By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jan 7 2025 – When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions have collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed.

“The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, and how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”

Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”

The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.

For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television.

“There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.

While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”

Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise.

Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.

The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.

Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.

When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this fall with a new afterword about the Gaza war.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Kumkum Chadha
DELHI, Jan 7 2025 – History seems to be chasing Bangladesh even while the interim government is grappling with real issues of administering a country thrown into chaos.

In July last year, this south Asian country faced an upheaval when a students’ movement drove out Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina from office.

Protestors took to the streets over a quota system for government jobs. Their angst—disproportionate benefits to descendants of freedom fighters.

Once political parties and fundamentalists jumped in, the focus shifted, with protestors demanding Hasina’s resignation.

Hasina was forced to leave the country she had ruled for 15 years. She landed in India for what was then flagged as a temporary refuge: “For the moment only,” as India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar had then told the Indian Parliament.

Back home in Bangladesh, an interim government headed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus took charge of governing a country clearly at a crossroads—in other words, a toss-up between Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s legacy or charting a new course without the baggage of history.

It is against this backdrop that one must examine the new narrative of the interim government to reprint Bangladesh’s currency notes.

Initiated by the Central Bank of Bangladesh, the new notes will no longer carry the customary picture of Bangabandhu as Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as the former leader who led the country to independence is known. In common parlance, Bangabandhu means Friend of Bangla people.

“Phasing out” is how officials from Bangladesh Bank explained the move, while 70-year-old Alamgir, a witness to the War of Liberation, called it “an altered history,” in other words, pressing a delete button on Bangabandhu’s legacy.

To say that the sins of a daughter have adversely impacted her father’s legacy may be a bit of a stretch because even on his own, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a controversial figure.

A folk hero turned dictator, he failed to address the real issues of Bangladesh. Instead, he became authoritarian and suspended rights. As Prime Minister, his daughter Hasina followed in her father’s footsteps.

Hence the anger of the people that spilled to the streets last year took a toll both on Sheikh Hasina and the legacy.

For starters, the current generation, many in the forefront of the students’ protest in Bangladesh, resent the undue space accorded to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman through the years, particularly when Hasina ruled. Not only do they want to erase his imprint, but they also intend to rewrite and, if possible, clean up the bloody chapters of history.

In this context, is the currency note redesign the first substantive step taken by the interim government headed by Yunus?

Fazal Kamal, former editor of The Independent and Bangladesh Times, does not think so.
“It is not the government that has taken the initiative. It is an intense reaction from among the people of Bangladesh to Hasina’s insistence on ensuring Mujib’s seal on everything. It is this overkill that Bangladeshis want to end. The interim government is only going along,” he told IPS.

Given the hullabaloo, it must be pointed out that this is not the first time that Mujibur Rahman’s mugshot, if one may be allowed to use the term, has been taken off currency notes.

In 1976, a year after Bangabandhu and some of his family members were assassinated, the series of notes that were introduced did not have his image. It was only in 1998 that he made a comeback on the taka and has remained since. A taka is a basic monetary unit in Bangladesh.

Therefore, when Farid Hossain, who has served as Minister at the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi, calls the currency issue “much ado about nothing,” he is not off the mark.

“On ground, people want governance—they want law and order and currency, which can buy more rather than which image it carries,” Hossain said, adding that the move is indicative of the interim government “giving in to pressure” from the radicals.

To many, Hasina’s ouster is nothing short of a “second independence.” Yet there is a large segment that is against what Hossain has termed “wholesale erosion” of history and legacy: “Today Bangladesh faces an ideological divide and the narrative that was buried years ago seems to have resurfaced.”

In other words, today’s generation in Bangladesh wants to resurrect the real face of Mujibur Rahman and strip him of the legacy draped in grandeur. And in this, the interim government has been an active player.

“The intention of the interim administration is to take the country away from its historical legacy. The current regime has pandered to its unruly student followers who have been crushing every symbol of history,” says political analyst Syed Badrul Ahsan.

As for succumbing to pressure, the interim government is in the eye of a storm on another issue—the tricky and sensitive issue of Hasina’s extradition.

Bangladesh has sent a note verbale to the Indian government saying that it wants Hasina back for a judicial process. A note verbale is a diplomatic communication from one government to another.

There has been a persistent demand, as Kamal points out, for leaders of the previous regime to be brought back and tried. Call it vendetta politics if you will but the popular sentiment seems to be that Hasina should be sent to the gallows.

Though India and Bangladesh have an extradition treaty in place, it exempts political vendetta.

Article 6 of the treaty states that extradition may be denied if the alleged offence is of a political nature. That Hasina is being tried for her political offences is a given: “A note verbale is not enough. The interim government does not have a mandate. It is there to administer and steer reforms and not indulge in politicking. But it seems to be taking up the side issue of radicals and seems to be giving in,” Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty, former Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh, told IPS.

Dismissing the extradition request as “mere rhetoric resulting from domestic pulls and pressures,” the former ambassador says India is unlikely to accommodate its neighbor on this issue.

He also did not rule out Yunus using this as a “pressure tactic” to tell India to restrain Sheikh Hasina from making political statements from Indian soil.

For record, in a virtual address last month, Hasina stated that Yunus was running a “fascist regime” that encouraged terrorists and fundamentalists. Interestingly, the extradition request had followed soon after.

Both issues seem to be hanging in the air—the new currency notes are yet to be printed and on Hasina’s extradition, the Indian government is silent.

As for Mujib’s legacy, his statue can be vandalized, his images defaced and his daughter’s sins denigrate his legacy, but Bangabandhu’s footprint from history, however controversial, cannot be erased.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Jomo Kwame Sundaram
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jan 7 2025 – The forthcoming fourth United Nations Financing for Development conference must address developing countries’ major financial challenges. Recent setbacks to sustainable development and climate action make FfD4 all the more critical.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

FfD4
The FfD4 conference, months away, will mainly be due to efforts led by the G77, the caucus of developing countries in the UN system. The G77 started with 77 UN member states and has since expanded to over 130.

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference outcome was primarily a compromise between the US and the UK. In 1971, when its Bretton Woods obligations threatened to undermine its privileges, President Richard Nixon refused to honour the US pledge to deliver an ounce of gold for US$35.

Over two decades later, President Bill Clinton promised a new international financial architecture. It rejected Professor Robert Triffin’s characterisation of international monetary arrangements after the early 1970s as an incoherent ‘non-system’.

Foreign aid
Several issues are emerging as G77 priorities for FfD4. In 1970, wealthy nations at the UN agreed to provide 0.7% of their national income annually as official development assistance (ODA).

This was much lower than the 2% initially proposed by the World Council of Churches and others. Only 0.3% has been delivered in recent years, or less than half the promise.

Most ODA conditions reflect the priorities of donors, not recipient countries. New aid definitions, conditions, and practices undermine ‘aid effectiveness’, reducing what developing nations receive.

Despite breaking its ODA promises, the new European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to contribute 0.25% of national income to Ukraine. By early December 2024, Europe had provided well over half the USD260 billion in aid to Ukraine!

Some European nations now insist that only mitigation qualifies as climate finance. Although most developing countries are tropical and struggling to cope with planetary heating, little assistance is available for adaptation.

Debt
More recently, developing countries’ new debt has been more commercial and conditional but less concessional. With the transition to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, the World Bank encouraged much more commercial borrowing with its new slogan, ‘from billions to trillions’.

Following the 2008 global financial crisis, Western countries adopted unconventional monetary policies, eschewing fiscal efforts. Quantitative easing enabled much more borrowing, which grew until 2022.

However, most Western governments did not borrow much. Some private interests borrowed heavily, often for unproductive purposes, with some using cheap funds to finance shareholder buyouts to get more wealth.

Meanwhile, many developing countries went on borrowing binges as creditors pushed debt in developing countries in various ways. Rapidly mounting government debt would soon become problematic.

From early 2022 until mid-2024, interest rates rose sharply, ostensibly to counter inflation. The US Fed and European Central Bank raised interest rates in concert, triggering massive capital outflows from developing countries with the poorest worst affected.

Institutional reform
A third priority is reforming multilateral financial institutions. While these institutions have changed much over time, they remain dominated by the Global North, especially the West.

Most countries at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference were from Latin America. Initially, 47% of voting rights were the standard ‘basic votes’ for all members. By 2008, Global South membership had increased severalfold as its votes fell to 11%.

The West, especially Europe, still dominates the International Monetary Fund. Many alternative governance arrangements have been proposed. Consideration of alternative regional monetary arrangements grew after the 1997-98 Asian financial crises.

The Chiang Mai Initiative (Multilateralisation) is now a multilateral currency swap arrangement among the finance ministries and central banks of ASEAN+3 countries when liquidity is needed. The Latin American Reserve Fund (FLAR) was created later in 2014.

Taxation
The Global South has long wanted the UN to lead negotiations on international taxation arrangements to provide more financial resources for development. However, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rich nations’ club has long undermined developing countries’ interests.

The OECD achieved this by misleading finance ministries in developing countries. It bypassed foreign ministries that had long worked well together on contentious Global South issues. With the OECD making up new rules for the world, developing country finance ministries signed on to a biased tax proposal on which they were nominally consulted.

At the FfD3 conference in mid-2015, the OECD blocked Global South efforts to advance international tax cooperation. An independent international commission proposed a minimum international corporate income tax rate of 25%.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen counter-proposed a 21% rate, the US minimum rate. However, at the G7 meeting he was hosting, Boris Johnson pushed this down to 15% while adding exemptions, reducing likely revenue.

Instead of distributing revenue as with a corporate income tax on profits from production, the OECD proposed revenue sharing according to consumption spending, much like a sales tax.

Poor countries would receive little as their population can afford to spend much less, even if they produce much at low wages. Rather than progressively redistribute, OECD international corporate income tax revenue distribution would be regressive.

Dollar
The US dollar remains the world’s principal currency for international transactions. US Treasury bond sales enable this, subsidising the world’s largest economy. Trump recently threatened the BRICS and others considering de-dollarization.

The leading BRICS proponents of de-dollarisation, Brazil and South Africa, have failed to persuade the other BRICS to de-dollarize. Instead, China’s central bank has issued dollar-denominated bonds for Saudi Arabia.

Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) should be issued regularly to augment discretionary IMF financial resources. This can be done without Congressional approval, as happened after the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 outbreak. Such resources can be committed to the SDGs and climate finance.

But this cannot happen without collective action by the Global South seriously mobilising behind pacifist, developmental non-alignment. Inclusive and sustainable development is impossible in a world at war.

IPS UN Bureau

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By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Jan 6 2025 – In 2021, the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr became the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa to be awarded the Prix Goncourt, France’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize.

Literature

His novel, La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, The most Secret Memory of Men, tells the story of a young Senegalese writer living in Paris, who by chance stumbles across a novel published in 1938 by an elusive Senegalese author named T.C. Elimane. This author had once been hailed by an ecstatic Paris press, but had then disappeared from view. Elimane had before every trace of him had vanished, been accused of plagiarism. After losing a legal process connected with the plagiarism charge, Elimane’s publisher had been forced to withdraw and destroy all available copies of The Labyrinth of Inhumanity. However, a few extremely rare copies of the novel remained, profoundly affecting anyone who happened to read them. The novel’s main protagonist (there are several others) eventually became involved in a desperate search for the illusive Elimane, who had left some rare imprints in France, Senegal and Argentina.

A reader of Sarr’s multifaceted, exquisitely written novel is confronted with a choir of different voices mixing, harmonizing and/or contradicting each other. The story turns into a labyrinth, where boundaries between fiction and reality become blurred and lose ends remain unravelled. Sarr moves in an ocean of world literature. It seems as if he has read everything worth reading and allusions are either in plain sight, or remain invisible. Ultimately, the novel investigates the limits between myth and reality, memory and presence, and above all the question – what is storytelling? What is literature? Does it concern the “truth”, or is it constructing a parallel version of reality?

A disturbing issue shimmers below the surface of the intriguing story. Why were two excellent West-African authors before Sarr severely scrutinized and condemned for plagiarism? Why were they accused of not being “African” enough? Are African writers doomed to linger within a shadowy existence as exotic curiosities, judged from the outside by a prejudiced literary establishment, which persistently consider African authors, except white Nobel laureates like Gordimer and Coetze, either as being exotic natives, or epigons of European literature?

The most Secret Memory of Men has a disturbing prehistory, echoing real-life experiences of the Guinean writer Camara Laye and the likewise unfortunate Malian Yambo Ouologuem.

At the age of 15, Camara Laye came to Conakry, the French colonial capital of Guinea, to attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue his studies in mechanics. In 1956, Camara Laye returned to Africa, first to Dahomey, then to the Gold Coast and finally to newly independent Guinea, where he held several government posts. In 1965, after being subject to political persecution, he left Guinea for Senegal and never returned to his home country.

In 1954, Camara Laye’s novel Le regard de Roi, The Radiance of the King, was published in Paris and at the time described as “one of the finest works of fiction to come out of Africa”. The novel was quite odd, and remains so, particular since its main protagonist is a white man and the story develops from his point of view. Clarence has, after in his home country having failed at most things, recently arrived in Africa to seek his fortune there. After gambling all his money away, he is thrown out of his hotel and in desperation decides to pursue a legend stating that somewhere in the inner depths of Africa a wealthy king can be found. Clarence hopes that this king might provide for him, maybe give him a job, and a purpose in life.

Laye’s novel becomes an allegory for man’s search for God. Clarence’s journey develops into a road to self-realisation and he obtains wisdom through a series of dreamlike and humiliating experiences; often harrowing, sometimes lunatically nightmarish, though the story is occasionally lightened by an absurd and alluring humour.

However, some critics asked if this really was an African novel. The language was beguilingly simple, but the allegorical mode of telling the story made critics assume that it was tinged with Christianity, that the African lore was “superficial”, and the narrative style “kafkaesque”. Even African authors considered that Laye “mimicked” European literary role models. The Nigerian author Wole Soyinka characterized Le regard de Roi as a feeble imitation of Kafka’s novel The Castle, implanted on African soil and within France suspicions soon arose that a young African car mechanic could not have been able to write such a strange and multifaceted novel as Le regard de Roi.

This unkind and even mean criticism became increasingly vociferous, deprecating what was actually an intriguing work of genius. The harassment continued until a final blow was delivered by an American professor. Adele King’s comprehensive study The Writing of Camara Laye did in 1981 “prove” that Le regard de Roi actually had been written by Francis Soulé, a renegade Belgian intellectual who in Brussels had been involved in Nazi- and Anti-Semitic propaganda and after World War II had been forced to establish himself in France. According to Adele King, Soulé had together with Robert Poulet, editor at Plon, the publisher that issued Le regard de Roi, concocted a story that his novel actually had been written by a young African, thus securing its success. To support her theory, Adele King presented an exhaustive account of Camara Laye’s life in France, tracing his various acquaintances and coming to the conclusion that Laye had been paid by Plon to act as the author of Le regard de Roi.

Among other observations Adele King stated that Laye’s novel was of an “un-African nature, with a European sense of literary form”, thus indicating Francis Soulé’s handiwork. This in spite of Soulé’s very meagre literary output (King mentions that he had in his ”youth dabbled in exotic writing”) and the fact that Laye wrote several other, very good novels.

Among other indications that Laye could not have written Le regard de Roi, King argued that the novel’s “Messianic message” sounded false, originating as it did from an African Muslim. She thus ignored that Laye came from a Sufi tradition where similar notions abounded and when it came to the “kafkaesque” flavour of the novel, which is far from being overwhelming – why could not a young African author living in France, like so many others, have been inspired by Franz Kafka’s writing?

Notwithstanding, through these and many other shaky assumptions King concluded that Le regard de Roi had been written by the otherwise almost unknown Francis Soulé and her verdict became almost unanimously accepted. It did for example in 2018 prominently appear in Christoffer Miller’s popular and otherwise quiet good book Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity.

Another resounding condemnation of an excellent West-African author occurred in 1968 when the groundbreaking and original novel Le devoir de violence, Bound to Violence, after a short time of praise was smashed due to accusations of plagiarism. Le devoir de violence dealt with seven centuries of violent history of an African, fictious kingdom (actually quite akin to present-day Mali). In a feverish first-rate, free flowing language the novel does not shy away from depicting extreme violence, royal oppression, religious superstition, murder, corruption, slavery, female genital mutilation, rape, misogyny, and abuse of power. All intermingled with episodes of real love and harmony, but there is no doubt about Yambo Ouologuem’s opinion that a powerful, age-old and corrupt African elite enriched itself and prospered through its collaboration with an equally corrupt and brutal colonial power, all done for their respective gain.

Quite expectedly, Ouologuem arose violent reactions from authors adhering to the concept of négritude, denoting a framework of critique and literary theory developed by francophone intellectuals, who stressed the strength of African solidarity and notions about a unique African culture. Ouologuem provided the négritude movement with his own denigrating term – negraille, accusing négritude authors of ingraining servility and an inferiority complex in Africa’s black population. He accused such authors of depicting Africa as a ridiculous Paradise, when the continent in fact had been, and was, just as corrupt and violent as its European counterpart. Ouologuem also wondered why an African writer could not be allowed to be as critical, outspoken and politically improper as, for example, the French authors Rimbaud and Céline.

The final judgment that befell Ouologuem was delivered by the generally admired Graham Greene, who launched a lawsuit against Ouologuem’s publisher accusing the African author of plagiarizing parts of Greene’s novel It’s a Battlefield. Greene won the lawsuit and Ouologuem’s novel was banned in France and the publisher had to see to the destruction of all available copies of it. Ouologuem did not write another novel, he returned to Mali where he in a small town directed a youth centre, until he withdrew in a secluded Muslim life as a marabout (spiritual advisor).

Considering the framework of Ouologuem’s entire and quite mindboggling novel, Graham Greene’s reaction appears to be petty, if not outright ridiculous. The plagiarism was limited to a few sentences describing a French mansion, which in itself was quite absurd within its African setting, and the description is clearly quoted with a satirical intention (in his novel Greene described a slightly ridiculously decorated apartment of an English communist).

The condemnation of Laye’s, and in particular Ouologuem’s novels may be discerned as an inspiration to Mohamed Sarr’s novel. Sarr writes about a young African author finding himself in a limbo between two very different worlds, Senegal and France, while he has found home and solace in literature, a world within which he has discovered a real gem, his talisman – Elimane’s novel. However, the bewildered young man’s pursuit of the man behind the book turns out to be in vain, and so is probably also his search for himself in this labyrinth that constitutes our life and the world we live in.

Sarr’s novel reminds us of the fate of two other West-African authors before him, who were accused of not being “genuine”, of being “plagiarists”, thus Sarr also succeeds in asking us what is genuine in a floating globalized world?

IPS UN Bureau

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By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jan 6 2025 – “A lot of people are very scared,” says Zalina Marshenkulova. “This is obviously another tool of repression. The state is waging war on the remnants of free-thinking people in Russia and trying to suppress all dissent and freedom,” the Russian feminist activist tells IPS.

The warning from Marshenkulova, who left Russia soon after the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and now lives in Germany, comes just days after new legislation came into force in her home country banning “child-free propaganda.”

Under the law, any person, organisation or government official deemed to be promoting a “child-free” lifestyle or encouraging people, either in person or online, not to have children can face huge fines and, in some cases, may be deported.

While MPs have stressed the legislation would not infringe on the right of individuals not to have children, critics fear it will be used in what some have described as an ongoing “crusade” by the Kremlin to promote a deeply conservative ideology centred around ‘traditional values’ and rejecting decadent Western ways of life—even at the expense of women’s reproductive rights.

“Women are already buying up all sorts of contraceptive pills [fearing they may not be able to get them in the future]. Abortions are already hard to get and that’s only going to get even harder now,” says Marshenkulova.

The legislation, which came into effect on December 4, introduces fines for individuals spreading “child-free propaganda” in broadcast media or online of up to 400,000 rubles (€3,840), while companies doing so can be fined up to 5 million rubles (€48,000) for the same offence. Foreign citizens who fall foul of the legislation will face deportation.

Its supporters have said the legislation is essential to protect Russia against a harmful Western ideology that could have devastating consequences for a country struggling with worrying negative demographic trends.

“We are talking about protecting citizens, primarily the younger generation, from information disseminated in the media space that has a negative impact on the formation of people’s personalities,” Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the lower house of parliament, said ahead of the vote. “Everything must be done to ensure that new generations of our citizens grow up centred on traditional family values.”

But human rights groups and activists say they have grave concerns about it. They point out that it has similarly vague language to other repressive laws passed in Russia in recent years that have been used to persecute minorities, such as LGBT+ people, and government critics, including civil society groups, as well as opponents of the invasion of Ukraine.

The relative novelty of the legislation means it is hard to gauge how strictly it will be implemented and what exactly authorities will see as ‘childfree propaganda’.

But it has already had some effect.

“The law is vague and broadly formulated so we can’t predict what things will be considered punishable—no one knows,” Anastasiia Zakharova, a lawyer at the Memorial Human Rights Defence Centre, told IPS.

“For example, a situation where women share publicly things like how hard it can be as a mother, how difficult it can be raising kids—will that be considered childfree propaganda? We have already seen that groups on social media where women talk about how hard it is raising children and being a mother have closed down to avoid potentially being fined. This law will have a chilling effect on what people will say,” she added.

Others say experience with Russian laws such as those introduced in the last decade banning “LGBT+ propaganda” provides a guide for how this legislation could impact women’s lives.

“This is another part of the Kremlin’s harmful ‘traditional values’ crusade. It will limit women’s freedom, their reproductive freedoms, and will stifle freedom generally,” Tanya Lokshina, Europe and Central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told IPS.

“We can predict what the effects of this law will be because it is similar to the anti-LGBT+ propaganda law in Russia and we have seen the effects of that. It’s not so much that this kind of law targets individuals; it’s about purging the cultural arena of anything that could be even vaguely interpreted as propaganda,” she added.

She said while this could see a vast amount of films, shows and books disappearing from shop shelves, TV schedules, and online streaming services—”for example, a ‘romcom’ film in which you see a woman in her thirties with no children pursuing her career—anything like that is going to be outlawed. Can you imagine how many films, TV shows, books, etc. might have to be banned because of that? It’s mind-boggling,” she said—it could also significantly impact reproductive health.

“Will children be able to get information about abortion and birth control? We saw what happened with the anti-LGBT+ law when teachers and others who should have been helping them could not, or would not, talk about [LGBT+ sexual health issues]. If children needed help, they couldn’t get it,” she said.

Other rights activists agreed.

“There will be problems for women to get information about abortions, contraception, and other reproductive health matters and it will be particularly difficult for young people who already might already be struggling with getting hold of information on these things and now won’t have any way at all to access it,” Natalia Morozova, Head of the Eastern Europe/Central Asia Desk at the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told IPS.

This comes at a time when women’s access to abortion is already being curtailed.

Elective abortion is legal in Russia up to the 12^th week of pregnancy, and in some exceptional cases, such as rape, up to the 22^nd week. However, in recent years there have been moves to limit access to the procedure.

Laws have been introduced in some regions outlawing “coercing” women—the legislation defines this as persuading, bribing, or deceiving a woman into undergoing the procedure—to have an abortion, while hundreds of private clinics across the country have followed a ‘voluntarily initiative’ supported by the Health Ministry and have stopped offering abortions.

The state has also introduced guidelines for doctors to encourage female patients to have children, but also to dissuade them from abortions.

“Already in state clinics in Russia, doctors put pressure on women to have children. There are women who have gone to a clinic and been questioned by doctors on why they have no children and why they don’t want to have them yet,” said Lokshina.

Health experts have already pointed to the dangers of restricting abortions, with World Health Organisation (WHO) officials previously warning that bans on private clinics performing abortions would force more women in Russia into having surgical abortions rather than medical abortions. Private clinics mainly offer medical abortions, whereas state hospitals perform surgical abortions, which carry higher risks of complications, side effects and injuries.

The WHO also raised concerns that tightening access to legal abortions could lead to a spike in dangerous illegal procedures.

This tightening of access to abortion and the passing of the ‘childfree propaganda’ law come as the Kremlin battles a demographic crisis amid rising mortality as Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine grinds on and the country’s birth rate falls.

Data from statistics service Rosstat showed 599,600 children were born in Russia in the first half of 2024, which is 16,000 fewer births year-on-year and the lowest figure since 1999. Meanwhile, the number of newborns fell 6 percent in June to 98,600, which is the first time the number fell below 100,000. There were 325,100 deaths recorded between January and June, which is 49,000 more than in the same period of 2023.

The Kremlin has called the demographic situation a “catastrophe” for the nation and lawmakers who backed the ‘childfree propaganda’ legislation see it as a way to help halt population decline.

But Morozova said the Kremlin’s main motive was bolstering its armed forces to continue fighting in Ukraine.

“They want a population that produces soldiers, women that produce soldiers. The only goal of this regime is to produce as many soldiers as possible,” she said.

According to Lokshina, the law will also give the Kremlin an extra tool in its fight against a group that many experts see as potentially the biggest threat to President Putin’s hold on power.

“The most notable protests [against the Russian regime] since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been women’s protests. The Kremlin sees women as being problematic and wants to silence them,” she said.

While it remains to be seen how the law will be implemented and interpreted by authorities in the future, some activists have already left the country in response to its passage, fearing it could be used against them.

But there are doubts the legislation will have any effect on the birth rate.

Some Russian women who spoke to western media ahead of the legislation’s approval said women’s decisions on whether to have children or not are largely rooted in financial concerns at a time when the economy is struggling, rather than anyone else’s opinion on their right to have children or not.

And research carried out by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) in October showed that 66 percent of Russians doubted fines for promoting childfree ideology would be effective.

“The law has no potential to influence the birth rate,” said Lokshina. “It is aimed at stifling dissent—in this case, the rejection of so-called traditional family values.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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