bravery or power.
The new reality in a new place terrified Timofey, eclipsing his anger at his mother. On a call, she explained what had happened. He was deeply relieved.
“I missed my parents,” he said. “It was very difficult for me without my mother and father’s support … I constantly cried like a girl, ‘Mom, it’s hard for me, I’m tired.’”
The little children repeatedly asked when they could go home to their mother. They were badly fed, slapped and cursed, Timofey said.
Then they heard hospital officials wouldn’t let them go home at all. Timofey’s 13-year-old foster brother, Sasha, was so furious that he slammed his hand on a slide and broke a finger.
“I really missed my parents,” Sasha said. “I didn’t need anything but my parents.”
Two officials pulled Timofey aside and told him a court in the DPR would strip Lopatkina and her husband of their guardianship. His younger siblings would go first to an orphanage, then to new families in Russia. Timofey would go to school in Donetsk.
He was enraged. “That can’t be done,” he said. “It is illegal.”
The officials replied that parents who didn’t come to collect their children didn’t want them. Timofey stormed out.
“I was so disappointed, I didn’t believe in anything,” he said. “I was terrified.”
He was determined to keep together the only family he had known, and he worried that his siblings would end up with Russian families who wanted them only for the state aid. He told his mother he could marry his new girlfriend and adopt his siblings when he turned 18.
Then Lopatkina’s efforts finally paid off.
She was working with Darya Kasyanova, the director of the nonprofit SOS Children’s Villages, who already had helped to negotiate the release of 25 Ukrainian children from Russia. Sending the children in the first place to Russian territories instead of Ukraine was “a violation of the rights of the child,” Kasyanova said.
After two months of negotiation and an initial objection from a senior Russian official, DPR authorities finally agreed to allow a volunteer with power of attorney from Lopatkina to collect the children. They asked Timofey if he and his siblings wanted to go back to his foster family or stay in Donetsk.
“Now that I have a chance, I will, of course, go home to my parents,” he told them.
A document was drafted and signed. At last, they were going to France.
___
Olga Lopatkina’s adopted children run to meet her in Loue, France. (Timofey via AP)
After a delay because of shelling, they finally left on a three-day bus trip through Russia and Latvia to Berlin.
They were grilled at the Russian border and panicked. Timofey texted his mother. But the volunteer got them through.
Timofey met his father at a bus stop in Berlin. He couldn’t quite believe it. They drove to France, where Timofey went to pick his mother up from the garment factory as a surprise.
Olga Lopatkina and her children pose for a photo in front of their house. (AP Video)
Lopatkina was sewing frantically, replaying the moment her kids were stopped at the border a dozen times in her head. She had already begun thinking of what new plan she could hatch to get them back.
When Timofey arrived, she was in shock. For him, the euphoria was wild, a high like nothing he had ever experienced before.
Back at the house, the other children were waiting. They ran toward their mother, losing their shoes, and jumped into her arms. She ruffled their hair and held their faces. It was all happening faster than her brain could process.
“Let me see you!” she screamed. “Aaaaah!” The two dogs joined the party, barking.
It took Timofey a couple of days before he could believe he was really back with his parents. No resentment was left, he said. He erased the angry message he had sent his mother from his phone and from his mind.
“I kept my promise,” he said. “The burden of responsibility was gone. I said: ‘Mother, take the reins, that’s all … I’m a child now.’”
___
Lori Hinnant, Cara Anna and Erika Kinetz contributed to this report.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
WASHINGTON (AP) — Campaigning for a northwestern Ohio congressional seat, Republican J.R. Majewski presents himself as an Air Force combat veteran who deployed to Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, once describing “tough” conditions including a lack of running water that forced him to go more than 40 days without a shower.
Military documents obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request tell a different story.
They indicate Majewski never deployed to Afghanistan but instead completed a six-month stint helping to load planes at an air base in Qatar, a longtime U.S. ally that is a safe distance from the fighting.
Majewski’s account of his time in the military is just one aspect of his biography that is suspect. His post-military career has been defined by exaggerations, conspiracy theories, talk of violent action against the U.S. government and occasional financial duress.
Still, thanks to an unflinching allegiance to former President Donald Trump — Majewski once painted a massive Trump mural on his lawn — he also stands a chance of defeating longtime Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur in a district recently redrawn to favor Republicans.
Majewski is among a cluster of GOP candidates, most running for office for the first time, whose unvarnished life stories and hard-right politics could diminish the chances of a Republican “red wave” on Election Day in November. He is also a vivid representation of a new breed of politicians who reject facts as they try to emulate Trump.
“It bothers me when people trade on their military service to get elected to office when what they are doing is misleading the people they want to vote for them,” Don Christensen, a retired colonel and former chief prosecutor for the Air Force, said of Majewski. “Veterans have done so much for this country and when you claim to have done what your brothers and sisters in arms actually did to build up your reputation, it is a disservice.”
Majewski’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview and, in a lengthy statement issued to the AP, did not directly address questions about his claim of deploying to Afghanistan. A spokeswoman declined to provide additional comment when the AP followed up with additional questions.
“I am proud to have served my country,” Majewski said in the statement. “My accomplishments and record are under attack, meanwhile, career politician Marcy Kaptur has a forty-year record of failure for my Toledo community, which is why I’m running for Congress.”
With no previous political experience, Majewski is perhaps an unlikely person to be the Republican nominee taking on Kaptur, who has represented the Toledo area since 1983. But two state legislators who were also on the ballot in the August GOP primary split the establishment vote. That cleared a path for Majewski, who previously worked in the nuclear power industry and dabbled in politics as a pro-Trump hip-hop performer and promoter of the QAnon conspiracy theory. He was also at the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Throughout his campaign Majewski has offered his Air Force service as a valuable credential. The tagline “veteran for Congress” appears on campaign merchandise. He ran a Facebook ad promoting himself as “combat veteran.” And in a campaign video released this year, Majewski marauds through a vacant factory with a rifle while pledging to restore an America that is “independent and strong like the country I fought for.”
More recently, the House Republican campaign committee released a biography that describes Majewski as a veteran whose “squadron was one of the first on the ground in Afghanistan after 9/11.” A campaign ad posted online Tuesday by Majewski supporters flashed the words “Afghanistan War Veteran” across the screen alongside a picture of a younger Majewski in his dress uniform.
A biography posted on his campaign website does not mention Afghanistan, but in an August 2021 tweet criticizing the U.S. withdraw from the country, Majewski said he would “gladly suit up and go back to Afghanistan.”
He’s been far less forthcoming when asked about the specifics of his service.
“I don’t like talking about my military experience,” he said in a 2021 interview on the One American Podcast after volunteering that he served one tour of duty in Afghanistan. “It was a tough time in life. You know, the military wasn’t easy.”
A review of his service records, which the AP obtained from the National Archives through a public records request, as well as an accounting provided by the Air Force, offers a possible explanation for his hesitancy.
Rather than deploying to Afghanistan, as he has claimed, the records state that Majewski was based at Kadena Air Base in Japan for much of his active-duty service. He later deployed for six months to Qatar in May 2002, where he helped load and unload planes while serving as a “passenger operations specialist,” the records show.
While based in Qatar, Majewski would land at other air bases to transfer military passengers, medics, supplies, his campaign said. The campaign did not answer a direct question about whether he was ever in Afghanistan.
Experts argue Majewski’s description of himself as a “combat veteran” is also misleading.
The term can evoke images of soldiers storming a beachhead or finding refuge during a firefight. But under the laws and regulations of the U.S. government, facing live fire has little to do with someone earning the title.
During the Persian Gulf War, then-President George H.W. Bush designated, for the first time, countries used as combat support areas as combat zones despite the low-risk of American service members ever facing hostilities. That helped veterans receive a favorable tax status. Qatar, which is now home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East, was among the countries that received the designation under Bush’s executive order — a status that remains in effect today.
Regardless, it rankles some when those seeking office offer their status as a combat veteran as a credential to voters without explaining that it does not mean that they came under hostile fire.
“As somebody who was in Qatar, I do not consider myself a combat veteran,” said Christensen, the retired Air Force colonel who now runs Protect Our Defenders, a military watchdog organization. “I think that would be offensive to those who were actually engaged in combat and Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Majewski’s campaign said that he calls himself a combat veteran because the area he deployed to — Qatar — is considered a combat zone.
Majewski also lacks many of the medals that are typically awarded to those who served in Afghanistan.
Though he once said that he went more than 40 days without a shower during his time in the landlocked country, he does not have an Afghanistan campaign medal, which was issued to those who served “30 consecutive days or 60 nonconsecutive days” in the country.
He also did not receive a Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, which was issued to service members before the creation of the Afghanistan campaign medal if they deployed overseas in “direct service to the War on Terror.”
Matthew Borie, an Air Force veteran who worked in intelligence and reviewed Majewski’s records at AP’s request, said it’s “odd” that Majewski lacks many of the “medals you would expect to see for someone who deployed to Afghanistan.”
There’s also the matter of Majewski’s final rank and reenlistment code when he left active duty after four years of service.
Most leave the service after four years having received several promotions that are generally awarded for time served. Majewski exited at a rank that was one notch above where he started. His enlistment code also indicated that he could not sign up with the Air Force again.
Majewski’s campaign said he received what’s called a nonjudicial punishment in 2001 after getting into a “brawl” in his dormitory, which resulted in a demotion. Nonjudicial punishments are designed to hold service members accountable for bad behavior that does not rise to the level of a court-martial.
Majewski’s resume exaggeration isn’t limited to his military service, reverberating throughout his professional life, as well as a nascent political career that took shape in an online world of conspiracy theories.
Since gaining traction in his campaign for Congress, Majewski has denied that he is a follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory while playing down his participation in the Capitol riot.
The baseless and apocalyptic QAnon belief is based on cryptic online postings by the anonymous “Q,” who is purportedly a government insider. It posits that Trump is fighting entrenched enemies in the government and also involves satanism and child sex trafficking.
“Let me be clear, I denounce QAnon. I do not support Q, and I do not subscribe to their conspiracy theories,” Majewski said in his statement to the AP.
But in the past Majewski repeatedly posted QAnon references and memes to social media, wore a QAnon shirt during a TV interview and has described Zak Paine, a QAnon influencer and online personality who goes by the nom de guerre Redpill78, as a “good friend.”
During a February 2021 appearance on a YouTube stream, Majewski stated, “I believe in everything that’s been put out from Q,” while characterizing the false posts as “military-level intelligence, in my opinion.” He also posted, to the right-wing social media platform Parler, a photo of the “Trump 2020” mural he painted on his lawn that was modified to change the zeros into “Q’s,” as first reported by CNN.
Then there’s Majewski’s participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Majewski has said that he raised about $25,000 to help dozens of people attend the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. He also traveled to the event with his friend Paine, the QAnon influencer, and the two later appeared in social media postings near the Capitol.
Majewski acknowledged he was outside the Capitol, but denies entering the building. Still, he lamented the decision on a QAnon livestream a week after the attack, stating that he was “pissed off at myself” for not going into the building.
“It was a struggle, because I really wanted to go in,” Majewski said on the livestream, which was first unearthed by the liberal group Media Matters.
Majewski has not been charged in connection with the attack. But he has falsely stated that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and said that the insurrection “felt like a setup” by police who were targeting Trump supporters.
In his statement, Majewski said, “I deeply regret being at the Capitol that day” and “did not break the law,” while calling for those who did to be “punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
The mischaracterizations extend to his professional career, in which he has repeatedly described himself as an “executive in the nuclear power industry,” including in a campaign ad last spring.
But a review of his now-deleted resume on the website LinkedIn and a survey of his former employers do not support the claim.
He most recently worked for Holtec International, a Florida-based energy conglomerate that specializes in handling spent nuclear fuel. But he is not listed among the executives and members of the corporate leadership teams in current or archived versions of the company’s website.
A spokesman confirmed Majewski was a former Holtec employee, but declined to offer details on his position or role, which Majewski’s LinkedIn page described as “senior director, client relations.”
Majewski’s campaign declined to address his claim of being an executive, but said he participated in weekly conference calls with executives.
Majewski also described himself on LinkedIn as “project manager – senior consultant” for First Energy, an Ohio based power company, a position that he stated he held since shortly after leaving the military. The company, Majewski explained in a biography posted to his website, quickly recognized him for his “intellect and leadership capabilities”
Yet records from his 2009 bankruptcy raise questions about his seniority. They show he was an “outage manager” who earned about $51,000 a year. In the bankruptcy, Majewski and his wife gave up their home, two cars and a Jet Ski to settle the case, court records show.
Still, in a nationalized political environment, some Republicans suggest none of this will matter to voters.
“At the end of the day, this will be a question of whether they want Nancy Pelosi leading the House or Kevin McCarthy,” said Tom Davis, a former congressman who led the House Republican campaign arm during George W. Bush’s presidency. “These elections have become less about the person. I wouldn’t say candidates don’t matter, but they don’t matter like they used to.”
___
LaPorta reported from Wilmington, North Carolina. AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics
___
This story has been corrected by deleting the reference to the social media platform Parler as being defunct.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — The Philippine government has scrapped a deal to purchase 16 Russian military transport helicopters due to fears of possible U.S. sanctions, Philippine officials said.
Former Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said Tuesday night he canceled the 12.7-billion-peso ($227 million) deal to acquire the Mi-17 helicopters in a decision last month that was approved by then-President Rodrigo Duterte before their terms in office ended on June 30.
“We could face sanctions,” Lorenzana told The Associated Press, describing ways Washington could express its displeasure if the Philippines proceeded with the deal due to America’s worsening conflict with Russia.
American security officials were aware of Manila’s decision and could offer similar heavy-lift helicopters for Philippine military use, he said.
After serving as defense chief under Duterte, Lorenzana has been appointed by new President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to head a government agency in charge of transforming former military bases into business hubs.
Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez told The AP that the deal was canceled because Manila could face possible sanctions under a U.S. federal law called the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act if the helicopter deal went through.
A Philippine military official said the helicopter deal would undergo a “termination process” after the decision to cancel it was made since a contract has already been signed. The Russians can appeal but there is little room for the Philippine government to reconsider, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to publicly discuss the issue.
Under the helicopter purchase agreement, which was signed in November, the first batch of the multi-purpose helicopters would have been scheduled for delivery by Russia’s Sovtechnoexport in about two years.
Asked in March if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would affect the purchase, Lorenzana told reporters: “We do not see any likelihood of it being scrapped as of this moment” and added that “only time can tell.”
Lorenzana at the time said an initial payment had been made by the Philippines in January. It was not immediately clear what would happen to the payment after the Philippines’ decision to back out of the deal.
The Russian-made helicopters could have been used for combat, search and rescue operations, and medical evacuations in the Southeast Asian archipelago, which is often lashed by typhoons and other natural disasters, Philippine officials said.
In March, the Philippines voted “yes” on a U.N. General Assembly resolution that demanded an immediate halt to Moscow’s attack on Ukraine and the withdrawal of all Russian troops. It condemned the invasion and echoed U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s appeal for respect of humanitarian principles to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
Duterte has expressed concern over the global impact of the Russian invasion but has not personally condemned it. When he was in office, he nurtured close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he once called his “idol,” and Chinese leader Xi Jinping while frequently criticizing U.S. security policies.
The Philippines is a treaty ally of Washington, which has imposed heavy sanctions aimed at pressuring Moscow to pull back from Ukraine.
The deal to acquire the Russian helicopters was among several weapons purchase agreements signed during Duterte’s final months in office.
Last February, Lorenzana signed a 32-billion-peso ($571 million) deal to acquire 32 S-70i Black Hawk helicopters from Poland-based aerospace manufacturer PZL Mielec. It was the largest military aircraft acquisition contract signed under Duterte, Philippine defense officials said..
Due to financial constraints, the Philippines has struggled for years to modernize its military, one of the most underfunded in Asia, to deal with decades-long Muslim and communist insurgencies and to defend its territories in the disputed South China Sea.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Afghan policeman opened fire on us with his AK-47, emptying 26 bullets into the back of the car. Seven slammed into me, and at least as many into my colleague, Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus. She died at my side.
Anja weighed heavy against my shoulder. I tried to look at her but I couldn’t move. I looked down; all I could see was what looked like a stump where my left hand had been. I could barely whisper, “Please help us.”
Our driver raced us to a small local hospital in Khost, siren on. I tried to stay calm, thinking over and over: “Don’t be afraid. Don’t die afraid. Just breathe.”
At the hospital, Dr. Abdul Majid Mangal said he would have to operate and tried to reassure me. His words are forever etched in my heart: “Please know your life is as important to me as it is to you.”
Much later, as I recovered in New York during a process that would turn out to eventually require 18 operations, an Afghan friend called from Kabul. He wanted to apologize for the shooting on behalf of all Afghans.
I said the shooter didn’t represent a nation, a people. My mind returned to Dr. Mangal – for me, it was him who represented Afghanistan and Afghans.
I have reported on Afghanistan for the AP for the past 35 years, during an extraordinary series of events and regime changes that have rocked the world. Through it all, the kindness and resilience of ordinary Afghans have shone through – which is also what has made it so painful to watch the slow erosion of their hope.
I have always been amazed at how Afghans stubbornly hung on to hope against all odds, greeting each of several new regimes with optimism. But by 2018, a Gallup poll showed that the fraction of people in Afghanistan with hope in the future was the lowest ever recorded anywhere.
It didn’t have to be this way.
___
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1986, in the middle of the Cold War. It seems a lifetime ago. It is.
Then, the enemy attacking Afghanistan was the communist former Soviet Union, dubbed godless by United States President Ronald Reagan. The defenders were the U.S.-backed religious mujahedeen, defined as those who engage in holy war, championed by Reagan as freedom fighters.
Reagan even welcomed some mujahedeen leaders to the White House. Among his guests was Jalaluddin Haqqani, the father of the current leader of the Haqqani network, who in today’s world is a declared terrorist.
At that time, the God versus communism message was strong. The University of Nebraska even crafted an anti-communist curriculum to teach English to the millions of Afghan refugees living in camps in neighboring Pakistan. The university made the alphabet simple: J was for Jihad or holy war against the communists; K was for the Kalashnikov guns used in jihad, and I was for Infidel, which described the communists themselves.
There was even a math program. The questions went something like: If there were 10 communists and you killed five, how many would you have left?
When I covered the mujahedeen, I spent a lot of time and effort on being stronger, walking longer, climbing harder and faster. At one point, I ran out of a dirty mud hut with them and hid under a nearby cluster of trees. Just minutes later, Russian helicopter gunships flew low, strafed the trees and all but destroyed the hut.
The Russians withdrew in 1989 without a win. In 1992, the mujahedeen took power.
Ordinary Afghans hoped fervently that the victory of the mujahedeen would mean the end of war. They also to some degree welcomed a religious ideology that was more in line with their largely conservative country than communism.
But it wasn’t long before the mujahedeen turned their guns on each other.
The fighting was brutal, with the mujahedeen pounding the capital, Kabul, from the hills. Thrice the AP lost its equipment to thieving warlords, only to be returned after negotiations with the top warlord. One day I counted as many as 200 incoming and outgoing rockets inside of minutes.
The bloodletting of the mujahedeen-cum government ministers-cum warlords killed upward of 50,000 people. I saw a 5-year-old girl killed by a rocket as she stepped out of her house. Children by the scores lost limbs to booby traps placed by mujahedeen as they departed neighborhoods.
I stayed on the front line with a woman and her two small children in the Macroyan housing complex during the heaviest rocketing. Her husband, a former communist government employee, had fled, and she lived by making and selling bread each day with her children.
She opened her home to me even though she had so little. All night we stayed in the one room without windows. She asked me if I would take her son to Pakistan the next day, but in the end could not bear to see him go.
Only months after my visit, they were killed by warlords who wanted their apartment.
___
Despite the chaos of the time, Afghans still had hope.
In the waning days of the warring mujahedeen’s rule, I attended a wedding in Kabul where both the wedding party and guests were coiffed and downright glamorous. When asked how she managed to look so good with so little amid the relentless rocketing, one young woman replied brightly, “We’re not dead yet!”
The wedding was delayed twice because of rockets.
The Taliban had by then emerged. They were former mujahedeen and often Islamic clerics who had returned to their villages and their religious schools after 1992. They came together in response to the relentless killing and thieving of their former comrades-in-arms.
By mid-1996, the Taliban were on Kabul’s doorstep, with their promise of burqas for women and beards for men. Yet Afghans welcomed them. They hoped the Taliban would at least bring peace.
When asked about the repressive restrictions of the Taliban, one woman who had worked for an international charity said: “If I know there is peace and my child will be alive, I will wear the burqa.”
Peace did indeed come to Afghanistan, at least of sorts. Afghans could leave their doors unlocked without fear of being robbed. The country was disarmed, and travel anywhere in Afghanistan at any time of the day or night was safe.
But Afghans soon began to see their peace as a prison. The Taliban’s rule was repressive. Public punishments such as chopping off hands and rules that denied girls school and women work brought global sanctions and isolation. Afghans got poorer.
The Taliban leader at the time was the reclusive Mullah Mohammad Omar, rumored to have removed his own eye after being wounded in a battle against invading Soviet soldiers. As international sanctions crippled Afghanistan, Omar got closer to al-Qaida, until eventually the terrorist group became the Taliban’s only source of income.
By 2001, al-Qaida’s influence was complete. Despite a pledge from Omar to safeguard them, Afghanistan’s ancient statues of Buddha were destroyed, in an order reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself.
Then came the seismic shock of 9/11.
Many Afghans mourned the American deaths so far away. Few even knew who bin Laden was. But the country was now squarely a target in the eyes of the United States. Amir Shah, AP’s longtime correspondent, summed up what most Afghans were thinking at the time: “America will set Afghanistan on fire.”
And it did.
After 9/11, the Taliban threw all foreigners out of Afghanistan, including me. The U.S.-led coalition assault began on Oct. 7, 2001.
By Oct. 23, I was back in Kabul, the only Western journalist to see the last weeks of Taliban rule. The powerful B-52 bombers of the U.S. pounded the hills and even landed in the city.
On Nov. 12 that year, a 2,000-pound bomb landed on a house near the AP office. It threw me across the room and blew out window and door frames. Glass shattered and sprayed everywhere.
By sunrise the next day, the Taliban were gone from Kabul.
___
Afghanistan’s next set of rulers marched into the city, brought by the powerful military might of the U.S.-led coalition.
The mujahedeen were back.
The U.S. and U.N. returned them to power even though some among them had brought bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996, promising him a safe haven. The hope of Afghans went through the roof, because they believed the powerful U.S. would help them keep the mujahedeen in check.
With more than 40 countries involved in their homeland, they believed peace and prosperity this time was most certainly theirs. Foreigners were welcome everywhere.
Some Afghans worried about the returning mujahedeen, remembering the corruption and fighting when they last were in power. But America’s representative at the time, Zalmay Khalilzad, told me that the mujahedeen had been warned against returning to their old ways.
Yet worrying signs began to emerge. The revenge killings began, and the U.S.-led coalition sometimes participated without knowing the details. The mujahedeen would falsely identify enemies – even those who had worked with the U.S. before – as belonging to al-Qaida or to the Taliban.
One such mistake happened early in December 2001 when a convoy was on its way to meet the new President Hamid Karzai. The U.S.-led coalition bombed it because they were told the convoy bore fighters from the Taliban and al-Qaida. They turned out to be tribal elders.
Secret prisons emerged. Hundreds of Afghan men disappeared. Families became desperate.
Resentment soared especially among the ethnic Pashtuns, who had been the backbone of the Taliban. One former Taliban member proudly displayed his new Afghan identity card and wanted to start a water project in his village. But corrupt government officials extorted him for his money, and he returned to the Taliban.
A deputy police chief in southern Zabul province told me of 2,000 young Pashtun men, some former Taliban, who wanted to join the new government’s Afghan National Army. But they were mocked for their ethnicity, and eventually all but four went to the mountains and joined the Taliban.
In the meantime, corruption seemed to reach epic proportions, with suitcases of money, often from the CIA, handed off to Washington’s Afghan allies. Yet schools were built, roads were reconstructed and a new generation of Afghans, at least in the cities, grew up with freedoms their parents had not known and in many cases looked on with suspicion.
Then came the shooting in 2014 that would change my life.
It began as most days do in Afghanistan: Up before 6 a.m. This day we were waiting for a convoy of Afghan police and military to leave the eastern city of Khost for a remote region to distribute the last of the ballot boxes for Afghanistan’s 2014 presidential elections.
After 30 minutes navigating past blown-out bridges and craters that pockmarked the road, we arrived at a large police compound. For more than an hour, Anja and I talked with and photographed about a dozen police officials.
We finished our work just as a light drizzle began. We got into the car and waited to leave for a nearby village. That’s when the shooting happened.
It was two years before I was able to return to work and to Afghanistan.
___
By that point, the disappointment and disenchantment with America’s longest war had already set in. Despite the U.S. spending over $148 billion on development alone over 20 years, the percentage of Afghans barely surviving at the poverty level was increasing yearly.
In 2019, Pakistan began accepting visa applications at its consulate in eastern Afghanistan. People were so desperate to leave that nine died in a stampede.
In 2020, the U.S. and the Taliban signed a deal for troops to withdraw within 18 months. The U.S. and NATO began to evacuate their staff, closing down embassies and offering those who worked for them asylum.
The mass closure of embassies was baffling to me because the Taliban had made no threats, and it sparked panic in Kabul. It was the sudden and secret departure of President Ashraf Ghani that finally brought the Taliban back into the city on Aug. 15, 2021.
Their swift entry came as a surprise, along with the thorough collapse of the neglected Afghan army, beset by deep corruption. The Taliban’s rapid march toward Kabul fed a rush toward the airport.
For many in the Afghan capital, the only hope left lay in getting out.
Fida Mohammad, a 24-year-old dentist, was desperate to leave for the U.S. so he could earn enough money to repay his father’s debt of $13,000 for his elaborate marriage. He clung to the wheels of the departing US C-17 aircraft on Aug. 16 and died.
Zaki Anwari, a 17-year-old footballer, ran to get on the plane. He dreamed only of football, and believed his dream could not come true in Afghanistan. He was run over by the C-17.
Now the future in Afghanistan is even more uncertain. Scores of people line up outside the banks to try to get their money out. Hospitals are short of medicine. The Taliban hardliners seem to have the upper hand, at least in the short term.
Afghans are left to face the fact that the entire world came to their country in 2001 and spent billions, and still couldn’t bring them prosperity or even the beginnings of prosperity. That alone has deeply eroded hope for the future.
I leave Afghanistan with mixed feelings, sad to see how its hope has been destroyed but still deeply moved by its 38 million people. The Afghans I met sincerely loved their country, even if it is now led by elderly men driven by tribal traditions offensive to a world that I am not sure ever really understood Afghanistan.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Saturday that he is committed to pressing for peace despite Russian attacks on civilians that have stunned the world, and he renewed his plea for more weapons ahead of an expected surge in fighting in the country’s east.
He made the comments in an interview with The Associated Press a day after at least 52 people were killed in a strike on a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, and as evidence of civilian killings came to light after Russian troops failed to seize the capital where he has hunkered down, Kyiv.
“No one wants to negotiate with a person or people who tortured this nation. It’s all understandable. And as a man, as a father, I understand this very well,” Zelenskyy said. But “we don’t want to lose opportunities, if we have them, for a diplomatic solution.”
Wearing the olive drab that has marked his transformation into a wartime leader, he looked visibly exhausted yet animated by a drive to persevere. He spoke to the AP inside the presidential office complex, where windows and hallways are protected by towers of sandbags and heavily armed soldiers.
“We have to fight, but fight for life. You can’t fight for dust when there is nothing and no people. That’s why it is important to stop this war,” Zelenskyy said.
Russian troops that withdrew from northern Ukraine are now regrouping for what is expected to be an intensified push to retake the eastern Donbas region, including the besieged port city of Mariupol that Ukrainian fighters are striving to defend.
The president said those defenders are tying up “a big part of the enemy forces,” characterizing the battle to hold Mariupol as “the heart of the war” right now.
“It’s beating. We’re fighting. We’re strong. And if it stops beating, we will be in a weaker position,” he said.
Zelenskyy said he is confident Ukrainians would accept peace despite the horrors they have witnessed in the more than six-week-long war.
Those included gruesome images of bodies of civilians found in yards, parks and city squares and buried in mass graves in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha after Russian troops withdrew. Ukrainian and Western leaders have accused Moscow of war crimes.
Russia has falsely claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged. It also put the blame on Ukraine for the attack on the train station in Kramatorsk as thousands of people rushed to flee ahead of an expected Russian offensive.
Despite hopes for peace, Zelenskyy acknowledged that he must be “realistic” about the prospects for a swift resolution given that negotiations have so far been limited to low-level talks that do not include Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Zelenskyy displayed a palpable sense of resignation and frustration when asked whether the supplies of weapons and other equipment his country has received from the United States and other Western nations were enough to turn the tide of the war.
“Not yet,” he said, switching to English for emphasis. “Of course it’s not enough.”
Still, he noted that there has been increased support from Europe and said deliveries of U.S. weapons have been accelerating.
Just this week, neighboring Slovakia, a European Union member, donated its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in response to Zelenskyy’s appeal to help “close the skies” to Russian warplanes and missiles.
Some of that support has come through visits by European leaders.
After meeting Zelenskyy in Kyiv earlier Saturday, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said he expects more EU sanctions against Russia even as he defended his country’s opposition to cutting off deliveries of Russian natural gas.
The U.S., EU and United Kingdom responded to the images from Bucha with more sanctions, including ones targeting Putin’s adult daughters. While the EU went after the Russian energy sector for the first time by banning coal, it has so far failed to agree on cutting off the much more lucrative oil and natural gas that is funding Putin’s war chest. Europe relies on those supplies to generate electricity, fill fuel tanks and keep industry churning.
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson also made an unannounced visit to meet Zelenskyy, with his office saying they discussed Britain’s “long-term support.”
In Kyiv on Friday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented Ukraine’s leader with a questionnaire marking the first step for applying for EU membership. The head of the bloc’s executive arm said the process for completing the questionnaire could take weeks — an unusually fast turnaround — though securing membership would take far longer.
Zelenskyy turned introspective when asked what impact the pace of arms deliveries had for his people and whether more lives could have been saved if the help had come sooner.
“Very often we look for answers in someone else, but I often look for answers in myself. Did we do enough to get them?” he said of the weapons. “Did we do enough for these leaders to believe in us? Did we do enough?”
He paused and shook his head.
“Are we the best for this place and this time? Who knows? I don’t know. You question yourself,” he said.
___
AP photographer Evgeniy Maloletka contributed to this story.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The fighting — so primitive and ferocious that one Capitol Police officer described it as “medieval” and another as a “trip to hell” — left more than 100 law enforcement personnel injured, some beaten with their own weapons.
Video cameras captured the violence live, with rioters clubbing officers with flag polls and fire extinguishers, even squeezing one between doors as he begged for his life.
Yet nearly a year after the Jan. 6 siege only about 4 in 10 Republicans recall the attack by supporters of then-President Donald Trump as very violent or extremely violent, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About 3 in 10 Republicans say the attack was not violent, and about another 3 in 10 say it was somewhat violent.
Their views were a distinct minority as overall about two-thirds of Americans described the day as very or extremely violent, including about 9 in 10 Democrats.
The findings reflect the country’s political polarization, with a false portrayal of the siege taking hold despite extensive footage that shows the ransacking of the building in harrowing detail. Trump and some allies in Congress and conservative media have played it down, falsely characterizing the attack as a minor civil disturbance.
It’s a view that is shared by many Republicans, though few go so far as to defend the rioters themselves.
“My understanding was that a lot of it was pretty peaceful,” Paul Bender, a self-described conservative from Cleveland, told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I’ve seen some video of the people just like marching in through a velvet rope.”
Bender, who said he didn’t keep up with the news coverage, added, “There were certainly outlier people who were not peaceful and were breaking through the windows and stuff like that, but I wasn’t aware of overt violence.”
Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who blame Trump for the Jan. 6 riot has grown slightly over the past year, with 57% saying he bears significant responsibility for what took place. In an AP-NORC poll taken in the days after the attack, 50% said that.
The uptick is seen among Republicans as well, even as relatively few think Trump bears significant responsibility. Twenty-two percent say that now, up from 11% last year. Sixty percent say he had little to no responsibility.
“I don’t believe that he actively was like promoting people to do anything other than a peaceful protest,” Bender, 53, said. “However, once things got out of hand, I think that it would have been appropriate for him to have reacted sooner, whether that was a statement or going on the radio or TV or whatever.”
The insurrection was the closing act of Trump’s desperate effort to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden. After Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud were soundly rejected in the courts, he shifted his focus to the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, publicly pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop Congress from naming Biden the winner. Pence did not have that power under the law, as the vice president’s function is largely ceremonial.
Trump promoted the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack, predicting it would be “wild,” and in a speech that day urged his supporters to “fight like hell” as Congress convened to certify the election results. The attack halted that process for hours as rioters occupied the building.
Still, while few Republicans blame Trump, Republicans and Democrats alike overwhelmingly say that the individual rioters had a great deal or quite a bit of responsibility for their actions during the riot.
“I think there were strong supporters of President Trump that were there, but I think the people that caused the attacks might not have been true Trump supporters,” said Mary Beth Bell of Jacksonville, Florida. “Because I know a lot of Trump supporters, and they see what happened on Jan. 6 as disgusting as I do.”
About 7 in 10 Americans also say a House select committee should continue its investigation of the attack, while about 3 in 10 say it should not.
Robert Spry, a Democrat in Kingman, Arizona, said the congressional investigation is crucial for getting at the truth.
“We need a comprehensive report of that day. It has got to come to light what those people did to police and to that building,” Spry said.
The 63-year-old, who used to vote Republican but now considers himself a conservative Democrat, said the protest-turned-attack appeared chaotic at first but the committee’s findings are making it “more and more clear that it was planned in advance.”
Forty-one percent of Republicans agree with Spry that Congress should continue to investigate, while 58% say it should not.
Bell said a federal investigation into what she saw as “a terrorist attack” is appropriate, but she objects to the way the nine-member panel has been conducting the investigation since July of last year.
“They’re not listening to all the information. I feel like it’s one-sided more or less than trying to investigate everything,” she said of the committee, composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose all the members of the committee after rejecting the choices of House GOP leadership.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democratic chairman of the committee, said it’s important for Americans to know that Democrats first tried to create a bipartisan commission with an equal number of members from each party. But Republicans in the Senate blocked it from passage.
“Only because Republican leadership failed this country did Speaker Pelosi have to step up and do what’s in the best interest of the country to make sure that we produce a committee that looks into the facts and circumstances of Jan. 6,” Thompson said.
___
The AP-NORC poll of 1,089 adults was conducted Dec. 2-7 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — The soldiers in rural Myanmar twisted the young man’s skin with pliers and kicked him in the chest until he couldn’t breathe. Then they taunted him about his family until his heart ached, too: “Your mom,” they jeered, “cannot save you anymore.”
The young man and his friend, randomly arrested as they rode their bikes home, were subjected to hours of agony inside a town hall transformed by the military into a torture center. As the interrogators’ blows rained down, their relentless questions tumbled through his mind.
“There was no break – it was constant,” he says. “I was thinking only of my mom.”
Since its takeover of the government in February, the Myanmar military has been torturing detainees across the country in a methodical and systemic way, The Associated Press has found in interviews with 28 people imprisoned and released in recent months. Based also on photographic evidence, sketches and letters, along with testimony from three recently defected military officials, AP’s investigation provides the most comprehensive look since the takeover into a highly secretive detention system that has held more than 9,000 people. The military, known as the Tatmadaw, and police have killed more than 1,200 people since February.
While most of the torture has occurred inside military compounds, the Tatmadaw also has transformed public facilities such as community halls and a royal palace into interrogation centers, prisoners said. The AP identified a dozen interrogation centers in use across Myanmar, in addition to prisons and police lockups, based on interviews and satellite imagery.
The prisoners came from every corner of the country and from various ethnic groups, and ranged from a 16-year-old girl to monks. Some were detained for protesting against the military, others for no discernible reason. Multiple military units and police were involved in the interrogations, their methods of torture similar across Myanmar.
The AP is withholding the prisoners’ names, or using partial names, to protect them from retaliation by the military.
Inside the town hall that night, soldiers forced the young man to kneel on sharp rocks, shoved a gun in his mouth and rolled a baton over his shinbones. They slapped him in the face with his own Nike flip flops.
“Tell me! Tell me!” they shouted. “What should I tell you?” he replied helplessly.
He refused to scream. But his friend screamed on his behalf, after realizing it calmed the interrogators.
“I’m going to die,” he told himself, stars exploding before his eyes. “I love you, mom.’”
___
The Myanmar military has a long history of torture, particularly before the country began transitioning toward democracy in 2010. While torture in recent years was most often recorded in ethnic regions, its use has now returned across the country, the AP’s investigation found. The vast majority of torture techniques described by prisoners were similar to those of the past, including deprivation of sleep, food and water; electric shocks; being forced to hop like frogs, and relentless beatings with cement-filled bamboo sticks, batons, fists and the prisoners’ own shoes.
But this time, the torture carried out inside interrogation centers and prisons is the worst it’s ever been in scale and severity, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, which monitors deaths and arrests. Since February, the group says, security forces have killed 1,218 people, including at least 131 detainees tortured to death.
The torture often begins on the street or in the detainees’ homes, and some die even before reaching an interrogation center, says Ko Bo Kyi, AAPP’s joint secretary and a former political prisoner.
“The military tortures detainees, first for revenge, then for information,” he says. “I think in many ways the military has become even more brutal.”
The military has taken steps to hide evidence of its torture. An aide to the highest-ranking army official in western Myanmar’s Chin state told the AP that soldiers covered up the deaths of two tortured prisoners, forcing a military doctor to falsify their autopsy reports.
A former army captain who defected from the Tatmadaw in April confirmed to the AP that the military’s use of torture against detainees has been rampant since its takeover.
“In our country, after being arrested unfairly, there is torture, violence and sexual assaults happening constantly,” says Lin Htet Aung, the former captain. “Even a war captive needs to be treated and taken care of by law. All of that is gone with the coup. … The world must know.”
Lin Htet Aung told the AP that interrogation tactics are part of the military’s training, which involves both theory and role playing. He and another former army captain who recently defected say that the general guidelines from superiors are, simply: We don’t care how you get the information, so long as you get it.
After receiving detailed requests for comment, military officials responded with a one-line email that said: “We have no plans to answer these nonsense questions.”
Last week, in an apparent bid to improve its image, the military announced that more than 1,300 detainees would be freed from prisons and the charges against 4,320 others pending trial would be suspended. But it’s unclear how many have actually been released and how many of those have already been re-arrested.
All but six of the prisoners interviewed by the AP were subjected to abuse, including women and children. Most of those who weren’t abused said their fellow detainees were.
In two cases, the torture was used to extract false confessions. Several prisoners were forced to sign statements pledging obedience to the military before they were released. One woman was made to sign a blank piece of paper.
All prisoners were interviewed separately by the AP. Those who had been held at the same centers gave similar accounts of treatment and conditions, from interrogation methods to the layout of their cells to the exact foods provided — if any.
The AP also sent photographs of several torture victims’ injuries to a forensic pathologist with Physicians for Human Rights. The pathologist concluded wounds on three victims were consistent with beatings by sticks or rods.
“You look at some of those injuries where they’re just black and blue from one end to the other,” says forensic pathologist Dr. Lindsey Thomas. “This was not just a swat. This has the appearance of something that was very systematic and forceful.”
Beyond the 28 prisoners, the AP interviewed the sister of a prisoner allegedly tortured to death, family and friends of current prisoners, and lawyers representing detainees. The AP also obtained sketches that prisoners drew of the interiors of prisons and interrogation centers, and letters to family and friends describing grim conditions and abuse.
Photographs taken inside several detention and interrogation facilities confirmed prisoners’ accounts of overcrowding and filth. Most inmates slept on concrete floors, packed together so tightly they could not even bend their knees.
Some became sick from drinking dirty water only available from a shared toilet. Others had to defecate into plastic bags or a communal bucket. Cockroaches swarmed their bodies at night.
There was little to no medical help. One prisoner described his failed attempt to get treatment for his battered 18-year-old cellmate, whose genitals were repeatedly smashed between a brick and an interrogator’s boot.
Not even the young have been spared. One woman was imprisoned alongside a 2-year-old baby. Another woman held in solitary confinement at the notorious Insein prison in Yangon said officials admitted to her that conditions were made as wretched as possible to terrify the public into compliance.
Amid these circumstances, COVID ripped through some facilities, with deadly results.
One woman detained at Insein said the virus killed her cellmate.
“I was infected. The whole dorm was infected. Everyone lost their sense of smell,” she says.
The interrogation centers were even worse than the prisons, with nights a cacophony of weeping and wails of agony.
“It was terrifying, my room. There were blood stains and scratches on the wall,” one man recalls. “I could see smudged, bloody handprints and blood-vomit stains in the corner of the room.”
Throughout the interviews, the Tatmadaw’s sense of impunity was clear.
“They would torture us until they got the answers they wanted,” says one 21-year-old. “They always told us, ‘Here at the military interrogation centers, we do not have any laws. We have guns, and we can just kill you and make you disappear if we want to — and no one would know.’”
—-
The tortured prisoners were already dead when soldiers began attaching glucose drip lines to their corpses to make it look like they were still alive, a military defector told the AP. It was one of multiple examples the AP found of how the military tries to hide its abuse.
Torture is rife throughout the detention system, says Sgt. Hin Lian Piang, who served as a clerk to the North-Western Regional Deputy Commander before defecting in October.
“They arrest, beat and torture too many,” he says. “They did it to everyone who was arrested.”
In May, Hin Lian Piang witnessed soldiers torture two prisoners to death at a mountaintop interrogation center inside an army base in Chin state. The soldiers beat the two men, hit them with their guns, and kicked them, he says.
After the men were put into jail, one of them died. The major in charge asked the military’s medical doctor to examine the man and determine his cause of death. Meanwhile, the other prisoner began trembling and then died, too.
The soldiers attached the drip lines to the prisoners’ corpses, then sent them to a military hospital in Kalay.
“They forced the Kalay military doctor to write in the chest biopsy report that they died from their own health problems,” Hin Lian Piang says. “Then they cremated the dead bodies straight away.”
Hin Lian Piang says the direct order to cover up the cause of the men’s deaths came from Tactical Operations Commander Col. Saw Tun and Deputy Commander Brig. Gen. Myo Htut Hlaing, the two highest-ranking army officials stationed in Chin state. The AP sent questions about the case to the Tatmadaw but they were not answered.
Though the Tatmadaw has been open about many of its brutalities since the takeover — killing people in broad daylight, releasing photos on state TV of detainees’ bruised faces — it has used modified torture techniques and false statements to hide evidence of other widespread abuses.
More from AP’s Myanmar investigation:
Several prisoners say their interrogators brutalized only the parts of their bodies that could be hidden by clothes, which Hin Lian Piang calls a common strategy. One prisoner had his ears repeatedly slapped, leaving no scars but inflicting intense pain. Another, Min, says his interrogators placed a rubber pad over his chest and back before beating him with a rod, minimizing bruising.
“They would just make sure to hit you so that only your insides are damaged, or would severely beat you on your back, chest and thighs, where the bruises aren’t visible,” says Min.
The use of rubber pads appears to be a classic example of “stealth torture,” which leaves no physical marks, says Andrew Jefferson, a Myanmar prisons researcher at DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture.
“It seems to indicate that the torturers actually sort of care about being found out,” Jefferson says. “So few ever get convicted that I don’t really understand why they care.”
The military may be attempting to pre-empt public accounts of its abuses, says Matthew Smith, cofounder of the human rights group Fortify Rights.
“This is a technique that dictatorships have used for a very long time,” he says. “What I believe the authorities are attempting to do is at least inject some level of doubt into the allegations that that survivor or that person or human rights groups or journalists or governments may accuse them of.”
One prisoner, Kyaw, said he was tortured for days and freed only after signing a statement that he had never been tortured at all.
Kyaw’s hell began when the military surrounded his house and detained him for the second time since February for his pro-democracy activism. As the soldiers beat him and hauled him away with five of his friends, his mother wet her pants and fainted.
His usually stoic father began to cry. Kyaw knew what he was thinking: “There goes my son. He’s going to die.”
All the way to the interrogation center in Yangon, soldiers ordered them to keep their heads bowed and beat them with their guns. When Kyaw’s 16-year-old friend became dizzy and lifted his chin, a soldier bashed his head with a gun until he bled.
At the interrogation center, the soldiers handcuffed them, chained them together and put bags over their heads. His first night was a blur of beatings. “Rest well tonight,” one soldier told him.
The next morning, none of the detainees could open their swollen mouths enough to eat their rice. It was the only food Kyaw would receive for four days. He drank from the toilet.
His interrogation began around 11 a.m. and lasted until 2 or 3 a.m. The soldiers poked his thighs with a knife. They zapped him with a taser. They rolled iron rods up and down his legs.
They learned he could not swim, and kicked him into a lake, blinded by the bag on his head and paralyzed by handcuffs that bound his hands behind him. He thrashed and flailed, sinking ever deeper. They eventually yanked him out.
Their questions were monotonous. “Who are you and what are you up to?” they demanded. “I really didn’t do anything,” he replied. “I know nothing.”
Another 100 detainees arrived at the center while he was there, some of their faces so disfigured from beatings they no longer looked human. A few could not walk. One detainee told Kyaw that soldiers had raped his daughter and her sister-in-law in front of him.
On the fourth day, Kyaw’s family called on a friend with military connections to intervene, and the torture stopped. But he was still held for three weeks until the tell-tale swelling in his face went down.
Kyaw was finally released after he paid military officials around a thousand dollars. The officials then made him sign a statement saying that the military had never asked for money or tortured anyone. The statement also warned that if he protested again, he could be imprisoned for up to 40 years.
Kyaw does not know if his friends are still alive. But against his mother’s pleas, he has vowed to continue his activism.
“I told my mother that democracy is something we have to fight for,” he says. “It won’t come to our doorsteps just by itself.”
_____
The soldiers forced the 16-year-old girl to her knees, then ordered her to remove the mask meant to protect her from COVID.
“You are not afraid of death – that’s why you are here,” one soldier sneered. “Don’t pretend like you are scared of the virus.”
Of the prisoners interviewed by the AP, a dozen were women and children, most of whom were abused. While the men faced more severe physical torture, the women were more often psychologically tortured, especially with the threat of rape.
Sixteen-year-old Su remembers kneeling with her hands in the air as a soldier warned, “Get ready for your turn.” She remembers walking between two rows of soldiers while they taunted, “Keep your strength for tomorrow.”
Su pleaded in vain for soldiers to help one of her fellow inmates, a girl even younger than she, whose leg was broken during her arrest. The soldiers refused to let the girl call her family.
Another girl, around 13, cried constantly and fainted at least six times the day they were arrested. Rather than call a doctor, officers sprayed the child with water.
Prison officials warned Su never to speak of what happened inside to people on the outside. “They said, ‘We really are nice to you. Tell the people the good things about us,’” Su says. “What good things?”
Su had never stayed apart from her parents before. Now she was barred from even calling them, and had no idea that both her grandfathers had died.
“As soon as I was released, I had to take sleeping pills for nearly three months,” Su says. “I cried every day.”
Inside Shwe Pyi Thar interrogation center in Yangon, the women grew to dread the night, when the soldiers got drunk and came to their cell.
“You all know where you are, right?” the soldiers told them. “We can rape and kill you here.”
The women had good reason to be frightened. The military has long used rape as a weapon of war, particularly in the ethnic regions. During its violent crackdown on the country’s Rohingya Muslim population in 2017, the military methodically raped scores of women and girls.
“Even if they did not rape us physically, I felt like all of us were verbally raped almost every day because we had to listen to their threats every night,” says Cho, an activist detained along with her husband.
Another young woman recalls her four months in a southwest Myanmar prison, and the constant fear of torture and rape.
“I was locked in the cell and they could call me out at any time,” she says.
A teacher, held for eight days at an interrogation center, learned to fear the sound of the cell door.
“Our thoughts ran wild, like: ‘Are they coming to take me? Or are they coming to take her?’” the teacher says. “When we saw them blindfolding someone, we were extremely anxious because that could be me.”
Not every woman was spared from violence. Cho’s cellmate was beaten so severely with a bamboo stick that she could not sit or sleep on her back for five days. And though Cho was not subjected to physical assaults at Shwe Pyi Thar, officers at Insein prison struck her on the back of her neck and forced her into a stress position.
When she objected, they beat her back and shoulders, then banished her to solitary confinement for two weeks.
For another woman, Myat, the beatings began the moment the soldiers burst into her home, smashing the butts of their guns into her chest and shoving a rifle into her mouth. As they arrested her and her friends, she heard one of them say: “Shoot them if they try to run.” She cries while recounting her ordeal.
One 17-year-old boy endured days of beatings, the skin on his head splitting open from the force of the blows. As one interrogator punched him, another stitched his head wound with a sewing needle. They gave him no pain medication, telling him the brutal treatment was all that he was worth. His body was drenched in blood.
After three days, he says, they took him to the jungle and dumped him in a hole in the ground, burying him up to his neck. Then they threatened to kill him with a shovel.
“If they ever tried to arrest me again, I wouldn’t let them,” he says. “I would commit suicide.”
___
Back inside the rural town hall, the young man ached for his mother as his night passed in a haze of pain. The next morning, he and his friend were sent to prison.
His small cell was home to 33 people. Every inch of floor was claimed, so he lay next to the lone squat toilet.
An inmate gently cleaned the blood from the young man’s eyes. When he looked at his friend’s battered face, he began to cry.
After two days, his family paid to get him out of prison. He and his friend were forced to sign statements saying they had participated in a demonstration and would now obey the military’s rules.
At home, his mother took one look at him and wept. For a month afterward, his legs and hands shook constantly. Even today, his right shoulder — stomped on by a soldier — won’t move properly.
He is constantly on edge. Two months after his release, he realized he was being followed by soldiers. When the sun goes down, he stays inside.
“After they caught us, I know their hearts and their minds were not like the people’s, not like us,” he says. “They are monsters.”
___ Gelineau reported from Sydney. Associated Press journalist Sam McNeil in Beijing contributed to this report.
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Eulalia García was stunned when she opened an envelope to find an invitation from none other than the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele. It promised a bus would take her family the following day to receive a surprise Christmas gift.
Garcia had survived a mudslide that killed four in her extended family and destroyed their humble home on the slopes of the San Salvador volcano. “It will be a good way to end the year after all we’ve been through,” Garcia told her husband, Ramon Sanchez.
A neighbor in Los Angelitos, Inés Flamenco, was so grateful for her invitation that she spent three days’ earnings on a gift for the president — a bouquet of red, white and pink roses that would turn into a beautiful photo opportunity for Bukele.
“I wanted to tell him how happy I was,” she recalled.
But the Christmas joy would be short-lived. Flamenco and many other guests of the president would soon discover their gifts came with a steep price tag.
____
This story is part of a series, After the Deluge, produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
___
The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, one of the worst ever for Central America, wiped out homes and crops and displaced more than half a million people. Honduras and Guatemala were hardest hit by back-to-back hurricanes, and their governments’ failure to respond fueled soaring migration to the United States.
Even where one government in the region did act, its response was marred by politics, disrespect for the rule of law and a tendency to embrace simple answers to complicated problems.
In El Salvador, a populist president saw opportunity where tragedy struck. After the tropical storm in October, Bukele moved quickly to demonstrate that he could deliver to hundreds of families from Los Angelitos and another community, Nueva Israel, with a program that surely would be appreciated by his countrymen.
There was a problem, though. Bukele forgot to ask the people what they needed to recover. While some appreciated his help, others said they were left out and still others criticized his program, saying it was typical of the way the president governs — using public funds for political propaganda.
“He acts fast. He does not consult, does not plan and does not listen to anyone,” said Francisco Altschul, a former ambassador of El Salvador to the United States.
After a tropical storm in October, El Salvador’s president moved quickly to show he could deliver to families with a program that surely would be appreciated by his countrymen. But he forgot to ask the people what they needed to recover. (Sept. 3)
___
On the night of Oct. 29, it rained so hard on the tin roof of their house that Ramon Sanchez fell into a hypnotic “sleep of death,” as he called it.
Heaps of broken trees and rocky soil created a dam high on the volcano during the torrent. The accumulation of groundwater throughout the winter, plus days of pounding rain, caused the dam to break and the landslide that devoured Los Angelitos.
Around 10:40 that night, Sánchez was awakened by what felt like an explosion. “A rock had hit a tree behind my house, the walls shook and water started coming in everywhere.”
Sanchez and García grabbed their two children and got out, fighting the water. A creek to the left and a road to the right were flooded. They reached high ground nearby and, in minutes, a monstrous ball of earth, logs and water that had traveled nearly four kilometers (2 1/2 miles) down the volcano’s slope came to a halt behind them.
Sanchez´s mother, brother and two nephews who were sleeping in an adobe house next to theirs were buried alive.
They were among 11 people who died as 78 houses were demolished.
“It was over as quickly as it began,” Sánchez said.
Nearby, Inés Flamenco, 73, awoke to see her kitchen gone and her goats bleating for help. “If I tried to get closer and got a foot in the current, I would be pulled go away and die with them,” she recalled.
She started running only to encounter the mangled body of a neighbor dragged to death by mud and stones. She breaks into tears every time she remembers him.
After the deluge, everything seemed to happen fast, like in a movie. Contrary to what usually happens in Central America, solutions arrived, along with cameras recording everything for the Bukele administration’s social media feed.
Within an hour of the mudslide, Defense Minister Rene Merino appeared on the scene and tagged President Bukele in Twitter to let him know that he had taken personal command of the search and rescue operation. Hundreds of soldiers and trusted inmates from a nearby prison started digging for survivors and bodies.
At dawn, Interior Minister Mario Durán joined the effort with drones and cameras. When he spoke to the media, he had smudges of dirt on his face — proof that the government was in the thick of it.
Almost as quickly, Adolfo Barrios, mayor of Nejapa and a member of the opposition Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, arrived with his own camera and interrupted Durán. “I just want to pose some questions to the minister,” he said.
He couldn’t even finish his first question when the general director of the police, Mauricio Arriaza Chicas, politely but firmly told him to leave. He organized his own press conference to say he, too, would divert money from the city budget to help the families.
Funerals and burials were held and shelters were set up in schools for the newly homeless. Within 48 hours, Housing Minister Michelle Sol arrived with a promise:. The government would give homeless families houses. And while they waited, she gave them money to rent houses.
Less than a month after the deluge, almost every family had moved to rental locations where, another month later, they received the invitation to meet with the president.
___
The trip to receive their surprise gift was 15 minutes and a world away. When the bus left the main road, they were surrounded by trucks and cranes. García said, “I think the gift is a house.”
Her husband, a man of few words still traumatized by what had happened weeks before, replied, “How can they give us a house?”
They could. And they did.
The mudslide survivors crossed a security barrier and entered Ciudad Marsella, a huge private residential development under construction, then saw a succession of gleaming new houses on a street so clean and perfect that it didn’t seem real. With mouths agape, they were taken off the bus and asked to form a line.
“It was very fast. A guide came up to us, checked our names and took us straight to the door of a house, gave us the keys, said it was ours and told us to wait because the president was on his way,” Garcia said.
Each family was given a check for $25,300 to buy their house and documents were exchanged. With the houses came a long list of conditions that they signed without reading them. And suddenly, these homeless families — small-scale farmers, shopkeepers, gas deliverymen — were part of a middle-class community.
In record time, 50 days after the storm, the government had delivered its gifts. Survivors from Los Angelitos and Nueva Israel, another neighborhood flooded in the capital in June 2020, received 272 furnished houses in a private development, with access to play spaces for children, a swimming pool, outdoor cinema, medical visits, psychological support, food bags, $250-a-month checks until August and a temporary exemption from paying the expenses for security and common premises.
President Bukele arrived with cameras for a short speech, hugs and pictures. At a podium, he lambasted Congress for failing to approve an emergency declaration that would have allowed him to use government funds without legislative oversight.
Instead, he had earmarked $5 million that he said was “saved” from the construction of a hospital in the capital to spend on a privately owned, already built residential community with available houses. There was no public bidding, just his decision to give the victims money to buy houses in Ciudad Marsella.
He knew the decision he had taken was considered unconstitutional by many, but Bukele said, “rain cannot be unconstitutional.”
García was grateful: “We lived in adobe in a ravine. When were we going to be able to buy a house? Never.”
___
Then the problems began to emerge.
After hugging and giving the bouquet of roses to Bukele, Inés Flamenco remembered that she had to go back to Los Angelitos to tend her animals. She milks the five cows and some goats that survived the mudslide and sells that milk to make a living. She realized that the bus ride would cost $3 round trip.
“I panicked. I barely make $5 a day.”
Security guards at the gated community couldn’t understand why she had to leave in the wee hours to get to her animals. And she felt they treated people like her differently than the middle-class residents who had bought their own homes.
“Darker, with no vehicles, walking in and out, wearing humble clothes, we feel abused by guards who follow and question us all the time,” she said.
Naively perhaps, she asked if she could bring her animals to the residence and let them graze in the common areas. They looked at her as if she was crazy.
“I didn’t know who to talk to,” she said. So, she went to the mayor. “How am I going to live?” she asked him.
On Jan. 15, he called another press conference, this time to criticize the president’s actions, surrounded by a dozen people who were ready to give the houses back to the government.
Flamenco was the first person to speak. “The house is beautiful, but I feel depressed, it is not for me. I want to ask the government if they could look for a place in the countryside,” she said.
Others continued with similar complaints. In Ciudad Marsella, it is prohibited to keep animals, and that means no chickens and no eggs to eat or sell. In any case, they weren’t allowed to set up small stores to sell their farm goods. They also cannot plant trees for shade and fruit to eat.
Unemployed, displaced, earning $3 a day, they said they wouldn’t be able to afford utility payments of about $70 per month when the government-subsidized period ends.
And there is no agricultural employment near Ciudad Marsella for laborers who earn $200 a month when they find consistent work.
“The minister called me immediately, outraged, asking me why I was so ungrateful with a government that had given me so much, and had agreed to be used in an opposition political show,” Flamenco said in tears.
“They took me to a place without asking and then accused me of being ungrateful for a gift that I didn’t ask for.”
García and Sánchez do not plan to give up their houses, but share the concerns of those who do. “We have no income, we have no idea how we are going to survive, the government will have to give us solutions,” García said.
Sánchez´s grandmother, Victoria Crisóstoma, added, “We are not allowed to cook with wood and we have to pay for gas. I cannot afford it. We are not allowed to grind corn so I cannot make my own tortillas and I have to buy them. I have no income.”
As of July, at least 28 families had decided to return the houses. Like Flamenco, most of them went back to Los Angelitos.
“I am defeated. I’m afraid of dying here as soon as it starts raining again,” Flamenco said.
___
For now, popular support is going Bukele’s way. He is getting credit for providing housing to the victims of mudslides as his counterparts in Honduras and Guatemala have yet to do.
After trying to stop the president’s plans since the first night of the tragedy, the opposition mayor of Nejapa, lost local elections in a political landslide to the candidate of Nuevas Ideas — Bukele´s party.
But the problems continue.
The Orellana family is among the residents of Los Angelitos who did not receive an invitation from the president and feel no one is listening. Their shack of wood pallets and aluminum sheeting held up in the tropical storm, so they await the next hurricane season with fear.
“They say we are not in danger,” said Lourdes Orellana, 27. “How do they know how high the water will rise the next time it rains?”
Cecilia Flores’ ailing mother got a house in Ciudad Marsella because she held the title to their family house even though it was not completely destroyed.
But her mother, who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals, could not live alone in the new house because of her health, and it was not large enough for all 11 family members. If Flores was to move in with her mother, she’d have to leave her children behind with the others. She’d also have to leave her business selling lunches to workers at a nearby factory — her only source of income.
They thought of renting out the new house to live off the income and fix up the old house, but it turned out they weren’t allowed to do that in the new neighborhood.
“What is this property that cannot be sold or rented? Either it is ours or not,” Flores said.
So they abandoned the gift house, which now sits empty, and returned to the adobe house where they survived the tragedy. But now the house in Los Angelitos has been seriously damaged by government when it cleared land after the mudslide. There are cracks running along the walls and the floor is sinking.
“There were options for land nearby and tailored to our needs,” Flores said, “but instead of sitting down to listen and think about the options, Bukele looked for a quick photo op and created a bigger problem for people who already had a lot of problems.”
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A militant leader in Ethiopia says his group has struck a military alliance with the Tigray forces now pressing toward the country’s capital, as the conflict that erupted in the Tigray region last year spreads into other parts of Africa’s second-most populous country.
“The only solution now is overthrowing this government militarily, speaking the language they want to be spoken to,” Oromo Liberation Army leader Kumsa Diriba, also known as Jaal Marroo, told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
The alliance is a further sign of the broadening of the Tigray conflict that began in November after a political fallout between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray leaders who had dominated Ethiopia’s government for nearly three decades. Thousands have been killed in the nine-month war that has been marked by widespread allegations by ethnic Tigrayans of gang-rapes, man-made famine and mass expulsions by Ethiopian and allied forces.
The OLA leader said the agreement was reached a few weeks ago after the Tigray forces proposed it. “We have agreed on a level of understanding to cooperate against the same enemy, especially in military cooperation,” Diriba said. “It is underway.” They share battlefield information and fight in parallel, he said, and while they’re not fighting side by side, “there is a possibility it might happen.”
Talks are underway on a political alliance as well, he said, and asserted that other groups in Ethiopia are involved in similar discussions: “There’s going to be a grand coalition against (Abiy’s) regime.”
The alliance brings together the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, who had been front and center in Ethiopia’s repressive government but were sidelined when Abiy took office in 2018, and the OLA, which last year broke away from the opposition party Oromo Liberation Front and seeks self-determination for the Oromo people. The Oromo are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group.
Ethiopia’s government earlier this year declared both the TPLF and OLA terrorist organizations.
Tigray forces spokesman Getachew Reda told the AP last week that “yes, we’re working with some people” in pursuit of a political arrangement but didn’t give details. “We want to work with anyone not implicated in the genocidal campaign Abiy Ahmed has waged,” he said.
There was no comment from the spokeswoman for Abiy’s office.
The OLA leader spoke a day after the prime minister called on all capable Ethiopians to join the military and stop the Tigray forces “once and for all” after they retook much of the Tigray region in recent weeks and crossed into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions. The Tigray forces spokesman has told the AP they are fighting to secure their long-blockaded region but if Abiy’s government topples, “that’s icing on the cake.”
With access to parts of Ethiopia increasingly restricted and journalists often harassed, it is difficult to tell how citizens will respond to the prime minister’s call, or whether they will join the fight against him. The government has supported large military recruiting rallies in recent weeks.
The Tigray leaders embittered many Ethiopians during their nearly three decades in power by putting in place a system of ethnic federalism that led to ethnic tensions that continue to simmer in the country of 110 million people.
Diriba acknowledged that agreeing to the Tigray forces’ proposal for an alliance took some thought. “There were so many atrocities committed” against the Oromo people during the TPLF’s time in power, he said, and the problems it created have never been resolved.
But the OLA decided it was possible to work together, he said, though some doubts remain. “I hope the TPLF has learned a lesson,” he said. “I don’t think the TPLF will commit the same mistakes unless they’re out of their mind.” If they do, there will be chaos in Ethiopia and it could collapse as a state, he said.
It was not clear how many fighters the OLA would bring to the alliance. “This, madam, is a military secret,” its leader said.
He said he hoped the TPLF’s talks with other groups would become public in the near future. He also warned the international community, which led by the United Nations and the United States has urged a halt to the Tigray conflict and negotiations, that the crisis has to be handled carefully “if Ethiopia is to continue together.”
