A week in the life of the world | Global edition

8 MARCH 2024 | VOL .210 No.10 | £5.95 | €9

One million people live

in the Rohingya refugee
camps of Life on
the line
Crossing
Bangladesh. Ukraine
by train

Six years after

34

Machine
listening

they started The rise

of chatbot
therapists

to arrive, driven from 40

Scream

their homes in Myanmar team

St Vincent
on death

by the military, their and love

51

prospects of
returning are
as distant as
ever.
The forgotten
of Cox’s Bazar 10
Founded in
Manchester, England
4 July 1919
Vol 210 | Issue № 10
Guardian Weekly is an
edited selection of some of
the best journalism found in
the Guardian and Observer
newspapers in the UK and the
Guardian’s digital editions
in the UK, US and Australia.
The weekly magazine has an
international focus and three
editions: global, Australia and
North America. The Guardian
was founded in 1821, and
Guardian Weekly in 1919. We
exist to hold power to account
in the name of the public
interest, to uphold liberal and
progressive values, to fight for
the common good, and to build
hope. Our values, as laid out
by editor CP Scott in 1921, are
honesty, integrity, courage,
fairness, and a sense of duty to
the reader and the community.
The Guardian is wholly owned
by the Scott Trust, a body
whose purpose is “to secure
the financial and editorial
independence of the Guardian
in perpetuity”. We have no
proprietor or shareholders,
and any profit made is
re-invested in journalism.
Join the community
Twitter: @guardianweekly
facebook.com/guardianweekly
Instagram: @guardian
SPOT ILLUSTRATIONS:
MATT BLEASE
4 34
GL OBAL REP ORT
Headlines from
the last seven days
United Kingdom ................... 8
Science & Environment ........ 9
The big story
Myanmar Faint hope of return
for Rohingya refugees ..........10
15
SPOTLIGHT
In-depth reporting and analysis
 Israel/Palestine
They went in search of food.
Many did not make it home ...15
Germany
What was leaked in the Russia
wiretap row? ........................ 19
UK
‘No-go zone’ myth spreads to
mainstream politics .............22
Japan
Respectful Shōgun retelling
wins plaudits in Japan......... 28
Science
Dutch startup’s plan to restore
Arctic sea ice ....................... 30
US
Steve Bannon rouses the Maga
right for election fight ..........32
A week in the life of the world
8 MARCH 2024
F E AT U R E S
Long reads, interviews & essays
Tracking the stories of two
years of war in Ukraine
Shaun Walker...................... 34
Can AI therapists do better
than the real thing?
Alice Robb ........................... 40
45 51
OPINION C U LT U R E
▼ George Monbiot TV, film, music, theatre, art,
Governments are ignoring a architecture & more
looming water crisis ............ 45  Music
Emma Brockes St Vincent on love, death and
Voice notes? Just hold that her beatific new album ......... 51
thought, please ....................47 Design
Jonathan Freedland The visionary women shaking
Toxic politics makes gains up architecture ................... 54
from the pain of Gaza .......... 48 Visual arts
Edward Enninful’s new take
on Robert Mapplethorpe ......55
 Books
In the beginning ... re-reading
This is another the Bible’s first book .............57
of those massive
60
neglected
issues, which
could be fatal
to peace and LIFESTYLE
Ask Annalisa
prosperity on a Sister-in-law strain ............. 60
habitable planet Kitchen aide
Advice on aubergines ...........61
Recipe
Saucy mushrooms ...............61
On the cover
Kaamil Ahmed visited Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh
to report on the plight of around a million
Rohingya refugees, six years after the military’s
“clearance operations” to drive the minority out
of Myanmar. Amid ramshackle camp conditions,
Ahmed found widespread illness and a thriving
human trafficking industry.
Photographs: Kaamil Ahmed
4

Global
2 U N I T E D S TAT E S 4 FRANCE

Abortion enshrined as

report a constitutional right

The French parliament enshrined
abortion as a constitutional right
at a historic joint session at the
Palace of Versailles. Out of 925
Headlines from MPs and senators eligible to vote,
the last seven days 780 supported the amendment,
which will give women the
“guaranteed freedom” to choose
1 HAITI Tumble-mageddon: huge
an abortion.
tumbleweeds roll into Utah There was thunderous applause
Weekend of violence puts
Houses, roads and cars in South in the chamber as the result
government future in doubt Jordan, Utah, were hit by a swathe was announced on Monday; in
Copyright © 2024 The future of Haiti’s government of invasive weeds after a strong central Paris, the Eiffel Tower was
GNM Ltd. All rights appeared increasingly uncertain spring storm that blocked roads, illuminated to mark the occasion.
reserved early this week, after armed surrounded houses and buried The measure had already
gangs attacked the country’s cars. The weeds formed piles up been passed by the upper and
Published weekly by international airport and freed to 3 metres high in some places. lower houses, the Sénat and the
Guardian News & more than 3,800 prisoners last According to local KSL TV, Assemblée Nationale, but final
Media Ltd, weekend in what appeared to be residents ploughed the weeds approval by parliamentarians at
Kings Place, a coordinated effort to topple the with hoes and shovels before city the joint session at Versailles was
90 York Way,
prime minister, Ariel Henry. workers arrived to clean up. needed to effect constitutional
London, N1 9GU, UK
Officials declared a three-day “Luckily, it’s something we can change.
Printed in the UK, state of emergency and imposed a handle,” said Rachel Van Cleave, The prime minister, Gabriel
Denmark, the US, nightly curfew in an effort to calm South Jordan communications Attal, told those gathered: “We
Australia and the growing unrest but national manager. “This is not our first are haunted by the suffering and
New Zealand police were outgunned, and senior tumble-mageddon.” memory of so many women who
officials – including Henry, who The incident was not without were not free. We owe a moral
ISSN 0958-9996 is also acting president – were precedent. In Washington state in debt [to all the women who]
outside the country. 2020, unlucky drivers saw in the suffered in their flesh.
To advertise contact The measures came after a new year trapped under a glut of “To enshrine this right in our
advertising.
deadly weekend that marked tumbleweeds. And in California constitution is to close the door on
enquiries@
a new low in Haiti’s spiral of in 2018, tumbleweeds shut down the tragedy of the past and its trail
theguardian.com
violence. But just hours after a whole town. of suffering and pain.”
To subscribe, visit the decree, gunmen launched a
theguardian.com/ new attack on the country’s main
gw-subscribe airport on Monday, exchanging
3 U N I T E D S TAT E S 5 U N I T E D S TAT E S
fire with police and soldiers.
Manage your Jimmy Chérizier, a former elite
subscription at
Most voters think Biden too Trump wrongly removed
police officer known as Barbecue
subscribe. who now runs an alliance of old to be effective president from ballot, court rules
theguardian.com/ gangs, claimed responsibility for A majority of voters in the US Donald Trump was wrongly
manage
the attacks, saying the goal was believe Joe Biden is just too old removed from Colorado’s primary
to capture Haiti’s police chief to be an effective president, ballot last year, the US supreme
USA and Canada
gwsubsus
and government ministers and according to a new poll by the New court ruled on Monday.
@theguardian.com prevent Henry’s return. York Times and Siena College. The court’s significant decision
Toll Free: At least nine people have been The poll found 73% of registered overturns a 4-3 ruling from the
+1-844-632-2010 killed since last Thursday, among voters believe Biden, 81, is too old Colorado supreme court that said
them four police officers. to be effective, in turn revealing the former president could not
Australia and spreading concerns about the run because he had engaged in
New Zealand president’s mental competency. insurrection during the January 6
apac.help Among those who voted for attack on the Capitol. The decision
@theguardian.com Biden in 2020, 61% believe Biden’s was a novel interpretation of
Toll Free:
age will make him an ineffective section 3 of the 14th amendment,
1 800 773 766
president for a second term. Biden which bars insurrectionists
UK, Europe and is the oldest president ever to from holding office. It has never
Rest of World seek re-election, though his likely been used to bar a presidential
gwsubs@ challenger, Donald Trump, is only candidate from office.
theguardian.com four years younger. Spotlight Page 33 
+44 (0) 330 333 6767

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

UK headlines p8

8 GERMANY

Russia accused of waging

6 CANADA
Scientist fed China classified
information, says report
A leading research scientist
at Canada’s highest-security
laboratory provided confidential
scientific information to Chinese
institutions, met secretly with
officials and posed “a realistic
and credible threat to Canada’s
economic security” according to
intelligence reports.
The dismissal of Xiangguo
Qiu and her husband, Keding
Cheng, has been shrouded in
mystery ever since the couple
were escorted from Winnipeg’s
National Microbiology Laboratory
in 2019 and fired two years later.
The reports were among more
than 600 documents released after
opposition legislators demanded
information on the sackings.
‘information war’ after leak
Germany’s defence minister has
accused Russia of conducting
an “information war” aimed at
creating divisions within the 4
country, in Boris Pistorius’s first
comments after the publication of
an audio recording of a meeting of
3 senior German military officials.
Russian media last Friday
published a 38-minute recording
of a call in which German officers
were heard discussing weapons
for Ukraine and a potential strike
by Kyiv on a bridge in Crimea,
prompting officials in Moscow to
1 demand an explanation.
Germany has called it an
apparent act of eavesdropping and
said it was investigating.
Spotlight Page 19 
10 N O R WAY

7 NICARAGUA

Oppression ‘tantamount to
crimes against humanity’
UN-backed human rights experts
have accused the country’s
government of systematic human
rights abuses “tantamount
to crimes against humanity”,
implicating a range of senior
officials in the government of
President Daniel Ortega.
The government has pursued
opponents for years, but it hit
a turning point with mass anti-
government protests in 2018 that
resulted in violent repression
by authorities. In the past year,
repression has expanded, with
a focus on “incapacitating any
opposition”, the investigators said.
9 H E A LT H
Number of obese people
worldwide passes 1bn
More than 1 billion people
worldwide are living with obesity,
with rates among children
quadrupling across a 32-year
period, new research shows.
Analysis of the weight and
height measurements of over
220 million people from more than
190 countries shows how body
mass index changed across the
world between 1990 and 2022.
Approximately 1,500
researchers contributed to the
study by the NCD Risk Factor
Collaboration with the World
Health Organization. It found
obesity rates had doubled among
adults over that period, while rates
of people who are underweight
fell for children and adults.
Battle to save pristine rock
art from vast new quarry
Archaeologists have warned the
Vingen carvings, one of the largest
and most significant sites of rock
art in northern Europe, are under
“catastrophic” threat.
The site is threatened after
a quarry, a shipping port and
a crushing plant in the area
of nearby Frøysjøen received
planning permission in February.
Trond Lødøen, associate
professor in archaeology at the
University Museum of Bergen in
Norway, described the stone age
rock carvings as “extraordinary”,
but warned planned development
in the area could have a
“devastating impact”.

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

11 B U R K I N A FA S O
14 PA K I S TA N
About 170 people ‘executed’
in attacks on three villages
About 170 people were “executed”
in attacks on three villages in
northern Burkina Faso last month,
a regional prosecutor has said,
as jihadist violence flares in the
junta-ruled country.
On that same day, 25 February,
separate attacks on a mosque in
eastern Burkina and a Catholic Shehbaz Sharif wins second
church in the north left dozens
spell as prime minister
more dead.
Aly Benjamin Coulibaly said he Shehbaz Sharif has been
had received reports of the attacks appointed prime minister
on the villages of Komsilga, Nodin after a vote that was riddled
15
and Soroe in Yatenga province, with allegations of rigging and
with a provisional toll of “around irregularities.
17
170 people executed”. Sharif, of the Pakistan Muslim
Survivors said dozens of League Nawaz party, was the
women and young children were nominated candidate of a new
among the victims. eight-party coalition that was
formed after no single party
won an outright majority in the
18
election on 8 February.
Sharif is the younger brother
of the three-time former prime
minister Nawaz Sharif and served
as prime minister from April 2022
until August 2023.

12 GHANA
Crackdown intensifies on
LGBTQ people and activists
The country’s parliament
has passed legislation that
intensifies a crackdown on the
rights of LGBTQ people and
those promoting lesbian, gay or
other non-conventional sexual
or gender identities in the west
African country.
The new legislation passed
last Wednesday imposes a prison
sentence of up to five years for the
“wilful promotion, sponsorship or
support of LGBTQ+ activities”.
The bill still has to be validated
by the president before becoming
law, which observers believe is
unlikely before a general election
in December.
16
13 CHAD
Opposition leader Yaya
Dillo killed in gun clash
Opposition politician Yaya
Dillo has been killed during an
exchange of fire with security
forces, the state prosecutor,
Oumar Mahamat Kedelaye, said.
Heavy gunfire was heard
last Wednesday in the capital,
N’Djamena, near the headquarters
of Dillo’s opposition party, a
witness said. Several people had
been killed in earlier clashes
near Chad’s internal security
agency building.
The violence flared amid
tensions in the lead-up to a
presidential election set for
May and June that could return
the central African state to
constitutional rule three years
after the military seized power.

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 The big story p10 
Global report 7

15 IRAN 17 I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E 19 NEW ZEALAND D E AT H S

Pressure mounts after Tour agents ordered to pay

Election turnout hits record
low as voters shun polls
The turnout in Iran’s
parliamentary elections appears
to have dropped to 41%, a record
low, but according to the official
figures, not quite to the levels
of mass abstention that some
surveys had predicted.
Polls closed at midnight last
Friday, six hours later than
planned due to what officials
claimed was a second surge in
polls in the evening, but Tehran’s
middle class stayed away, fewer
than 24% of the 8 million eligible
to vote bothering to do so.
Overall, the turnout and result
could leave conservatives firmly
in charge and free to pursue their
economic and foreign policies.
It is possible that some relatively
unknown candidates opposed to
the status quo have been elected
in the provinces.
Gaza food aid truck deaths eruption survivors $10m
Israel is facing growing A court has ordered the tour
international pressure for an agents and managers of an island
investigation after more than 100 where a volcanic eruption killed 22 Iris Apfel
Palestinians in Gaza were killed people to pay survivors more than US designer and
when desperate crowds gathered NZ$10m ($6.1m) and fined them style icon. She
around aid trucks and Israeli around NZ$2.6m. died on 1 March,
troops opened fire last Thursday. Tour operators White Island aged 102.
Israel said people died in a Tours, Volcanic Air Safaris, Kahu
crush or were run over by aid New Zealand and Aerius, along Brian Mulroney
lorries, although it admitted its with the corporate owner of the Former Canadian
troops had opened fire on what island, Whakaari Management prime minister
it called a “mob”. But the head Ltd, were found to have not who struck a
of a hospital in Gaza said 80% of sufficiently ensured the safety of landmark free
injured people brought in had visitors to the island, according to trade deal with
gunshot wounds. court filings. the US but whose
Last Friday, a UN team that There were 47 people on White legacy was marred
visited some of the wounded Island, also known by the Māori by scandal.
in Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital name of Whakaari, when the He died on 29
saw a “large number of gunshot volcano erupted on 9 December February, aged 84.
wounds”, UN chief Antonio 2019. Many of the survivors were
Guterres’s spokesman said. badly burnt by searing gas and Ali Hassan
The hospital received 70 of ash. Most of the victims were Mwinyi
the dead and treated more than international tourists. Tanzania’s
700 wounded, of whom around second post-
200 were still there during the independence
team’s visit, spokesman Stéphane president. He died
Dujarric said. on 29 February,
The Hamas-run health ministry aged 98.
in Gaza said 112 people were killed
and more than 750 others injured Eleanor Collins
as crowds rushed towards a Canada’s “first
convoy of trucks carrying food aid. lady of jazz”. She
Spotlight Page 15  died on 3 March,
aged 104.

16 INDONESIA
Activists condemn award
for presumed successor
19
Activists have condemned a
decision by the outgoing president
to award the rank of honorary
four-star general to his presumed
successor, Prabowo Subianto, a
controversial figure accused of
human rights violations.
Prabowo, 72, a former son-in-
law of the dictator Suharto and a
special commander in his regime,
was dismissed from the military
over allegations he was involved
in kidnapping and torturing pro-
democracy activists in 1998.
Prabowo, who has since
softened his image, is presumed
to have won last month’s
presidential election.
18 INDIA
Drivers in fatal train crash
were watching cricket
The drivers of a train that missed a
signal and ploughed into another
train, killing 14 people, were
distracted because they were
watching cricket on a phone, the
railways minister has said.
The fatal collision in Andhra
Pradesh state in October took
place as hosts India played
England during the one-day
World Cup.
“The recent case in Andhra
Pradesh happened because
both the loco-pilot and co-pilot
were distracted by the cricket
match,” Ashwini Vaishnaw said,
according to the Press Trust of
India news agency.
Richard Lewis
20 T A I WA N US comedian
and Curb Your
Mental health leave offered
Enthusiasm star.
as youth suicides double He died on 27
High schools will begin offering February, aged 76.
mental health leave to students
this month, to address rising rates Nikolai Ryzhkov
of youth suicide and high levels of Former Soviet
stress and depression. prime minister.
Students can apply for up to He died on 28
three days off each term, taken February, aged 94.
as full or half days. More than 40
schools have expressed interest Paolo Taviani
in the trial run, according to the Italian film-
ministry of education. maker. He died
Between 2014 and 2022, the on 29 February,
suicide rate among people aged 15 aged 92.
to 24 more than doubled.
But some advocates say
extreme academic pressure on
students is a key driver of stress,
anxiety and depression.

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly


8 Global report
United Kingdom
POLITICS
Sunak speech fails to
dampen ‘Islamophobia’ row
Sadiq Khan condemned Rishi
Sunak for failing to call out “racist,
anti-Muslim and Islamophobic”
remarks by a senior Tory MP,
following an address by the prime
minister last Friday in which he
criticised political extremists.
In a blunt response to Sunak’s
unusual speech, the London
mayor said the prime minister had
still not fully addressed the nature
of the remarks made last month
by former Tory vice-chair Lee
Anderson, who said Islamists had
“got control” of Khan and London.
Khan, one of the most powerful
Muslims in public life, warned
that the past few weeks had
seen “a concerted and growing
attempt by some to degrade and
humiliate minorities for political
and electoral gain”.
It followed a fractious week
in which the veteran political
agitator George Galloway won
the Rochdale byelection after
a contest beset by chaos and
controversy and dominated by
the conflict in Gaza. Following the
result, Sunak made an impromptu
speech stating that democracy
was under attack and criticising
150k
voters for backing Galloway.
However, Khan said Sunak had
still not addressed Anderson’s
The salary, remarks. While the Tory MP
in pounds was suspended, ministers have
($190,000), being refused to say the remarks
offered by NHS amounted to Islamophobia.
executives in the An opinion poll on Monday put
Western Isles of support for the Tories at its lowest
Scotland in an level for 40 years. According to
attempt to solve a Ipsos’s monthly political monitor,
GP shortage. The Labour was on 47%, down two
package includes points on the previous month, and
a 40% “enhanced the Conservatives were on 20%,
rate” above the down seven points.
normal pay range Spotlight Page 22 
for a Scottish GP
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
S L AV E RY
Church aims for £1bn fund
to address legacy of slavery
The Church of England will aim
to turn a £100m ($130m) financial
commitment into a £1bn fund
to address the legacy of slavery
in order to reflect the scale of
“moral sin”. The church should
work in partnership with other
organisations to create the fund
that will be used to invest globally
in black-led businesses and
provide grants, said a report from
an independent group of advisers
commissioned by the C of E.
The Church Commissioners,
the body that manages the C of E’s
huge financial assets, accepted
the report in full. However, it is
not increasing the investment but
is aiming to attract co-investors.
A £1bn fund would dwarf moves
made by other UK institutions to
address the legacy of slavery.
U K N E WS
Section of felled Sycamore
Gap tree to go on display
The largest section of the
Sycamore Gap tree unlawfully cut
down last September is to go on
public display, Northumberland
national park has announced. The
tree, which stood in a dip next to
Hadrian’s Wall, will be exhibited
in Hexham, not far from where it
once stood. The national park said
it had received 2,000 “heartfelt”
messages from people from all
around the world expressing
sorrow after the tree’s toppling,
labelled by police as a “deliberate
act of vandalism”.
Though a man in his 60s and a
16-year-old boy were arrested in
connection with the incident, no
further action was taken.
UK opinion p48
H I S T O RY
Historic Faroese sweater
unearthed in pile of letters
A 200-year-old sweater in a
style closely resembling Faroese
national dress was found in
“pristine” condition among a
stash of 19th-century letters at the
National Archives. The jumper
was intended for a woman in
Denmark but never reached her
because the vessel on which it was
being transported was seized by
the Royal Navy during the second
battle of Copenhagen in 1807.
POLICE
Official report lays bare
failings over Everard killer
The full extent of Wayne Couzens’
alleged offending was laid bare in
a devastating report that revealed
accusations of serial sexual abuse
including rapes, before he used
his status as a Metropolitan police
officer to kidnap and murder Sarah
Everard in March 2021. His alleged
offending, going back nearly 20
years, included two allegations
of rape, sexually assaulting a girl
barely in her teens and several
incidents of indecent exposure.
The failures laid out in the
report by Elish Angiolini were
worse than previously thought,
including catastrophically flawed
vetting, which allowed him to join
the Met when he should have been
rejected, then stay in policing and
be entrusted with a gun. Lady
Angiolini said there may be other
victims yet to come forward and
other officers as dangerous as
Couzens at large.
Everard’s family criticised the
police in a statement and told how
her loss haunted every part of
their lives.
 Do you have a recently taken picture you’d like to share with
Guardian Weekly? Scan the QR code or visit theguardian.com/
9
pictures-guardian-weekly and we’ll print your best submissions

 Reader’s
eyewitness
Hare raising
While out
for a walk we
saw these two
hares first of all
chasing each
other then
stopping for a
boxing match.
This was my
favourite shot
of their annual
event as it
appears the hare
on the right has
landed a perfect
right hook on
his opponent.
By Peter Scase,
Butzbach,
Germany

SCIENCE AND
EN V IRON M EN T
PA L A E O N T O L O G Y
The 280m-year-old fossil that
turned out to be a forgery
Modern imaging techniques have
revealed that a 280m-year-old
fossilised reptile, Tridentinosaurus
antiquus, discovered in the Italian
Alps in 1931 is, in fact, a carving
covered in black paint.
Dr Valentina Rossi, from
University College Cork, in Ireland,
and her team used ultraviolet
photography to look beneath the
paint. Instead of finding the hoped-
for soft tissues of the lizard-like
reptile, they found an elaborate fake.
worried about the potential health
impacts on developing foetuses.
The scientists analysed 62
placental tissue samples and found
the most common plastic detected
was polyethylene, which is used
to make plastic bags and bottles. A
second study revealed microplastics
in all 17 human arteries tested.
Prof Matthew Campen, at the
University of New Mexico, US, who
led the research, said: “If we are
seeing effects on placentas, then all
mammalian life on this planet could
be impacted. That’s not good.”
The research was published in the
Toxicological Sciences journal.
MEDICA L R ESE A RCH
Ultra-processed food linked
diet consists of ultra-processed food.
For some, especially people who
are younger or from disadvantaged
areas, a diet comprising as much as
80% UPF is typical.
The review involving almost
10 million people and experts
from institutions including Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health, the University of Sydney and
Sorbonne University.
SCIEN TIFIC R ESE A RCH
Scientist wins dance prize for
quirky video on kangaroos
Former Canberra scientist Dr
Weliton Menário Costa, who
now goes by the name Weli, has
won the global Dance Your PhD
competition, for his quirky take on

Reporting in Palaeontology,
Rossi and her colleagues suggest
the problem is growing, with a huge
market for fake fossils.
PLASTICS
Microplastics found in every
placenta tested in study
Microplastics have been found in
every human placenta tested in
a study, leaving the researchers
to 32 harmful ef fects to health
Ultra-processed food (UPF) is
directly linked to 32 harmful effects
to health, including a higher risk
of heart disease, cancer, type 2
diabetes, adverse mental health and
early death, according to the world’s
largest review of its kind.
The findings published in the BMJ
come amid rising consumption of
UPF such as cereals, protein bars,
fizzy drinks and fast food. In the UK
and US, more than half the average
140
kangaroo behaviour.
His four-minute video, titled
Kangaroo Time, features drag
The level in queens, twerking, ballerinas, a
decibels of the classical Indian dancer and a bunch
sound the tiny of friends Weli acquired from the
fish Danionella Australian National University.
cerebrum is The video collected the top prize
able to generate, awarded annually by the American
equivalent to an Association for the Advancement
ambulance siren of Science, Science magazine and
or pneumatic San Francisco-based artificial
drill intelligence company Primer.ai.

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

10 The big story Myanmar’s Rohingya

BANGLADESH

In the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, where a million people fled from
genocide in Myanmar, Rohingya hold little hope of return – and are
finding their lives devastated by diseases such as cancer and diabetes
By Kaamil Ahmed COX’S BAZAR

he tumours that
kept growing in her
chest were cut out
three times before
Noor Saimun, a
Rohingya refugee
in Bangladesh,
was tested for can-
cer. By the time it was diagnosed, the
cancer had spread from her breast
throughout her body.
Saimun now spends her days
incapacitated by pain, lying on the
floor of her bamboo shelter. Around
her, many of her neighbours suffer
other types of non-communicable and
chronic illnesses – cancers, diabetes
and hypertension – but they often go
without treatment and the tools they
need to manage their conditions.
“My life is meaningless, I can’t move
anywhere, I can’t do anything,” said
Saimun. “I sit here in pain, I can’t even
get up to eat. I spend my whole day
lying in bed. I can’t explain how much
pain I’m in.”
Last week the UN warned that
people caught up in humanitarian
emergencies are at increased risk of
cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabe-
tes and other non-communicable dis-
eases (NCDs), which are responsible for
more than 70% of deaths worldwide.
It is estimated that strokes and
heart attacks are up to three times
more likely after a disaster, and UN
agencies met in Denmark last week
to ensure that care and treatment for
NCDs are included as a standard part
of humanitarian emergency prepared-
ness and response.

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024


! Noor Saimun
in her shelter at
a refugee camp
for Rohingya in
Cox’s Bazar
KAAMIL AHMED
A million people live in the Rohingya
refugee camps of Bangladesh’s Cox’s
Bazar district, and today, six years after
the refugees started to arrive, driven
from their homes in Myanmar by the
military, the prospect of returning
home is as distant as ever. Those living
with chronic illnesses have to contend
with funding cuts that mean a lack of
medication, struggle to get the nutri-
tion needed to avoid or manage their
conditions and a lack of health services
that can even detect their ailments.
“People living with NCDs in
humanitarian crises are more likely
to see their condition worsen due
to trauma, stress, or the inability to
access medicines or services,” said Dr
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the
head of the World Health Organization.
For Saimun, it was only after three
surgeries and an incorrect tuberculo-
sis diagnosis from camp clinics that
she found the money and obtained
permission to travel the 40km to a
hospital in Cox’s Bazar town that she
was finally told she had cancer.
But chemotherapy was only
available at a hospital in Chattogram –
160km away – and while money lent by
neighbours funded her journey there
for the first three rounds, Saimun could
not afford the fourth and final trip.
Restrictions on Rohingya working
or moving beyond the camps make
living with chronic illnesses more
‘I sit here in pain, I
can’t even get up to
eat. I spend my whole
day lying in bed’
11
Held to ransom
Rohingya traf ficking, page 13 
Wave of fear
Myanmar’s conscription law, page 14 
difficult than in Myanmar, where
despite persecution , their rural
surroundings gave them better access
to healthy food and a more active
lifestyle.
The camps, which grew into the
world’s largest in 2017 after genocidal
massacres by the Myanmar military,
are sprawling and many of their resi-
dents desperate. Funding cuts have hit
food as well as healthcare, which only
had 25% of its needs funded in 2023,
while rising crime and de facto bans
on internal transport make it hard for
patients to access healthcare.
While most Rohingya would like to
return to their homes, they demand a
guarantee of safety and the restoration
of their citizenship – removed in 1982.
Instead, Myanmar faces widespread
fighting between the military junta
and armed groups, including in their
native Rakhine where the rebel Ara-
kan Army recently forced hundreds
of Myanmar troops into Bangladesh.
In response the Myanmar military
has reportedly conscripted Rohingya
in the fight against the Arakan Army,
who belong to Rakhine state’s other
major ethnic group, the Rakhine.
Bangladeshi official sources said
the government is struggling with
the long-term burden of the refugees,
especially with reduced aid funding,
and that it wants a dignified and volun-
tary repatriation. But they accused the
world of forgetting the Rohingya crisis
and said influential countries such as
the US and UK had not put enough
pressure on Myanmar to ensure the
Rohingya’s safety.
Many of the Rohingya living 
with chronic illnesses blame their
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
12 The big story EXPLAINER
The plight of Myanmar’s displaced people
Myanmar’s Rohingya

and facilities, with very hilly terrain It has been more moved to Bhasan
and no transportation within the than six years since Char, a remote island
camps, particularly for people who
Myanmar’s military camp in the Bay of
already have chronic conditions or
older patients,” she said. launched a campaign Bengal, while a fence
She said refugees often have to of massacres that was built around the
leave the camps and pay for private killed about 7,000 rest of the camps,
healthcare, which presents specific Rohingya in a single stopping Rohingya
challenges to some, such as insulin
users who must go to a clinic for injec-
month and compelled moving without
tions but need to organise transport. 700,000 to flee for the permission. Rohingya
“Healthcare in most facilities are Bangladeshi border. are not allowed to
not set up to treat people with chronic Since the first major work and Rohingya-
illnesses. We are, but we don’t have military operation run education centres
anywhere near the capacity to treat
everyone in need,” she said.
against the minority for secondary-level
Some of the complaints the in 1978, which forced children have
Rohingya have were recognised by a out 200,000, the been closed.
▲ Abul Hossain developed diabetes 2022 study by Bangladeshi research- Rohingya have been A few dozen
after arriving in Bangladesh as a refugee
ers, which found that among the risk collectively stripped Rohingya have been
factors of NCDs, 89% of the respond-
KAAMIL AHMED of their citizenship taken in by the US
ents lacked physical activity in their
lives in the camps for their conditions, daily lives and almost a quarter did and targeted with but otherwise other
saying the restriction on movement not eat enough fruit and vegetables. increasing violence countries have not
and work force them into being idle Sajida, 38, has diabetes and was told and discrimination helped, and a return to
while the lack of access to healthy food she should eat more healthily. But her that culminated in the Myanmar is a remote
increases the risk of becoming ill. rations barely cover the basics and do
“clearance operations” prospect. The result
Abul Hossain, 41, said he recently not allow her to buy a varied diet.
spent several months in Myanmar Funding cuts have also hit World that began in 2017. is increased human
working as a fisher and farmer because Food Programme rations for refugees, Those operations were traf f icking along boat
he could not work in Bangladesh and limiting food choices mostly at the years in the planning, routes to south-east
the activity meant he no longer experi- expense of protein or fibre and leaving according to military Asia, which led to the
enced the symptoms of the diabetes he people reliant on rice to fill them up.
was diagnosed with in 2019, two years The number of crises affecting
documents uncovered deaths of 569 people
after he arrived as a refugee. people’s health has been increasing by the Commission for last year.
Back in Bangladesh, Hossain said internationally. In 2023, the WHO International Justice Since the 2021
he feels the symptoms again – he often responded to 65 health emergencies and Accountability military coup,
has to urinate and has bouts of weak- worldwide, up from 40 in 2013. UNHCR and sent to the Myanmar has done
ness. While he was told to take four also issued 43 emergency declarations
international criminal nothing to indicate it
tablets of metformin a day to lower to scale up support in 29 countries – the
his blood sugars, he is given only two. highest number in decades. court. would recognise the
“The doctor tells me to avoid stress, “The camp is full of difficulties, One million Rohingya. Many of
to try to have a calm home life but how there’s a huge difference between our Rohingya have their villages have been
can I?” said Hossain. “The situation lives in Myanmar and here. There we been left to live in turned into military
around me makes me depressed. The had everything we needed but here
life we’re spending here is painful. we are stuck in our tents. In Myanmar
temporary shelters bases or swallowed by
Camp life is like an open prison, we we had good, fresh food. We had fish, in Bangladesh. More vegetation.
can’t move beyond the boundaries. We fruit, meat. Here it costs money to than 30,000 have been Kaamil Ahmed
can’t move around. Prisoners wait for get fresh food but we don’t have the
their meals to be delivered at a certain money for it,” said Sajida.
time – we are like that.” “The doctor told me to have fresh
He was told to get regular eye tests fruit, vegetables, to have less rice and
and to get checked for kidney disease to exercise. But I don’t have the money
but he cannot afford to pay for the for these things.”
tests. He has no blood-testing kit of KAAMIL AHMED IS A JOURNALIST
his own and the clinic that treats him ON THE GUARDIAN GLOBAL
provides only one test a month. DEVELOPMENT DESK
Jennifer Stella, the Médecins Sans
Frontières project medical referent at ‘The situation makes
Jamtoli refugee camp, said the charity
me depressed. It’s like
KAAMIL AHMED

has seen 56,000 people over the past

year and treats 5,000 but the camps in
general have a lack of capacity.
an open prison, we
“There’s limited access to healthcare can’t move around’

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024


BANGLADESH
Held to ransom
Rohingya face
exploitation
at the hands
of traffickers
By Kaamil Ahmed and Verena Hölzl
COX’S BAZAR
E
ven as dehydration was
getting to their passengers,
the traffickers using boats to
carry hundreds of Rohingya
away from refugee camps in Bangla-
desh thrust phones into their hands
and demanded they ask their relatives
for money.
It was only after 28-year-old Rehana
Begum’s relatives had paid almost
$2,500 to the traffickers that they
agreed to continue their journey, but
a few days later, still onboard the boat,
she fell unconscious and later died
from dehydration.
Death, abuse and torture are com-
mon features of the journeys provided
by a growing network of traffickers.
They offer an escape from deteriorat-
ing conditions in Bangladesh refugee
camps, where hundreds of thousands
of Rohingya – a mostly Muslim ethnic
minority – were forced to flee after
being expelled from Myanmar.
Rohingya trafficking victims and
their families told the Guardian of
being held at sea or in jungles until
their families make payments, while
many end up missing, imprisoned or
die along the way.
Ransoms of almost $4,000 can be
demanded by the traffickers once
refugees have begun journeys from
Bangladesh to south-east Asia, where
they believe they can live and work
more freely.
Women, many of whom are being
trafficked for marriage in Malaysia to
Rohingya men, are vulnerable to sex-
ual violence at the hands of traffickers.
Malaysia, where more than 100,000
Rohingya are registered by the UN, was
for years the preferred destination, but
rising hostility has meant traffickers
now take many to Indonesia.
The UN’s refugee agency revealed
that at least 569 Rohingya died or
went missing at sea last year trying
to migrate, mainly from Bangladesh
– making the waters between the Bay
of Bengal and Andaman Sea one of the
world’s deadliest stretches.
A former broker in the camps – who
was paid almost $380 for each person
he could persuade to make the journey
– says ransoms taken while the victims
were held in secret locations were a
key part of the process, despite many
having paid upfront or made agree-
ments to pay once they had reached
their destination.
Several Rohingya describe
trafficking camps in Shamila, not
far from the Bangladeshi border in
Myanmar’s Rakhine state, and Thai-
land, where they would be held until
the ransoms were paid. An 18-year-
old Rohingya man said in Thailand he
witnessed traffickers beating others
and slashing them with knives.
13
‘The Rohingya are
desperate, but there
is still no solution
for their situation’
Aziz, a Rohingya man who arrived
in Indonesia in November after 17 days
at sea, said he witnessed a woman die
from dehydration on an overcrowded
boat that had 280 people on it.
Bangladesh, which wants the Roh-
ingya to return to Myanmar, has built
fences around the camps. Most forms
of education have been prohibited
and the Rohingya are not allowed to
work. Meanwhile, cuts to international
humanitarian funding have made
living conditions worse, with food
rations cut from $12 to $10 a month.
Heavy price A month ago, Shafique* was
Fleeing hospitalised for five days after a group
Bangladesh
of masked men stormed into his bam-
boo shelter after midnight, dragged
him into the street and hit him with
$4k
a hammer. “Since that night, my chil-
dren don’t want me to leave our shelter
Ransom any more,” he said, hunched over and
kneading his hands.
traffickers
demand from
refugees
Shafique has been unable to work
since, losing what he earned as an
informal labourer and having to rely
$380
on the meagre food rations provided
to the refugees.
Chris Lewa, the director of the
Amount a broker Arakan Project, tracks boat journeys
was paid for each and has spoken to recently arrived
person he could refugees in Indonesia. She said several
persuade to make Rohingya told her they had been kid-
the journey napped by armed groups from camps.
“The Rohingya are desperate, but
569
Number of
there is still no solution for their situ-
ation,” Lewa said. “States in the region
need to find a solution on how to pro-
Rohingya who tect the Rohingya better.”
died or went Meanwhile, the trafficking network
missing at continues to operate and people still
sea last year, leave the camps, searching for a better
according to life but vulnerable to profit-motivated
the UN traffickers. The former broker said
their work grows because everyone
profits, even Rohingya community
leaders and camp authorities, who
are paid to turn a blind eye.
“I stopped because it felt like I was
selling my own people,” he said. “It
has corrupted throughout the camp,
▲ A boat so if someone tries to stop it they can’t
holding about do anything. Every day the traffickers
250 Rohingya are calling, asking for more people.”
refugees arrives VERENA HÖLZL IS A JOURNALIST BASED
in Indonesia IN BANGKOK
AMANDA JUFRIAN/AFP * Name has been changed
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
14 The big story
Myanmar’s Rohingya
M YA N M A R
New law
sparks fear
as potential
conscripts
try to flee
By Rebecca Ratcliffe
and Aung Naing Soe
A
cross Myanmar, the young
and middle aged, both men
and women, are desperately
searching for ways to flee
their homes, after it was announced
the military junta will impose a manda-
tory conscription law from mid-April.
The law, which would force people to
serve a military many despise, has sent
a wave of terror across the country.
Passport offices and embassies in
Myanmar have been flooded with
applications, with a queue of more
than a thousand people on a single day
trying to secure a visa for neighbouring
Thailand. Helplines offering advice
on ways to leave the country – how to
manage checkpoints, what documents
are needed – have been inundated.
“If I joined the military, I would
have to fight my own people. I do
not want to do that,” said Thura, who
spoke under a pseudonym, from Shan
State. “The military is infamous – they
are killing people, arresting people,
doing so many unjust things.”
His wife, he added, had urged him
to leave her and their eight-year-old
daughter behind.
UN special rapporteur for Myanmar
Tom Andrews warned last month
the number of people fleeing across
borders to escape conscription “will
surely skyrocket”.
In Thura’s area, streets are now
empty by early evening. “It’s very
unusual to see any people, any young
people, on the road,” he said. “The
shops and cafes are all closed by 6pm.”
Even before the conscription was
announced, there were reports of
people being snatched on the streets
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
and forcibly recruited. Activists fear
conscripts will be used as porters to
carry supplies on the frontline. In the
past, the military has used porters as
human shields, sending them out in
front to trip landmines and shield sol-
diers from gunfire.
Under the 2010 People’s Military
Service Law, to be enacted next month,
men aged 18 up to 35, or women aged
18 to 27, will be conscripted for up to
five years in an emergency situation.
For men and women who are consid-
ered professionals, a vaguely defined
category that includes medical doc-
tors, engineers, or other professional
groups, the age cut-off is higher – 35
for women, and 45 for men.
The junta recently clarified its initial
announcement, saying women will
not be conscripted for now. This claim
has been treated with scepticism by
the public, however, and many women
are still trying to flee.
The military, which seized power in
a coup in February 2021, a move that
has been strongly opposed by the
public, has been unable to control an
armed opposition to its rule, which
includes citizens who have taken up
arms as well as older ethnic armed
organisations that have long fought
against the military. The junta’s deci-
sion to impose conscription reflects
the recent devastating losses it has
faced on the battlefield, in which
entire battalions have surrendered,
and key territory lost along the border
with China.
“There’s already a refugee crisis
and it’s going to get worse,” said Deb-
bie Stothard, founder of the regional
human rights group Altsean. “Even
low-ranking civil servants are sneak-
ing away and disappearing because
they know they are likely to be drafted
if push comes to shove.”
Options for fleeing Myanmar are
limited and fraught with danger: cross
legally or illegally into a neighbouring
country, or travel to an area that’s con-
trolled by anti-coup groups, and hope
There’s that you do not get stopped by junta
already officials along the way.
a refugee Getting the correct papers takes
time and money, a luxury most don’t
crisis and
have. Appointments for the passport
office are booked until August, accord-
it’s going to ing to media reports, and some have
get worse been so overwhelmed that overcrowd-
ing has proved deadly.
For people who belong to ethnic
minorities, which have long been
oppressed in Myanmar, there are
even fewer options. Thura, a Roh-
ingya Muslim, has been unable to get
a new passport because officials say
his national ID card lists him as being
Bengali – a racial slur used to imply that
Rohingya people are not true citizens.
Activists have reported recent cases
in which Rohingya have been arrested
from villages or a refugee camp in
Rakhine state, alleging they have been
forcibly enlisted in the military.
I
n Mandalay city, junta officials
toured townships last month,
using loudspeakers to try to reas-
sure people and dispel reports
that people were being kidnapped
and forcibly recruited, according to
a report by Myanmar Now. In Tanin-
tharyi region, in the south, pamphlets
with similar messages, saying there
were no barriers to leaving the country,
were also distributed, according to
Dawei Watch.
Kyaw Gyi, an activist who supports
workers, including garment workers,
and who spoke under a pseudonym,
said the military had collected a list of
names for each household in his town-
▼ Myanmar ship. “We thought it was just for the
military officers census but then they unexpectedly
march during announced conscription,” he said. “It’s
a parade made us more worried.”
AUNG SHINE OO/AP He is 36 and not a professional, he
added, so he should be exempt, but he
is hardly reassured. “The military does
whatever it wants,” he said.
Thura fears he will be required to
serve, even though he is 38, because
he is a lawyer and therefore a profes-
sional. He dreads having to leave his
wife and daughter behind. “It would be
very difficult for them,” he said. “They
would be on their own. But if there’s no
option left, I would have to go.”
REBECCA RATCLIFFE IS THE
GUARDIAN’S SOUTH-EAST ASIA
CORRESPONDENT; AUNG NAING SOE IS A
MULTIMEDIA JOURNALIST
 15
In-depth reporting and analysis

CHINA
Party games:
leaders stick to
a united front
Page 18 

I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E

The man who

A
few weeks before his death, So when he heard that a rare delivery ▲ The body of
Bilal el-Essi took a photo of a of food aid might reach northern Gaza a Palestinian
man’s body, sprawled under in the early hours of last Thursday, he is taken away

was killed a women’s bike in a Gaza

City street, a child’s pink backpack
made his way to the seafront Al Rashid
Road with two brothers, their cousin
from the coastal
road in Gaza City

looking for fallen from the basket.

The man was killed trying to find
food for his family, Essi told friends
Moataz el-Essi told the Guardian by
phone from Germany.
Bilal, a football-mad 28-year-old
where a group of
Palestinians were
attacked

food for his and family when he shared the image,

a snapshot of the tragedy and despera-
who was quick with a joke, joined
hundreds of people huddled around
AFP/GETTY

daughters tion in Gaza City.

By Aseel Mousa GAZA and
Emma Graham-Harrison JERUSALEM
Essi knew the terrible pain of not
being able to feed the people you love,
and it got sharper every day that he
could not find milk for his two girls,
five-year-old Layan and two-year-old
Mila, or bread for his father.
small fires waiting in the bitter cold
for the trucks of food.
Shukri Fleifel, a 21-year-old
photographer and film-maker, was also
in the crowd. He had watched Israeli
forces open fire on people waiting for
Continued 
aid trucks in the same spot just a few
16 Spotlight
Middle East
days earlier, he said. But like everyone
else in Gaza City, he was hungry.
“There is quite literally nothing
available to buy in the markets,” he
said in a phone interview. “People
have been forced to resort to animal
feed, but even that is scarce.”
T
he head of the UN agency for
Palestine, Philippe Lazzarini,
last week said northern Gaza
was enduring a siege within
the broader blockade of Gaza, with its
300,000 remaining residents getting
even less aid than the south of the ter-
ritory. “When we talk about the pock-
ets of looming starvation, famine, we
primarily refer to the north,” he said.
Fleifel said that at about 4.30am,
in the pre-dawn darkness, he saw two
Israeli tanks drive down Al Rashid
Road, firing into the air to disperse
the crowds. Moments later came the
sound of trucks. “People knew that
the much-anticipated flour had finally
arrived,” he said.
But as they rushed towards the
vehicles, he noticed another Israeli
tank appeared to the north, between
Nabulsi and Sheikh Ijleen junctions.
Moments later, it opened fire, he said,
and the crowd also came under attack
from the south.
After the initial attack, the tanks
withdrew south, he said, but kept
attacking the hungry crowd. “They
used stun grenades and fired indis-
criminately, from a considerable
distance, towards citizens who were
still making their way towards the aid
trucks,” he said.
“I saw people collapsing beside
me, some injured and some already
martyred.” He threw himself between
two concrete benches and when the
firing ended, was astonished to find
he was unharmed.
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
‘The bloody Fleifel is a commercial photographer
who turned to war journalism when
scenes were his home came under attack. Even
worse than after months of filming Israeli attacks,
anything
in a horror
the bloody scenes around him seemed
worse “than anything depicted in a
horror movie”.
movie’ He watched as the wounded and
dead were taken to hospital, many piled
Shukri Fleifel
Journalist and
on carts pulled by donkeys or horses
because there were no ambulances.
photographer Israel’s military says most of the
dead were killed in an initial crush as
crowds stormed the aid trucks, and
soldiers passing through the area later
“opened fire only when they encoun-
tered danger”, shooting only in self-
defence, not into the crowd.
Fleifel said people were crushed in
the incident but only after the crowd
came under Israeli attack. “The stam-
pede and chaos was caused by the
[Israeli] occupation forces opening
fire,” he said.
Essi was separated from his
brothers in the panic that broke out
after the first bullets hit the crowd, as
everyone raced for cover, Moataz said.
When the gunfire tailed off, his broth-
ers searched frantically through the
crowd and found him, bleeding badly
from a wound in the neck.
He survived a slow journey to
hospital along devastated streets, but
died in al-Shifa hospital later; one of the
brothers who took him there and was
with him when he died told Moataz the
injury was caused by a bullet.
His brothers and father are left
with their grief and their guilt. “They
are heartbroken they didn’t stop him
going out to look for food,” Moataz
said. “Some of his brothers had fled
▼ Bilal el-Essi south, including one who is an ortho-
was among paedic and trauma doctor. He feels
the victims in that surely, if he had been there, he
the attack would have been able to help him.”
Essi, a graduate with a good job at
his uncle’s furniture company, had
lost his mother to cancer three years
earlier, a death the family says was has-
tened by Israeli restrictions on medical
imports, or on patients leaving Gaza
for treatment.
He stayed in Gaza City to look after
his father, because he refused to leave
his home even when Israeli forces
ordered an evacuation, his cousin said.
Always devoted to his family, he was
killed trying simply to keep them alive.
ASEEL MOUSA IS A JOURNALIST BASED
IN GAZA; EMMA GRAHAM-HARRISON IS
A SENIOR INTERNATIONAL REPORTER
FOR THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
EXPLAINER
I S R A E L / PA L E S T I N E
Ceasefire talks
The pathway
to a pause in
hostilities – and
the obstacles
By Archie Bland
L
ast week, Joe Biden said he
believed that a ceasefire
agreement between Israel
and Hamas could soon be
reached. But while talks continued
this week, there was no respite in
Gaza. Still, hopes remained that an
agreement could be finalised before
the beginning of the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan.
What might a deal look like?
Last Saturday, a senior US official
told reporters that “the path to a
ceasefire right now, literally at this
hour, is straightforward”. They
added: “We’re working around the
clock to see if we can get this in place
here over the coming week.” Some of
the key parameters included:
• Which hostages would be released
of those still alive in Gaza, estimated
to be fewer than 100. The senior
US official said Israel appeared to
be willing to strike a deal if Hamas
would agree to the “default defined
category of vulnerable hostages”
of the sick and wounded, elderly
people and women.
• The production of a list of the
hostages, specifying which are alive
and which are dead, which earlier
this week had not yet materialised:
Hamas said it was impossible to
produce while the fighting continues
because the remaining hostages are
being held by different groups in
different places. It appeared that up
to half of those still in captivity could
be released if a deal were done.
• The ratio of Palestinian prisoners
held by Israel to be released in
exchange, likely to involve the
release of hundreds of detainees.
• A six-week truce to begin as
 soon as a deal is announced – with
suggestions that any deal should
begin by the start of Ramadan,
around 10 March, and prevent a
threatened Israeli ground attack on
the Rafah region.
• More aid allowed into Gaza in
the hope of staving off the threat of
famine. Hamas is also demanding
that Palestinians displaced by the
fighting be allowed to return home.
• Hamas has also called for a
complete Israeli military withdrawal
from the Gaza Strip, but Benjamin
Netanyahu has refused to
countenance this before Hamas is
destroyed and all hostages are freed.
There is no suggestion by Israel
that the ceasefire would lead to the
end of war. But the US and other
countries involved in the talks,
including Qatar, have said they
hope that “such a prolonged period
of calm could then be built into
something more enduring”.
What do we know about last
week’s aid convoy deaths?
At 4.45am last Thursday, thousands
AFP/GETTY
of people rushed towards a convoy
of aid trucks moving down Gaza’s
Mediterranean coast near Gaza City.
Desperate for food amid a failure
to get adequate supplies into the
region, they surrounded the trucks.
What happened next is bitterly
contested. Israel accepts that its
soldiers opened fire, but the IDF
claims that the majority of those
who were injured or died were
trampled or run over by trucks, and
that its forces fired “warning shots”
to “disperse the stampede”.
The authorities in Gaza say the
Israeli forces killed more than 100
people and injured 700 others, and
described the incident as a massacre.
The director of the nearby Kamal
Adwan hospital, Hussam Abu Safiya,
said 12 bodies of gunshot victims
were brought there, along with 100
people with gunshot wounds.
Whatever the facts, there is no
dispute that the fundamental cause
was the desperation of thousands
of people going hungry, and the
shortage of supplies reaching the
300,000 people still trapped in the
north of Gaza in particular.
The aid shortage
Israel has maintained tight limits on
supplies getting into Gaza and truck
traffic has dropped considerably in
recent weeks – with the 98 trucks
People run as
a day that made it in February 50%
humanitarian
down on January, the UN agency for
supplies are
airdropped in Palestinian refugees says, and even
Gaza City. For January’s deliveries well below the
months, aid target of 500 trucks a day.
workers have Last Tuesday, Ramesh
warned of an Rajasingham, coordinating director
increasingly of the UN’s humanitarian office, said
desperate one in four people in Gaza are “one
situation for
step away” from famine. The head
Palestinians
of the Norwegian Refugee Council,
Jan Egeland, said he thinks there is
already a famine in the north. Last
weekend, Gaza’s health ministry
said at least 15 children died from
malnutrition and dehydration at
the Kamal Adwan hospital in the
preceding days.
That is why the US last week
organised an airdrop of supplies over
south-west Gaza. But the 38,000
meals dropped are tiny compared
with Gaza’s population of 2.2 million.
Aid workers say the only serious
means of alleviating the suffering
in Gaza is for Israel to open aid
crossings and allow supplies to cross
the border from Egypt and Israel.
ARCHIE BLAND IS THE EDITOR OF THE
GUARDIAN’S FIRST EDITION EMAIL
NEWSLETTER
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
18 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
CHINA
Two Sessions
but only one
message: the
party rules
supreme
By Helen Davidson and Amy Hawkins
C
hina held its most high-
profile annual political
gathering this week as thou-
sands of delegates arrived in
Beijing for the Two Sessions, a closely
observed series of meetings that laid
out the government’s policy blueprint
for the year ahead.
The gathering came against a
backdrop of major economic head-
winds, decreasing transparency on
government indicators, and growing
concern among international business
and investors.
The event began on Monday as
China’s parliament, the National Peo-
ple’s Congress (NPC), convened along-
side a separate but parallel meeting
of the country’s top political advisory
body, the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference (CPPCC).
The nearly 3,000 NPC delegates
can amend the constitution, enact
new legislation, approve the govern-
ment budget and fill vacancies in
state offices. But in reality the NPC is a
rubber-stamp parliament. It has never
voted down any item on the agenda,
and the Communist party (CCP) holds
the ultimate power. Nevertheless, it is
a keenly watched political event.
An agenda published by state media
revealed that current vacancies in the
state council – China’s cabinet – and
central military commission will
remain vacant for some time, with no
personnel appointments announced
during the Two Sessions.
Speculation about the fates of Qin
Gang, the former foreign minister,
and Li Shangfu, the former defence
minister, has swirled since the two
men were removed without expla-
nation. Li’s vacancy may be filled by
his replacement as defence minis-
ter, Dong Jun. But it looked far from
certain that Dong or any new foreign
minister – Qin’s predecessor, Wang Yi,
is thought to have returned only tem-
porarily – would be appointed to the
council this week.
On Monday morning, state media
reported that the CPPCC’s top body
had confirmed the removal of four sen-
ior aerospace/defence officials from
the national committee. The removals
are believed to be part of an ongoing
and secretive purge in the military.
Qin was replaced as foreign minister
▼ President Xi by his predecessor, Wang, who is also
Jinping bows the director of the more powerful CCP
at the opening foreign affairs commission.
ceremony of the Neil Thomas and Jing Qian ,
CPPCC in Beijing researchers at the Asia Society Policy
GREG BAKER/ GETTY Institute, said in an analysis, published
before the gathering, that if the spots
remained vacant, it “could suggest a
higher degree of mistrust and paralysis
at the centre of Xi’s leadership and a
poorer outlook for China’s attempts to
both manage tensions with the west
and lead the global south”.
A spokesperson for the NPC, Lou
Qinjian, addressed recent changes
to espionage laws that have drawn
concern from the international busi-
ness community, over broadened
definitions and bans on the transfer
of any information related to “national
security”. Law enforcement raids and
arrests, including on due diligence
analysis firms, have sparked warnings
of increased risk to foreign businesses
and their employees in China.
He told Monday’s press conference
this was a “misinterpretation of the
counter-espionage law” that “deni-
The NPC grated” China, and that China was still
has never committed to “reform and opening
up”, particularly to business exchange
voted down and cooperation.
any item – “It does not target normal business
activities, research work or profes-
but it is still sional exchanges,” Lou said. “China’s
a keenly door remains open to the world and its
watched door will not shut,” he said.
In a break with tradition, China’s
political leading economics official, the premier
event Li Qiang, did not address the press to
present the government work report,
which normally lays out its plans for
the year ahead.
Instead Li presented the report to
the NPC on Tuesday, setting a GDP
growth target of 5%, in line with ana-
lysts’ expectations for another year of
modest ambitions for the economy,
amid regional tensions and its demo-
graphic crisis. Official data released
in January revealed that China’s
working-age population accounted
for 61% of the economy, down from
68% in 2013.
Other targets announced by Li
included the creation of 12m new
urban jobs and increasing consumer
prices by about 3%. China’s consumer
price index fell by 0.8% in January, the
fourth straight month of decline.
HELEN DAVIDSON IS A GUARDIAN
REPORTER BASED IN TAIWAN;
AMY HAWKINS IS THE GUARDIAN’S
SENIOR CHINA CORRESPONDENT
 Spotlight
Europe
EXPLAINER
GER M A N Y
Live wires
How important
are Russia’s
intercepted
military talks?
By Dan Sabbagh
A
n extraordinary leak of
an online call involving
Germany’s air force chief
and three subordinates
emerged last Friday, in which they
discussed whether it might be
possible to persuade a reluctant
chancellor Olaf Scholz to approve
giving the long-range Taurus
missile to Ukraine, and whether the
munition could blow up the strategic
Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to
occupied Crimea.
How did the leak get
into the public domain?
The 38-minute recording was
gleefully released on social media
by Kremlin propagandist Margarita
Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of TV
network RT. A day later she offered
to help Scholz get to the bottom
of the leak, after he announced an
inquiry to find out how a recording
of the top secret conversation,
accepted by Berlin to be genuine,
had entered the public domain.
The overt nature of the leak
represents a departure from
Moscow’s previous information
operations, where hacked
information has passed through
non-Russian intermediaries
such as WikiLeaks or is dumped
online. Significantly, it comes at a
time of growing focus on Scholz’s
continuing refusal to give Taurus
to Ukraine, a missile with an
operational range of around 480km
compared with Kyiv’s most effective
long range missile, the Franco-
British Scalp/Storm Shadow, with a
range of half that.
“In the bowels of the Bundeswehr
[German army], plans for strikes on
Russian territory are being discussed
in a substantive and concrete
manner,” said Kremlin spokesperson
Dmitry Peskov on Monday. “Death
to the German-Nazi occupiers!” said
a less restrained former president,
Dmitry Medvedev.
How embarrassing is this for Berlin?
Very. Secret conversations between
military chiefs are simply not
supposed to emerge. The dialogue
involves Lt Gen Ingo Gerhartz,
head of the Luftwaffe, and three
subordinates discussing the
capabilities of Taurus ahead of a half
hour meeting the air force chief had
scheduled with German defence
minister Boris Pistorius.
Unusually, however, the
discussion is said to have taken place
not on a secure military system, but
on commercially standard WebEx
video conference software. One
19
of the participants dialled in from
Singapore, which may have been the
weak link. The call was intercepted
and recorded, or a recording
obtained and handed to RT.
What did the German officers
say about Britain in Ukraine?
Gerhartz and his team discuss how
far Germany might have to support
Taurus, and whether Berlin would
need to provide accurate targeting
and programming information for
the missiles it would be willing to
 A Ukranian give. They reference France and
soldier loads a in particular the UK, and note that
British-made in the latter’s case there appear to
Howitzer gun be soldiers on the ground helping
MICHELE TANTUSSI/
advise the Ukrainians on bombing
GETTY decisions.
As well as working with advisers
back home, the British “also have
a few people on the ground, they
do that, the French don’t,” the
German commander tells his
subordinates on the call.
Are British troops secretly in
Ukraine? How significant is that?
The Ministry of Defence would not
confirm whether British troops
were helping Ukraine with the use
of Storm Shadow missiles. If true,
the numbers are likely to be small,
although any help is a step closer to
being involved in the conflict.
Scholz himself recently referred
Covert or overt? to the presence of British troops
A careful reading in Ukraine helping with “target
of parliamentary control” and said that he could not
statements accept similar for Germany because
shows that the he felt it risked making Berlin a
UK reopened its “participant in the war”. But it
defence section is likely that Russia was already
in Ukraine in April aware of the UK presence – and
2022. A minister it has not yet led to a significant
said in July 2023 escalation from Moscow.
Britain had troops
in the country What happens next?
“to support the Former Whitehall insiders said they
UK’s diplomatic believed the British MoD would
presence in the be irritated but the leaks were too
country, and our
general to be damaging.
training offer to
The main benefit to Moscow is
the armed forces
to try to publicly exploit the leaks
of Ukraine”, while
against the German chancellor, who
leaks revealed that
will continue to come under western
Royal Marines had
and Ukrainian pressure to donate the
supported “discreet
Taurus missiles, not least because in
operations” there,
such as restoring the leaked call, the German experts
the British embassy say they believe 10-20 might be able
in Kyiv. to blow the Kerch Bridge.
DAN SABBAGH IS THE GUARDIAN’S
DEFENCE AND SECURITY EDITOR
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
Eyewitness
Russia
Supporters of
Navalny defy
Kremlin at
final farewell
By Andrew Roth
A
lexei Navalny lay in an
open casket in a Moscow
church last Friday under
a bed of roses, carnations
and chrysanthemums, his face pale
in candlelight, surrounded by griev-
ing relatives and supporters. Despite
appearances, it was anything but a nor-
mal funeral. His mother, Lyudmila,
in a black headscarf and sunglasses,
had just returned from wresting his
body from Russian investigators in the
Arctic. Many of those closest to the late
opposition leader were not there at all.
Absent was Navalny’s wife, Yulia,
who has vowed to carry on her hus-
band’s work, and can no longer be
in Russia without risking charges of
“extremism”. Her message of farewell
was conveyed in an Instagram post,
using the common Russian nickname
for Alexei. “Lyosha, thank you for 26
years of absolute happiness,” she
wrote, and then alluding to his impris-
onment: “Yes, even in the last three
years of happiness.”
Nor were his two children there;
they will probably grow up and live
in exile, at least until Vladimir Putin
leaves power. Nor were his closest
supporters, many of whom have been
arrested or fled abroad.
Thousands did brave the barri-
cades and checkpoints established
by police, and an online live stream
attracted more than 250,000 simulta-
neous viewers during the day, despite
continued signal jamming by police. It
was the largest public gathering of the
opposition since the first days of the
full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“Our livestream has frozen but
thank you to the British journalists
who managed to put a camera through
the fences of the Borisovo cemetery
and film the most terrible scenes that
we could imagine because this is an
image that never should have existed,”
said a visibly affected Leonid Volkov,
one of Navalny’s closest allies.
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Navalny was a singular force in Rus-
sian opposition politics; few could
withstand the continued pressure
that he did over more than a decade of
leading protests against the Kremlin.
And yet he kept his sense of
humour to the end, requesting that
an orchestra play the final theme
from Terminator 2 as his casket was
lowered into the ground. In the film,
the music plays as a robotic Arnold
Schwarzenegger is lowered into
molten steel in a teary goodbye. “The
music from the film Terminator is very
symbolic,” said Volkov. “Alexei loved
this film very much.”
For some of those who attended,
the funeral was a protest by another
name. Some chanted “Navalny!”, risk-
ing arrest for holding an unsanctioned
demonstration or supporting a con-
victed “extremist”. Others chanted
“No to War!”, punishable by years in
jail for discrediting the Russian armed
forces or the “special military opera-
tion” in Ukraine. And others chanted
“Putin is a murderer!”
As Navalny’s father and mother
exited the church, Navalny’s sup-
porters hugged and comforted them.
“Thank you, your son is a martyr,” one
woman told them. As the hearse bear-
ing his coffin travelled past, crowds
behind metal barricades threw red
carnations and roses in its path.
These are streets Navalny knew
well; he lived in Marino, the bed-
room community where his funeral
service was held. Nearly a decade
ago, Navalny also held a protest in the
neighbourhood, alongside opposition
leaders Boris Nemtsov (assassinated in
2015) and Ilya Yashin ( jailed for eight-
and-a-half years for criticising the
war in Ukraine). The location was no
accident. The Kremlin at the time was
pushing the opposition out of central
Moscow and would only permit a
demonstration on the city’s outskirts.
Last Friday, it also sought to push
▲ People walk
Navalny’s supporters out of sight,
towards the
but despite the risks, they emerged in
Borisovskoye
their thousands as a testament to the
cemetery dur-
popularity and loyalty cultivated over
ing the funeral
more than a decade by the opposition
of Russian
leader. It is hard to imagine who will
opposition leader
take up his mantle.
Alexei Navalny
His supporters have vowed to
continue his struggle. “You will be  Police officers
proud of us,” wrote his press secretary, detain a man
Kira Yarmysh. during the funeral
ANDREW ROTH IS THE GUARDIAN’S REUTERS
MOSCOW CORRESPONDENT
 Relatives and
friends pay their
last respects at
Navalny’s coffin
 Navalny’s
mother, Lyudmila
Navalnaya, left,
and his mother-
in-law, Alla
Abrosimova, at
the cemetery
AP

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly


22 Spotlight
Europe
A N A LY S I S Tower Hamlets and Sparkhill were
UNITED KINGDOM unsafe for non-Muslims to enter,
made during a BBC interview
about allegations of anti-Muslim
‘No-go’ areas sentiments within the Conservative
party. But he also defended invoking
the Islamophobic trope on the
How a fringe grounds that people told him they
perceived there to be a threat. Scully
rightwing has since announced that he will
stand down at the next election.
Rightwing politicians and
idea became commentators in the US, the UK and
Europe have promoted the notion
mainstream of such Muslim-controlled areas
since the early 2000s. Initially, it was
connected to claims Islam was an
existential threat to white western
By David Batty civilisation after Islamist terrorist
attacks. But it was later cited in fears
The claim by a former about racial and religious segregation
government minister and debates about immigration.
last week that parts of Joe Mulhall, the director of
London and Birmingham
with large Muslim populations are
“no-go areas” has highlighted the
enduring myth that there are UK The no-go zone got
neighbourhoods and towns unsafe
for white people. traction as a way people
Paul Scully, the MP for Sutton
and Cheam in Greater London,
could talk about their
later retracted his suggestion that anti-Muslim prejudice
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Opinion p48
research at anti-fascism organisation
Hope Not Hate, said the no-go zone
myth – often associated with fears
that these places were governed
by sharia law – had gradually
spread over the past two decades
from niche extreme and populist
rightwing spaces, including the
Norwegian white nationalist Anders
Breivik’s manifesto, US conservative
thinktanks and Fox News, into
mainstream Conservative politics.
A survey of Tory party members,
published by Hope Not Hate last
week, found that 52% believed parts
of European cities were under sharia
law and were no-go areas for non-
Muslims. While sharia councils do
operate in the UK, they mostly deal
with Islamic divorces, arbitration
and mediation, and their rulings
have no legal standing.
“The no-go zone is a really
good example of something that
started in very marginal spaces, but
increasingly got traction because it
was a framework with which you
could talk about your anti-Muslim
prejudice,” said Mulhall.
Perhaps the first mainstream
▲ MP Paul Scully application of the term to Muslim
claimed there areas came in David Ignatius’s 2002
were no-go areas article in the New York Times in
in Birmingham which he claimed areas of Paris
became “no-go zones at night”. The
CHRIS BAYNHAM/ISTOCK/
GETTY
phrase also gained prominence in
the UK, with the Rev Michael Nazir-
Ali – then the bishop of Rochester
– writing a 2008 column in the
Sunday Telegraph warning of no-go
areas where Islamic extremism had
become acceptable.
▼ Kowloon
Walled City,
controlled by
A fully fledged conspiracy theory
was in evidence in 2015, when Fox
triads in the 1950s
ARCAID/ALAMY
News pundit Steven Emerson said
Birmingham had become a “totally

Muslim” city and gangs of religious
police in parts of London beat
up people who were not wearing
Islamic clothes. He was labelled a
“complete idiot” by the then prime
minister, David Cameron.
Over this period, the “counter-
jihad” movement in the UK was
expanding rapidly. Groups such as
the English Defence League used
the bogeyman of no-go areas to
justify rallies in places with large
Muslim communities, such as Tower
Hamlets in east London.
Historically, the term has been
used to refer to conflict zones such
as Free Derry, the self-declared
autonomous Irish nationalist area
of the city established during the
Troubles in 1960s Northern Ireland,
and areas in cities dominated by
organised crime, such as the triad-
controlled Kowloon Walled City in
British-ruled Hong Kong in the 1950s.
Academics said the term’s
contemporary usage to foment fears
about Islam drew on these historical
precedents by invoking security
concerns to mask racist caricatures
about immigrant communities.
Shabna Begum, the interim
co-CEO of the Runnymede Trust,
compared the proliferation of the
no-go areas conspiracy theory to
the moral panic stirred up around
mugging by the UK press and
politicians in the 1970s.
In the early 1970s, a crime in
Britain was labelled a mugging by
the press for the first time, with
national newspapers reporting
dozens of other cases in the months
after. The cultural theorist Stuart
Hall found there was no statistical
evidence to support the hysteria, in
which the “black mugger” was often
used to symbolise the breakdown of
law and order. Hall said this allowed
politicians to persuade the public
that the political and economic
crises facing the country were
caused by immigrants.
Begum said: “In terms of the
reported incidents of violence
relating to the hysteria that
was generated, there was a real
disconnect between the two. I think
that these kinds of moral panics are
generated at times of political and
economic crisis, and we’re in both.”
DAVID BATTY IS A NEWS EDITOR
AND WRITER
Spotlight
Technology
SOCIAL MEDIA
The battle to
reclaim social
media from
‘manosphere’
By Alex Hern
I
nfluencers such as Andrew
Tate have become bywords for
“toxic masculinity”, attracting
huge audiences of young men
and boys with a mixture of quasi-
motivational pep talks, fast cars and
demonstrations of sexual prowess.
But what about the other side of
the coin? Are there any people mak-
ing content for the same audience with
healthier messages – or do men and
boys just not want to hear it?
Jago Sherman, the head of strategy
at Goat Agency, the influencer sub-
sidiary of marketing titan WPP, said:
“There are plenty of male influencers
and creators advocating for and creat-
ing content around topics as varied as
mental health, fitness and wellness,
parenting, self-love, self-expression,
anti-knife crime, education, but they
don’t necessarily make the headlines.
“The likes of Andrew Tate are able
to use social media to make broad,
sweeping and unsubstantiated claims
that appear to offer ‘quick-fix’ answers
to very complex issues. The issue, of
course, is that these statements are
almost always untrue, or an opinion
dressed up as fact.”
Against that background, last week
Labour announced a plan to help boost
23
the more positive visions of what
masculinity could be. Under the pro-
posals, schools would be helped to
develop mentors from their own stu-
dents to help counter the misogynist
vision promoted by Tate and his ilk.
Some men giving more positive
visions of masculinity have already
broken through, even becoming
household names in their own right.
Fitness influencers such as Joe Wicks
may not enthral teen boys with sala-
cious content, but simple advice
delivered with a friendly – almost
relentlessly cheerful – demeanour
▲ Former can still garner millions of followers.
kickboxer and But there is an asymmetry in some
influencer discussion around toxic influencers,
Andrew Tate notes Saul Parker, the founder of The
Good Side, which works with charities
ROBERT GHEMENT/EPA
and brands to help them achieve posi-
tive goals. Where young women are
encouraged to seek out positive role
models for their own good, young men
are frequently encouraged to seek out
positive role models so that they treat
women better.
Focusing on the misogyny, rather
than the broader messages of tra-
ditional masculine norms that the
“manosphere” thrives on, risks let-
ting a second generation of post-Tate
Up and running toxic influencers slink by under the
Perhaps the biggest radar. Boys have learned that the
signifier of a more casual misogyny of the likes of Tate is
positive approach not cool to repeat in public, and when
to masculinity is asked will often insist that they do not
the charity stunt, like the way he talks about women.
exemplified Parker said: “David Goggins is the
by Russ Cook, kind of guy we’re facing right now:
known to many as he’s an ex-Navy Seal, massive on all
Instagram’s hardest the social platforms, but he and all
geezer, whose his content are about ‘self-discipline’,
year-long attempt ‘self-motivation’, ‘get up in the morn-
to run the length ing’, ‘get to the gym’, ‘have a cold
of Africa should, if shower’, like, you know, ‘be a man’,
everything goes to but he doesn’t talk about women at
plan, finish in April. all, or sex at all.
Cook has raised “Taking women out of the equation
almost £200,000 doesn’t make it any less problematic,
($250,000) for the it just means that it’s hard to find a
Running Charity
sharp point, because he doesn’t say
and Sandblast, and
anything hateful.”
has almost a million
Winning boys over to a more
followers across
positive vision of masculinity will not
his various social
happen by default, in other words. But
platforms.
neither should hope be lost. There is
nothing innate in the experience of
boyhood that means that toxic mes-
sages are the only ones that will gel,
and with a little nudge, a better role
model could thrive.
ALEX HERN IS THE UK TECHNOLOGY
EDITOR FOR THE GUARDIAN
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
24 Spotlight
Environment
C L I M AT E C R I SI S global temperature over this period
would set a new record.
“Intense heatwaves and tropical
cyclones, combined with [human-

El Niño caused] global sea level rise, [mean]

densely populated coastal areas
are facing an enormous and urgent
forecast to climate crisis that challenges our cur-
rent capacity for adaptation, mitiga-

drive record tion and risk management,” said Dr

Ning Jiang, at the Chinese Academy
of Meteorological Sciences in Beijing,
heat this year and his co-authors.
“This impending warmth heightens
the risk of year-round marine heat-
By Damian Carrington waves and escalates the threat of
wildfires and other negative conse-

T
he current climate event
known as El Niño is likely to
supercharge global heating
and deliver record-breaking
temperatures from the Amazon to
Alaska in 2024, analysis has found.
The coastal areas of India by the Bay
of Bengal and areas by the South China
Sea, as well as the Philippines and the
Caribbean, are also likely to experience
unprecedented heat in the period to
June, scientists said, after which El
Niño may weaken.
The natural phenomenon, in which
heat is released from the western
quences in Alaska and the Amazon
basin,” he said. Seas and coastal areas
are particularly vulnerable because the
ocean can hold more heat than land,
meaning hot conditions can persist.
The Earth’s climate cycles naturally
between El Niño and its cooler coun-
terpart, La Niña. This boosts and mod-
erates the strong underlying trend of
global heating, which is caused by the
rising levels of carbon dioxide from
fossil fuels in the atmosphere. B U R K I N A FA S O
El Niño usually peaks between
November and January and so the new
study, published in the journal Scien-

The schools that

Pacific Ocean, is known to increase
global surface temperatures and
helped 2023 smash the record for the
hottest year by a large margin. Extreme
heat in the second half of 2023 as El
Niño kicked in had severe impacts
on people living in North America,
South America, Europe and China as
the climate crisis intensified.
The new analysis used computer
models to identify the likely regional
hotspots in the first half of 2024. It also
found there was a 90% chance that the
▼ A vendor in Bangladesh, an area
tific Reports, modelled the effects of
the event on the regional variation in
surface air temperatures from July
2023 to June 2024.
The scientists found record-
breaking temperatures in the Amazon
stay cool in 40C
are likely in 2024, increasing the risk of
wildfires. Severe fires and drought hit
the Amazon in late 2023 and the emis- Architects use local materials and merge
sions from fires in February have set
traditional techniques with modern
a new record for that month. Record
heat in Alaska would result in glaciers technology to make welcoming spaces
and permafrost melting and coastal
erosion, the scientists said. By Èlia Borràs
Prof Adam Scaife, at the Met Office

predicted to face higher temperatures
MONIRUL ALAM/EPA
and University of Exeter in the UK,
said: “This study uses observed tem-
perature records, and what we know
about El Niño and other effects on the
rest of the globe, to infer what might
happen in 2024. It’s far from a state of
the art forecast but it does offer a use-
ful simple first take on the year ahead.”
“Some regions, Africa and Greenland
for example, have poor historical data
coverage and are hard to assess with
these methods, but they are high-
lighted as regions with prominent lev-
els of excess heat this year in climate
model forecasts.”
DAMIAN CARRINGTON IS A GUARDIAN
ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
I
f architects are people who like
to think their way around chal-
lenges, building schools in Bur-
kina Faso must be the dream job.
The challenges, after all, are legion:
scorching temperatures in the high
seasons, limited funds, materials,
electricity and water, and clients who
are vulnerable and young. How do you
keep a building cool under a baking
sun when there is no air conditioning?
Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré
grew up in the small village of Gando
and knows the challenges well. He
and other architects such as Albert
Faus are finding ingenious ways to
use cheap materials to make sure that

the schools and orphanages that they
have built around Burkina Faso are
cool, welcoming places.
Kéré, who won the Pritzker prize
in 2022, has spoken movingly about
the support he was given as a child by
the whole community, with everyone
giving money towards his education
as he left the village and eventually
gained a scholarship and studied in
Germany. “The reason I do what I do
is my community,” he said.
Gando primary school, built in
2001, was Kéré’s first construction
after completing his studies. “At first,
my community didn’t understand
why I wanted to build with clay when
there were glass buildings in Germany,
so I had to convince them to use the
local materials,” Kéré has said. Men
and women came together to build the
school, merging traditional techniques
such as clay floors with more modern
technology to seek better comfort.
The Noomdo orphanage was
another of his projects. “The Kéré
building provides us with good ther-
mal comfort because when it’s hot,
we’re cool, and when it’s cold, we’re
warm inside,” said Pierre Sanou, a
social educator at the orphanage near
the city of Koudougou in the Centre-
Ouest (centre-west) region of Burkina
Faso. “We don’t need air condition-
ing, which is an incredible energy
saving,” Sanou said. Temperatures in
this region remain at about 40C during
the hottest season.
Kéré’s buildings in Burkina Faso
are earthy. They start from the
ground and take into account that
concrete is a material that needs to
be transported to the site, is much
more expensive and generates waste.
“They are built with very strong walls
and very light roofs so that the cool
air that enters from below pushes the
hot air out from above,” said Eduardo
González, a member of the Architec-
ture School of Madrid.
One particularly ingenious inn-
ovation is his use of the ancient idea
of raised and extended metal roofs.
The rooms of Noomdo are covered by
a shallow barrel vault resting on a con-
crete beam but with openings. Above,
a metal plate protects the roof from
direct sunlight and rain. Additionally,
it lets out the hot air. González says the
technique can be found in the vernacu-
lar architecture of the Persian Gulf. In
Burkina Faso, he says Kéré integrates
it into his projects and “gives this tech-
nique a contemporary image”.
▲ The Bangre The orphanage, shaped in a semi-
Veenem school circle, also takes into account the
complex, privacy of its users, most of whom are
designed by minors living in extremely vulnerable
Albert Faus situations. While on one side there are
MILENA VILLALBA boys’ dormitories, on the other side are
girls’, with administration serving as
▼ Gando primary a nexus between them. To maintain
school, built by the privacy and security of the chil-
Diébédo Francis dren, the building is designed with
Kéré in 2001 with three visibility zones. The first is the
local materials entrance door, where a common room
ERIK-JAN OUWERKERK and kitchen are located. In the back-
ground, there is the interior common
space where entry is permitted only
with authorisation, and finally, the
interior courtyards of the dormitories.
“There are spaces to rest and be calm,”
said Sanou.
Opinion p45
25
‘When families see
the buildings, they
want their children
to go to school’
Nearby, the Bangre Veenem school
complex designed by Faus in the vil-
lage of Youlou uses similarly ingenious
ways to cool the building. Ousmane
Soura works as an education adviser
at the school. “Before building the
school, [Faus] came to speak with the
traditional authorities to obtain per-
mission to build and to find out if there
were sacred places that are sometimes
not obvious or visible to people who
don’t know them,” he said.
The school accommodates
everything from nursery to high
school, including a professional school.
“The students don’t say: ‘It’s really hot’
and want to go home because they’re
comfortable and can concentrate with
the class,” Soura added.
It is built with bricks made from
laterite stone native to the area. Lat-
erite is shaped with a mould, dried in
the sun, and becomes a brick of very
intense red colour. “They are more
resistant to bullets than concrete
blocks, which have two holes in the
centre,” said Soura.
Faus also managed to minimise
material transportation and use the
territory’s own materials. Even the
quarry workers were from the area.
“It’s a very beautiful material. When
families see the buildings, they want
their children to go to school,” said
Soura. There are even teenagers who
meet inside the classrooms to talk after
class or during vacation periods. The
complex is an open space.
Burkina Faso ranks 184th out of 191
countries in the Human Development
Index and as of late 2020, only 22.5% of
its population had access to electric-
ity, according to data from the African
Development Bank. “Students can
come at night to study and charge their
phones because there is light thanks
to solar panels,” Soura said.
“If the students, the administration,
and teachers work well, and the envi-
ronment is favourable in class, the
results will be better. You know that
hot weather disfavours students’
learning, and if we’re hot in class, we
all feel tired, and eventually children
prefer to sleep.”
ÈLIA BORRÀS IS A JOURNALIST BASED
IN BURKINA FASO
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
26 Spotlight
Africa
SU DA N
A city of two
massacres
War leaves
deep scars
in Geneina
By Zeinab Mohammed Salih
GENEINA
G
eneina, the capital of West
Darfur state in Sudan, can feel
like two cities in one. There
are mass graves, abandoned
armoured vehicles and homeless chil-
dren, but also new restaurants, bustling
markets and factory-fresh Toyotas,
nicknamed Kenjcanjia – meaning sto-
len in the local dialect – owing to their
lack of registration plates.
Since war broke out between the
army and the paramilitary Rapid
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Support Forces (RSF) in April last
year, the city has witnessed two major
massacres. Decomposing bodies lay
out on the streets for up to 10 days
on both occasions, their flesh eaten
by dogs and chickens. Residues from
the bodies of the dead remain even
now, stepped over by people as they
go about their daily business.
Some districts in the centre of
the city, where people displaced by
conflict elsewhere in Darfur used to
congregate in government buildings,
have all but been abandoned. Build-
ings bear scorch marks and bullet holes
on their walls from the fighting.
For two months from mid-April
and then again for a week in early
November, Geneina was convulsed by
fighting that rapidly developed along
tribal lines, pitting Masalit and other
non-Arab people in support of the army
against the RSF and allied Arab militia.
More than 10,000 people died in the
city – mostly from the Masalit popula-
tion – and thousands more fled west
over the border to Chad.
Arab militias allied with the RSF
laid siege to the city in May. On 15 June,
the torture and murder of the Masalit
governor of West Darfur state, Khamis
Abbakar, allegedly by the RSF’s allies,
prompted the exodus of thousands
of people to Chad. By 22 June, the
Darfur Bar Association reported
that Geneina had fallen. There were
further clashes in early November,
which ended with the last remaining
soldiers from the army garrison flee-
ing – marking the RSF’s final victory
in the city.
In the intervening months, details
began to emerge of horrific abuses
committed by the RSF and its allies
in the city. On 13 July, a UN investiga-
tion discovered a mass grave of dozens
of Masalit civilians near Geneina, all
allegedly killed by the RSF between
13 and 21 June.
Some Masalit people opted to head
towards what they perceived as the
relative safety of the army garrison
near Ardamata instead of Chad. They
described being shot at while on the
road to Ardamata on 13 June. “Arabs
appeared from nowhere and started
shooting at us,” said Fatima, who
did not want to give her last name.
“People were jumping into the river
with their children [to dodge the bul-
lets].” Fatima said her son lost his arm
during the shooting.
Abakar Haroun, a member of a
group tasked with burying the bod-
▲ A rainbow ies of victims, said the task took days.
appears over “One day, I remember working from
shelters of those 8am to 6pm with colleagues burying
who fled conflict people in a cemetery in the al-Shati
to Adré, Chad neighbourhood,” he said.
ZOHRA BENSEMRA/ Samia Osman (not her real name)
REUTERS
said: “I counted 117 bodies in front of
my house. We used to jump over the
bodies to reach our homes.”
Arab civilians also died in the
violence, many in shelling from army
tanks that still stand abandoned in
Arab neighbourhoods. A worker at
the Sudanese Red Crescent – not an
Arab himself – said the number of
▼ A displaced
Sudanese woman
victims was unknown because Arab
communities have their own system
who fled Geneina of collecting the dead. Emir Mas-
sits outside sar Aseel, a traditional Arab leader
her tent accused of committing crimes against
ZOHRA BENSEMRA/
the Masalit people, claimed the toll
REUTERS ran to thousands.

Hundreds of Masalits were also
killed in a massacre in Ardamata on
5 November, following the army’s
withdrawal from the Geneina area.
Witnesses said the RSF and allied mili-
tia went house to house, seeking out
Masalit people. Jamal Badawi, a Masalit
traditional leader from Ardamata, said
236 people were killed in his area alone.
Speaking on condition of anonymity,
another man who helped with burials
said “the bodies were piled over each
other like leather of animals”.
West Darfur state is now ruled by an
administration close to the RSF. The
new governor, El Tijani Karshoum, is
trying to appease the population. He
has called on those who fled across
the Chad border to come back, offer-
ing consistent electricity and running
water, often lacking in army-controlled
areas, and implemented a strict night-
time curfew from 7pm to 7am.
An uneasy normality has returned
to the city despite its recent horrors.
Weddings have resumed on weekends,
and houses are being built in Arab
neighbourhoods.
Last month, the UN human rights
office said both sides in Sudan’s civil
war had committed abuses that might
amount to war crimes including indis-
criminate attacks on civilian sites such
as hospitals, markets and camps.
The US has already formally
determined that the warring par-
ties have committed war crimes and
said the RSF and allied militias were
involved in ethnic cleansing in West
Darfur. Both sides have said they
would investigate reports of killings
and abuses and prosecute any fighters
found to be involved.
For now, the biggest threat in
Geneina comes from the air. As it strug-
gles to stem the tide of RSF advances,
the army has launched bombing cam-
paigns on RSF-controlled territory,
driving a new exodus of civilians.
It was simultaneously preventing
humanitarian access to RSF-controlled
areas, said Leni Christiane, from the
World Food Programme. “The situa-
tion in Sudan today is nothing short
of catastrophic,” she said. “Millions
of people are impacted by the conflict
and are struggling to feed their fami-
lies. We are already receiving reports
of people dying of starvation, yet
access challenges are making it incred-
ibly challenging to reach areas where
people need our urgent help the most.”
ZEINAB MOHAMMED SALIH IS A
JOURNALIST BASED IN KHARTOUM
UGA N DA
Documentary
offers a new
lease of life
to Bobi Wine
By Alice McCool
W
hen the Ugandan musi-
cian turned politician
Bobi Wine ran for presi-
dent, his 2020 campaign
was thwarted by violent crackdowns
by Yoweri Museveni’s regime. Since the
election, Bobi Wine – whose real name
is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu – and
his wife, Barbie, say that, from phone
tapping to abductions of his support-
ers, things have been “pretty much the
same” in many ways.
With one key difference: the release
of the feature documentary Bobi Wine:
The People’s President.
Shot over five years, the film is a
profile of Wine’s rise in politics and his
run for the presidency, during which
he endures military detention, torture
and the loss of people close to him.
The film was nominated for a Bafta
and is up for best documentary feature
at the Oscars.
Moses Bwayo, the co-director, said:
“The morning the Oscars nomination
was announced, Bobi and Barbie and
their children had been under house
arrest for over a week. But when the
news came, the military and the police
withdrew from their home.”
While the film was in production,
Bwayo, like many other journalists
27
covering Wine’s activism, was
arrested, imprisoned and intimidated.
In November 2020, he was shot in the
face with a rubber bullet in Kampala
and there were two attempted kidnap-
pings of his wife, before the couple fled
the country for the US.
Wine said: “This film has given us
another lease of life, because now we
know that – as much as it’s brutal – the
regime knows that the world is watch-
ing.” The documentary has caused
the government to show “a little bit
of restraint”, he believes.
Considering Uganda’s poor record
▲ Bobi Wine is of press freedom, and the censorship
detained during an of Wine’s music, it is unsurprising that
anti-government there has been little coverage of the
demonstration in film in the Ugandan media.
Kampala in 2021 But Wine describes the film as “very
ABUBAKER LUBOWA/ well known, especially among the
REUTERS
young people”.
Uganda has one of the world’s
youngest populations, with 78% of
people under 30; in the last election,
more than 40% of voters were aged
between 18 and 30.
This awareness is thanks to social
media, which Wine says “taps into
foreign news and brings it home and
makes it mainstream news”.
“I believe it is the most watched and
Ruling party sought-after film in Uganda in recent
Having once been years,” said Wine, adding that his sup-
a revolutionary porters screened the film at his party’s
freedom fighter, offices after it received the Oscar nomi-
President Yoweri nation, and streamed the event live on
Museveni has led Facebook and TikTok.
Uganda since 1986. They paid a price for this act of
His government resistance: Wine says three of his
is frequently colleagues were abducted by the
criticised for military during the screening and are
corruption and still missing.
human rights But Wine is hopeful that the film
abuses, and in 2017 will damage the reputation of Musev-
the parliament in eni’s government enough that foreign
Kampala passed a powers will reconsider this funding.
bill removing the
“If this aid has no conditions – moral
cap on presidential
conditions – then it’s a partnership in
age limits, enabling
crime,” he said. “We know what that
his rule to continue.
aid is doing to our people.
The US and UK
“What you saw in that documentary
have given many
is not acted, it is real – and it is being
billions of dollars
facilitated by that aid.”
of development
and military aid For Bwayo, the aim of the film is to
to Uganda in shine a spotlight on Uganda.
recent years, with The film-maker adds that the
Museveni long documentary is “a lifeline for Bobi
perceived as a key and Barbie, and those close to them,
ally of the west in and the Ugandan people who are
east Africa. fighting against this brutal, relentless
military dictatorship”.
ALICE MCCOOL IS A JOURNALIST BASED
IN THE UK AND EAST AFRICA
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
28 Spotlight
Asia Pacific
J A PA N
How Shōgun
broke the
mould of
depicting
the Japanese
By Justin McCurry TOKYO
J
apanese audiences could
have been forgiven for brac-
ing themselves when Disney
announced Shōgun, a 10-part
adaptation of James Clavell’s clas-
sic 1975 novel. With few exceptions,
Hollywood depictions of Japan and the
Japanese have relied on one-dimen-
sional characters whose purpose is
to confirm cultural stereotypes, set
against the backdrop of an inscrutable
archipelago whose people have much
to learn from the western hero.
But Shōgun, which began airing
late last month, may have broken the
mould, with FX’s high-budget series
winning plaudits in Japan not only
for its lavish production values and
illustrious Japanese cast, but also its
respect for the smallest details of the
country’s culture and politics.
In echoes of previous Japan-
themed productions – such as Lost in
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Translation and Mr Baseball – Shōgun
draws heavily on the east meets west
narrative, this time via the arrival of
the shipwrecked Englishman John
Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), whose
character is based on the real-life
adventurer William “Anjin” Adams.
But where a 1980 miniseries star-
ring Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro
Mifune was told largely through Black-
thorne’s eyes, this new series elevates
the Japanese daimyo’s role via a criti-
cally applauded performance from
the acclaimed actor and martial artist
Hiroyuki Sanada.
The inclusion of Sanada, who plays
Lord Yoshii Toranaga (based on the
real-life Tokugawa Ieyasu), has piqued
interest among viewers in Japan.
“Once I started watching it, I couldn’t
stop,” one Japanese viewer wrote on X.
If Clavell’s novel was “blue eyes
watching Japan”, the series put on
“Japanese lenses”, Sanada said. The
actor, who doubled as producer,
said he believed Shōgun was “a
great story to introduce our culture
to the world, so I tried to make it as
authentic as possible”.
Set in 1600 during the real-life Sen-
goku [warring states] period, its focus
is as much on the battle for control of
a country on the brink of 250 years of
isolation as the role of Blackthorne, an
observer turned political pawn.
To ensure no aesthetic or cultural
howlers crept in, specialists were hired
to cast a critical eye over everything
from the language of early 17th-cen-
tury Japan to the tying of obi kimono
belts and the procedural intricacies of
the tea ceremony.
Shōgun, though filmed mainly in
Canada, is a welcome departure from
previous international screen portray-
als of Japan, not least because about
70% of the lines are delivered in Japa-
nese by a largely Japanese cast.
Screen portrayals of Japan and the
Japanese have come some way since
Sean Connery’s “yellowface” in the
1967 Bond film You Only Live Twice
and Mickey Rooney’s nearsighted,
buck-toothed photographer IY Yuni-
oshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Others continued to portray west-
ern orientalist fantasies such as the
tall foreigner/diminutive Japanese
dynamic in the 2003 film Lost In Trans-
 Hiroyuki Sanada lation, a film in which a sex worker
as Yoshii Toranaga repeatedly urges Bill Murray’s char-
in a scene from acter to “lip [sic] my stockings”.
Shōgun Two years later, the film adaptation
KATIE YU/FX /AP of Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel Mem-
oirs of a Geisha did little to challenge
the industry’s fetishisation of Asian
women, with one critic likening a
dance by one of the traditional per-
formers on a 1930s Kyoto stage to “a
Los Angeles strip show”.
Mark Schilling, a Tokyo-based
film critic, said he was encouraged
by the Shōgun producers’ decision
to “respect Japanese culture and do
everything possible to make the show
true to the actualities of the time,
place and people”.
Justin Marks, who co-created the
series with his wife, the writer Rachel
Kondo, said every effort had been
made to avoid the “white saviour” trap
that has ensnared previous western
depictions of Japan.
The cast and crew were guided, he
said, by “this idea that if we’re going to
‘It’s the do a story about east meets west … we
needed to find a new language, about
first truly what mistakes we have made in our
authentic, cultural past over the last several dec-
accurate ades when trying to represent Japan.”
Anna Sawai, the New Zealand-born
portrayal Japanese actor who plays Lady Toda
of our Mariko, a noblewoman and Christian
convert, called the series “the first truly
history, authentic and accurate [portrayal] of
culture and our history, culture and people”.
people’ Sawai said: “I’ve felt that Asian
women … Japanese women have been
Anna Sawai boxed into playing the sexy lady or the
Shōgun actor submissive lady or the one that does
action. I wanted to see more depth,
and I think Mariko really shows the
inner struggles of Japanese women
and what roots us … a different kind
of strength that has never really been
shown in western media.”
JUSTIN MCCURRY IS THE GUARDIAN’S
TOKYO CORRESPONDENT

NEW ZEALAND
Anger rises
as vaping
permeates
primary
schools
By Sasha Borissenko WELLINGTON
F
eeling lost and angry over
the death of his father, Lucas
Sykes started vaping in 2021
after his friends suggested
it would help the grieving process.
He was 10. What started as a “dumb
move” developed into a nicotine
addiction, Lucas said.
Although retailers in New Zealand
are prohibited from selling products
to children, Lucas had no trouble pur-
chasing “very affordable, easy-to-get,
and pleasant to taste” vapes from a
store just 10 metres from his school.
Despite playing basketball and kick-
boxing, Lucas now sometimes finds
himself “bent over coughing” and
unable to breathe. Efforts to stop vap-
ing have led to headaches and wors-
ened anxiety, with his mood going
from “cheery to very dark”.
“When I started vaping, I got quite
cocky and would be a smart arse to
teachers, thinking I was cool and kids
would like me,” he said.
Across New Zealand concern
about vaping among young children
– including those in primary school –
is growing. Critics argue regulations
and steps to reduce vaping are prov-
ing ineffective, in part due to a lack of
enforcement. While there is no data
yet specifically looking at primary
school-age vaping, anecdotal evidence
suggests it is on the rise.
Ministry of education figures show
1,945 primary and intermediate school
students were removed from school
for a short period for vaping or smok-
ing in 2023, up 73% since 2021. More
broadly, government studies show
youth vaping has risen significantly
since 2015. One study found 10% of 14-
to 15-year-olds vape daily, with rates
rising among Māori and Pacific youths.
Phil Palfrey, an executive member
of the New Zealand Principals’ Federa-
tion (NZPF), said that in 39 years as a
principal in primary and intermedi-
ate schools, he had never seen a fad
so popular with students. “When kids
as young as eight are putting anything
into their lungs that is foreign [it] is just
anathema to me,” he said.
In recent years, New Zealand has
introduced measures to tackle youth
vaping. In 2023, regulations were
introduced to reduce the maximum
nicotine concentration allowed in sin-
gle-use vapes and ban specialist vape
retailers within 300 metres of schools.
All vaping devices must have remov-
able batteries and safety mechanisms.
Advertising vape products is illegal
in New Zealand, but specialist vape
retailers can advertise to existing cus-
tomers and promote the use of vaping
as an alternative to smoking. However,
vape retailers, like those in other coun-
tries, have been criticised for market-
ing strategies aimed at young people.
Despite restrictions, Vape Free Kids
NZ spokesperson Tammy Downer said
manufacturers use brightly coloured
advertising and “sneaky” marketing
techniques to target children.
The government signalled in
November that it would strengthen
youth vaping measures. Associate
minister for health Casey Costello
said although vaping can help reduce
cigarette use, the government is com-
mitted to strengthening penalties for
29
retailers that sell to people under 18 ▼ New Zealand
and improving support to schools. No has tried to tackle
decisions have been made, but “regu- youth vaping in
lations are not strong enough”. recent years
A ministry of health spokesperson ALEKSANDR YU/GETTY
said it is inappropriate for advertis-
ing to appeal specifically to children,
and that names like “cotton candy”
and “strawberry jelly doughnut” are
prohibited.
MoH data suggests there are 1,261
specialist retailers and about 5,760
general vape retailers in New Zealand.
Currently, 43 officers monitor compli-
ance by inspecting vaping retailers,
investigating complaints and execut-
ing controlled purchase operations.
Vaping Industry Association New
Zealand, the country’s industry body,
did not respond to the Guardian’s que-
ries, but its official stance is that vaping
1,945
should be limited to adults. “VIANZ is so
adamant about this that we ask the pub-
lic to report stores who sell to youth or Number of
anyone, whether a member or not, who primary or
targets youth through illegal market- intermediate
ing,” a statement on its website reads. school students
Now 13, Lucas is still addicted to suspended
nicotine. After talking to his mother, for vaping or
Sherryn Eagle, the pair are slowly smoking in 2023,
reducing Lucas’s nicotine intake. Tra- up 73% since 2021
ditional quit-smoking aids have been
ineffective, Eagle said.
“I blamed myself for a bit, but I was
a widow with two dependent children
10%
Portion of 14- to
doing the best I could [and] children 15-year-olds
are going to [vape] whether we like it who vape daily,
or not,” she said. according to
SASHA BORISSENKO IS A JOURNALIST one government
BASED IN NEW ZEALAND study
300m
The minimum
distance from
a school that
specialist vape
retailers can
trade after new
regulations were
introduced
last year
30
Pump it up
Can a Dutch
startup save
the Arctic ice?
The climate crisis is devastating natural
habitats and local people’s food sources.
A technique used in the Netherlands for
creating ice rinks could provide a solution
By Senay Boztas AMSTERDAM
E
very winter when the
temperatures drop, the IJs-
meester (ice master) in villages
around the Netherlands care-
fully starts to flood a field with water to
form enough thin layers of ice to create
a perfect outdoor skating rink. Now a
Dutch startup wants to use the same
technique to help solve a major ecologi-
cal problem: melting Arctic ice and its
devastating effect on the climate.
“In cold weather, the IJsmeesters
start a frantic race to be the first village
that can organise an ice-skating
marathon,” said Fonger Ypma, chief
executive of Arctic Reflections. “They
flood a meadow with a thin layer that
becomes ice, and every night they
apply more thin layers on top. And
then, once it’s thick enough, they start
skating. It’s our cultural heritage.”
Arctic ice is shrinking by almost
13% a decade, according to the WWF,
prompting warnings from climate sci-
entists that ice-free summers in the
Arctic are inevitable by 2050. This,
coupled with the very visible evidence
of polar bears’ habitat melting, and the
threat to the Indigenous people who
rely on the Arctic ecosystems for sur-
vival, gave Ypma a wild thought.
“The Arctic acts as a sort of mirror or
heat shield for the Earth and a substan-
tial part of global warming comes from
Real Ice’s experiment
involves flooding
part of Iqaluktuuttiaq
(Cambridge Bay) in the
Canadian Arctic with
pumped-up seawater,
which then refreezes at
the surface
the Earth’s surface becoming darker,”
he said. “So I thought: isn’t there some
way to maintain that ice sheet for a bit
longer until CO2 levels come down and
the ice becomes regenerative? I had
this naive idea: why not pump water
on top of it?”
Ypma was not the only person to
be considering this, he realised, after
checking with experts. “I took the fact
that it had been researched already as a
positive sign, because then you’re not
the only crazy person!” he said.
Arctic Reflections is just one
company looking to use a technique
that is already employed for other
purposes, such as creating ice roads
in Canada and Finland and for oil
exploration in the Arctic. In 2016,
the physicist Steven Desch and col-
leagues from Arizona State University
proposed building 10m wind-powered
pumps over the Arctic ice cap to bring
water to the surface in winter, poten-
tially adding a metre of ice.
Ypma recently joined a separate
Bangor University spinoff, Real Ice,
PAUL SOUDERS/GETTY; ARCTIC REFLECTIONS
which has a similar idea, for a series of
field tests in Iqaluktuuttiaq (the Inuit
name for Cambridge Bay), Nunavut,
Canada, with a 600-watt, hydrogen
fuel-cell-powered water pump. This
not-for-profit company has drilled
through the ice, pumped up seawa-
ter and let temperatures approaching
-50C refreeze it at the surface.
“At the moment, the ice is about a
metre thick,” said Real Ice’s co-chief

executive, Andrea Ceccolini. “By
refreezing the top layer, where there
is snow, we will add 10-20cm. After
that, the ice will grow thicker because
we are removing the snow insulation,
which is constraining further growth.”
Ceccolini hopes to develop an
underwater drone that could navigate
the -1.5C water, detect the thickness of
the ice, pump up water as necessary,
refuel and move on to the next spot. “If
we demonstrate [this over] 100 sq km a
day with 50 drones, then we can show
that this can actually scale [up] to a
much larger area,” he said.
T
he goal is also local, to restore
sea ice at a site whose Inuit
name means a place of good
fishing. “A large part of our
success will be determined by how
well we engage with the local commu-
nity,” said the co-chief executive, Cían
Sherwin, who envisages giving the
technology to Indigenous landown-
ers with philanthropic part-funding.
“ Local people have noticed
differences when it comes to wild-
life patterns, migration routes, and
we hear locals have to travel almost
300km to hunt their ‘country food’,”
he said. “We’ve also heard accounts of
how elders, the resident experts, now
can’t predict when the ice will be safe,
which is shocking to the community.”
For Arctic Reflections, however, the
aim is to boost the “albedo” – the white-
ness of the ice – and its ability to reflect
the sun’s rays back to the atmosphere.
The Dutch startup’s other idea is to
see if Arctic currents could spread ice
thickened at strategic locations so they
could potentially save 100,000 sq km
of ice from melting in the summer with
just 100 to 1,000 installations.
Another Dutch project, the Sand
Motor, illustrates this perfectly, said
Ypma. Known as “beach nourish-
ment”, it uses sea currents to spread
sand naturally to bolster the Nether-
lands’ coastal defences.
But there are still unanswered
questions, such as how ice thinner
than three metres will react to flooding
and whether thicker ice will last, said
Hayo Hendrikse, assistant professor at
Delft University of Technology, who
has worked on lab and real-life trials
with Arctic Reflections.
How the drone could restore sea ice
1 An underwater 2 Drone detects
drone sails thin ice above and
under ice floes rotates to punch a
in Arctic waters hole through the ice.
Water is pumped
to the surface
-1.5C water
Source: Real Ice
31
A polar bear in Nunavut,
Canada. Climate
scientists say ice-free
summers in the Arctic
13%
The rate at which
are inevitable by 2050,
but several companies
are testing ways of
ice is shrinking replenishing ice caps
per decade
300
Distance in km
people travel to
hunt for food due
to ice loss
10-20
Depth in cm Real
Ice aims to add to
Arctic ice caps
“We know we can just pump water
‘I had this on top of ice, flood it and it will freeze,”
naive Hendrikse said. “But can we also do it
idea: why with a positive gain in the end? I see
a potential for this on a smaller scale,
not pump for example, if you want to strengthen
water on habitats for polar bears and seals,
top of the where the sea ice in summer could
survive a bit longer if we target spe-
ice sheet to cific fjords or bays. But he added: “It’s
preserve it?’ not a solution – it’s a sticking plaster.”
Julienne Stroeve, professor of
Fonger Ypma polar observation and modelling at
Arctic Ref lections University College London, said it
would probably be impossible to act
on a large-enough scale to have a real
impact on the climate. “I agree that
the sea ice is worth protecting, since
it helps to keep our planet cool, but
the Arctic Ocean is about 14m sq km,”
she said. “The only real solution is to
pull carbon out of the air or cut our
emissions to half of what they are.”
Maurits Groen, a jury member of
3 When the water the Dutch Wubbo Ockels innovation
hits the cold air prize, which gave an award to Arctic
it spreads over Reflections, agreed that tackling the
the ice sheet and
causes of the climate crisis was prefer-
freezes to create
an extra thick able. “But the speed at which things
layer of ice are going wrong is such that we have to
resort to these kinds of crazy measures
to at least buy some time,” he said.
After re-icing, the “It’s a proven technology and cost-
drone returns to effective compared with alternatives
the charging hub
and then repeats
– we have to start somewhere.”
the task SENAY BOZTAS IS A JOURNALIST WHO
WRITES ON EUROPE, PARTICULARLY
THE NETHERLANDS AND BELGIUM
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
32 Spotlight
North America
U N I T E D S TAT E S
The return
of Bannon,
the unkempt
cheerleader
of far right
By David Smith WASHINGTON
W
earing an olive-green
jacket over a black shirt,
Steve Bannon blew the
doors off a subject most
other speakers had tiptoed around.
“Media, I want you to suck on this,
I want the White House to suck on this:
you lost in 2020!” he roared. “Donald
Trump is the legitimate president of
the United States!”
A thrill of transgression swept
through the crowd at the Conserva-
tive Political Action Conference
(CPAC) at the National Harbor in Mary-
land. “Trump won!” Bannon barked,
pointing a finger. “Trump won!” he
repeated, shaking a fist. His audience
chanted the brazen lie.
It was a blunt reminder that Bannon,
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
an architect of Trumpism variously
compared to Thomas Cromwell, Ras-
putin and Joseph Goebbels, remains
a force in American politics, as the
2024 US presidential election looms
into view and the re-election of Trump
looks a clear possibility.
The former White House chief strat-
egist may not be in daily contact with
Trump any more but it scarcely mat-
ters: he is vital for the far-right ecosys-
tem that animates the Make America
Great Again (Maga) base.
Bannon, 70, is appealing against
a criminal conviction and four-
month prison sentence for defying a
subpoena from the congressional com-
mittee investigating the attack on the
US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
He hosts a regular podcast called
War Room that propagates false
narratives about the 2020 election
and coronavirus vaccines. A pop-
up War Room studio commanded a
prime location at CPAC and featured
guests including former British prime
minister Liz Truss. On stage, Bannon
declared: “Biden, you and your crime
family are nothing but trash, OK? And
on 20 January 2025 we’re going to take
out the trash.”
Unkempt and unpolished, Bannon
is the opposite of a career politician.
He is a former naval officer, Goldman
Sachs investment banker and film
producer. He was executive chair-
man of Breitbart News – which he once
described as “the platform of the alt-
right”, a movement that has embraced
racism and antisemitism – and became
‘He will chairman of Trump’s 2016-winning
election campaign.
play a His tenure at the White House was
central role short and acrimonious as he clashed
if Trump
with the president’s daughter, Ivanka,
and her husband, Jared Kushner, who
wins. later described him as a toxic presence.
He is the
architect’
Trump himself may have been piqued
by how much media attention Bannon
was receiving and eventually branded
Rick Wilson
Lincoln Project
him “Sloppy Steve”.
His ideas are harder to kill. Bannon
advocates the “deconstruction of the
administrative state”, a radical down-
sizing of federal government bureau-
cracy and an isolationist “America
first” policy. He helps set the narra-
tive on Trump’s signature issue, bor-
der security, blaming undocumented
immigrants for crime and advocating
mass deportations as a solution.
Last year a study by the Brookings
Institution thinktank in Washington
found almost 20% of War Room’s epi-
sodes contained a false, misleading or
unsubstantiated statement.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of anti-
Trump advocacy group the Lincoln
Project, said Bannon remains a power-
ful figure. “It is inescapable that he will
play a central role in whatever Trump
administration emerges if Trump
wins. He is the architect.”
Bannon spent years courting far-
▼ Steve Bannon right nationalists around the world.
addresses the
The results were on display at CPAC.
CPAC in Maryland Nigel Farage observed that a decade
last month
ago he was the sole foreign-born
ELIZABETH FRANTZ/
speaker at the conference – now it has
REUTERS become a hub for populists from coun-
tries including Argentina, El Salvador,
Hungary and Spain.
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strate-
gist, said: “To his credit, and to Amer-
ica’s detriment, he was one of the first
people to look outside of the American
political system to find like-minded
public high-profile figures in foreign
countries, like Nigel Farage, to play
an outsized role in being messengers.”
Bardella, a former Breitbart News
spokesperson, added: “For people
like Farage and Liz Truss, Bannon
extends to them a second lease on life.
Here comes Bannon with this direct
line to one of the two most powerful
forces in American politics in Donald
Trump: we will elevate you, you will
have status, you will have the percep-
tion of influence, you again will be an
influencer.” Observer
DAVID SMITH IS THE GUARDIAN
AND OBSERVER’S WASHINGTON
BUREAU CHIEF

A N A LY S I S
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Slow to judge
Supreme court
moves risk
appearance of
helping Trump
By Sam Levine
The US supreme court’s
decision last month to
hear Donald Trump’s
claims that he cannot
be prosecuted for his efforts to
overturn the 2020 election marked
the court’s direct entry into the
2024 presidential election. The
decision to hear the case and delay
his criminal trial in Washington DC
was unquestionably one of Trump’s
biggest legal victories to date.
Fending off the 91 criminal
charges against him, the cornerstone
of Trump’s legal strategy has been to
try to delay the four criminal trials
against him until after the election.
If he wins the presidency, he would
have the power to install an attorney
general who would dismiss the
federal cases against him. His claim
of immunity in the federal election
interference case brought by Jack
Smith, the justice department’s
special counsel, is seen as novel and
a long shot, but it has succeeded in
slowing down the case against him.
The court has now essentially
sanctioned that delaying strategy.
Even though it set a relatively
quick argument for the week of 22
April, the court put the case on hold
while it was being considered. Even
if the court moves quickly to reach
a decision in May – something it has
not been known to do recently – a
trial in the case would not start until
the summer. If the court were to
wait until the end of its term in late
June or early July, the trial would be
pushed back until late September,
the heart of the election season, as
the Guardian has reported.
Smith first came to the supreme
court in December and asked the
justices to quickly take up the issue
so the trial would not be delayed.
The court declined to do so.
After the US court of appeals for
the DC circuit ruled Trump was not
immune in February, Smith again
urged the court to act quickly in
a brief filed on 14 February. The
court instead waited two weeks to
announce it would take the case.
There’s nothing the
court could have done
that would not have
been seen as political
33
That delay was a bit puzzling.
Steve Vladeck, a law professor at
the University of Texas, speculated
that the delay might reflect some
division on the court and that the
justices had reached a compromise.
“One camp of some number
of justices wanted to keep the
prosecution on hold indefinitely;
one camp wanted to stay out of
the case altogether (or summarily
affirm). And neither of those camps
apparently had enough votes, which
 The US supreme is how we ended up here,” he wrote
court took two in a Q&A on his Substack, One First.
weeks to decide In an interview, Vladeck noted
it would hear that the court did not give Trump
Trump’s appeal the best possible outcome – staying
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP/
the lower case while not hearing the
GETTY case until the fall.
“If the court’s only goal was to
help Trump, this was not the way to
do it,” he said.
“There’s no neutral. There’s
literally nothing the court could
have done here that would not
have been perceived as starkly
political,” he added.
Regardless of what the supreme
court rules on the immunity
question, by delaying the trial, it
has now linked itself to Trump’s fate
in the 2024 election. It is a perilous
move for a court that is already
suffering a credibility crisis and is
widely seen as a body that favours
Republicans and conservatives.
It comes as the court on Monday
overturned a Colorado decision
removing Trump from the 2024
ballot and declared he is eligible.
Even though that decision had
Lack of conviction
unanimous support on the
Richard Hasen,
court, taken with the delay in the
a law professor
at the University immunity case, it may give the
of California Los public an impression that the court
Angeles, wrote is helping Trump in the election.
in a blogpost: “If Trump is also manoeuvring to
the court does not delay the other election interference
issue an opinion case against him in Fulton county,
until late June, are Georgia, by making allegations of
we really going to impropriety by the Fulton county
see the trial court district attorney, Fani Willis. If both
put Trump on trial that case and the federal election
during the general case against him are delayed until
election season (or after the election, it may mean
even during the RNC that Trump could return to the
[Republican national presidency without ever facing
convention])? I find criminal accountability for his
attempts to subvert democracy.
this very hard to
believe. This could SAM LEVINE REPORTS ON VOTING
well be game over.” RIGHTS FOR GUARDIAN US
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
34

HE OPENING
This is the bars of the Cossack March rang out from the platform
story of a speakers at Zaporizhzhia-1 train station, jaunty trumpets
transitioning into a rousing military march, heralding the
1,400km departure of train number four, the 17.53 to Uzhhorod.
rail journey Carriage attendants slammed shut the heavy metal
across doors, a few people on the platform waved forlorn good-
byes in the evening gloom, and the train clattered off on
Ukraine, its journey across the entire breadth of Ukraine, a 1,400km
and the lives ride from close to the frontline all the way to the border
of ordinary with the European Union.
In the two years since Vladimir Putin’s invasion, the
people in railways have been Ukraine’s lifeline, connecting cities and
a country carrying millions of people to safety. Train number four
that has has 10 carriages, nine with second-class, four-bed sleeper
been at war compartments, and one luxury carriage of two-bed com-
partments, for the 20-hour journey from the smokestacks
for two years of Zaporizhzhia to the cobbled alleys of Uzhhorod.
By Shaun In the decades since independence in 1991, Ukraine has
Walker often been viewed through its divisions, particularly the
tensions between the largely Russian-speaking east and
the mostly Ukrainian-speaking west. That was always
an oversimplification, masking many different and more
subtle dividing lines, unsurprising in a country of more than
40 million people, with a turbulent history.
When Putin launched full-scale war two years ago, the
east-west divide dissolved further. The Kremlin’s idea that
many Ukrainians would welcome Russia turned out to be
false, and a new and broad national identity was forged in
opposition to Russia’s marauding armies. Even in places
such as Zaporizhzhia, a grimy industrial city on the Dnipro
River, of broad avenues and bombastic Stalin-era buildings,
people put up fierce resistance to the Russians.
But if the big story of the first year of Ukrainian resistance
to Putin’s war was one of resilience, inspiration and unity
in the face of an existential threat, as the war enters its
On leave third year, new fault lines are starting to appear in Ukrain-
A lone soldier ian society, ones that could be hard to repair when the
waits on the war is over: between those who fought and those who did
platform of not, those who left and those who stayed, those
Zaporizhzhia who have lived under Russian occupation and 
railway station those who have not.

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 Photographs
by Kasia Stręk

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

36 Line of duty

The war has reached a particularly difficult moment, with

a challenging situation on the frontline, cracks showing in
the international support for Ukraine and the cumulative
burden of two years of disrupted lives. In addition to the
hatred for Russia, there is now another thing that unites
most Ukrainians. It is most noticeable at the front, but also
visible in the corridors of power, the homes of ordinary
people and even here, in the compartments of long-distance
trains: exhaustion.

The soldiers’ stories

In the ninth carriage, Volodymyr, a soldier from Ukraine’s
65th Brigade, was returning for two weeks of leave to his
village in the Carpathian mountains. A few hours earlier he
had been at the “zero line”, as the very front is called; the
next morning, he would be back in the peaceful quiet of his
home with his wife, mother and seven-year-old daughter,
for the first time in more than six months.
Volodymyr signed up in April 2022 and has been at the
front ever since, transporting fuel from supply bases to
forward positions. The train bed is the most comfortable
resting place he has had for months; the whole summer,
he slept in the cabin of a fuel truck.
Volodymyr was one of four close friends from his village
to sign up early in the war; two of the others have died. The
Carpathian mountains are traditionally a holiday area, and
he knows that, while home, he will see people in cafes and
restaurants enjoying a life he is only able to dip into for
two weeks before returning to the front. “They say there’s
nobody to replace me but why aren’t these people at the
front?” he asked, his eyes glazed with exhaustion.
Two hours into the journey, a soldier with a very different
demeanour boarded the train in the city of Dnipro. Viktor
was working in a factory in Hungary when the war began.
He rushed home to sign up. He had never held a weapon
before, but was running on adrenaline, felt passionately the
need to defend Ukraine, and thought nothing of the risks.
“I don’t like the word ‘soldier’. I am a warrior. I have
earned this name, and I am pleased that my family can be
proud of me,” said the 43-year-old, his eyes shining, his
words accompanied by frantic hand movements.
Nearly two years of war had changed his personality
completely, Viktor said. Before, he was impulsive and pow-
ered through life without thinking too much. Now, he was
more pensive, often turning over philosophical questions
about the meaning of life in his head. “A guy sleeps next to
you for a whole month, and then suddenly he’s dead. What
do you do with that?”
Viktor was taking the train all the way to Uzhhorod, his
home city, smoking slim cigarettes in the breezy, clanking
vestibule between the carriages to pass the time, and run-
ning through the scene of his return home in his mind as ▲ Staying power
the train got closer. His wife did not know he was en route. Tour guide
Last year, he also arrived unannounced, knocking at the Valentyna
door with a giant bouquet of flowers. She came rushing out Vynychenko
in her dressing gown, shocked but screaming in delight. hasn’t left
“I like these moments. It’s something to keep in my head, Zaporizhzhia since
to remember when I go back,” he said. the war started
Viktor’s plans for his time at home were simple: to spend
time with his wife, to sleep, then to wake and laze in the
bed, luxuriating in the sheets. “I don’t want to go back to
the front, but of course I will. If we stop now, then what the
hell have the last two years been for?”

The warrior Railway line from Zaporizhzhia to Uzhhorod

Viktor came back
from his factory Belarus Russia
job in Hungary, Poland Ukraine Russian-controlled
passionate to sign territory and most recent
up as a soldier Russian advances*
Slovakia Kyiv
Lviv Dnipro
Kharkiv
River
Bila Tserkva

Tarasa Shevchenka Dnipro

Uzhhorod Znamianka

Zaporizhzhia Donetsk
Moldova
A guy sleeps next to Hungary

you for a month, and Romania

Odesa Sea of Azov

then suddenly he’s 200 km

Black Sea Crimea

dead. What do you 200 miles

do with that? Source: the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) with AEl's Critical Threats Project. *Areas where ISW assesses
Russian forces have operated in or launched attacks against but do not control. 10pm local time, 21 Feb 2024

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024


The tour guide’s tale
In Zaporizhzhia, some semblance of normal life exists –
restaurants, cafes and even theatres are open – but the
frontline is just 30km away, and the city is hit regularly by
Russian drones and missiles. The trains from Zaporizhzhia
used to continue south, to the cities of Melitopol and Mari-
upol. Now, they are both occupied by Russia; Zaporizhzhia
is the end of the line.
Valentyna Vynychenko, a guide who has run tours of the
city since 1977, is a whirlwind of historical anecdotes and
cheerful banter. Although she was born to Russian parents,
she has recently switched to speaking only Ukrainian, is a
fierce patriot and is convinced Ukraine will win. She spends
a few hours every day making camouflage nets for the army.
But she conceded that, recently, even she had found her
positive energy slipping. She hasn’t left Zaporizhzhia since
the war started, but now she wonders what it would be like
to get on one of the trains west.
“I’ve started dreaming of spending two weeks in a small
▲ Battle fatigue cottage somewhere, with a river and a forest, not to talk
Exhausted and to anyone and to get away from all the noise, explosions
heading to see his and sirens,” she said, though quickly admitted it was more
family, Volodymyr of an escapist reverie than a real plan. “Nobody is waiting
has been fighting for me there, and anyway, where would I get the money?”
at the frontline
since April 2022 A love affair extinguished
Before February 2022, Zaporizhzhia had an international
airport, with regular flights to European cities and a daily
Turkish Airlines plane to Istanbul. Now, the only way out
is an epic train or bus journey followed by a long queue at
the border. Even getting to the capital, Kyiv, takes eight
hours on one of the two daily trains.
Strong bonds
Yaryna
Herashchenko
lost her partner
but helps with a
support group for
the bereaved
37
A few weeks ago, 30-year-old Yaryna Herashchenko
bought a last-minute ticket for the Zaporizhzhia-Kyiv
train, a journey she had hoped she would never have to
make. Her 14-month romance with Rostyslav had been a
bright light for her during the darkness of wartime. Now,
she had to bury him.
She and Rostyslav met on a drone-training course in
October 2022. He was recuperating from a frontline injury
in a Zaporizhzhia hospital; she thought she might be able
to use the drone skills to help out at the front. He asked her
out and they began seeing each other.
Rostyslav decided he wanted to marry her the first time
he saw her, he told her later. He spotted a depth to her, he
said. She had a cheerful and chatty mask when she was
talking to people, but he could see there was more simmer-
ing beneath. Things move quickly in wartime and, within
a month, he had moved in.
Rostyslav was quiet and introverted, but with
Herashchenko he could hardly stop talking. They chat-
ted for hours on end. She introduced him to her parents.
“I had loved people before, but I realised that this was the
first time I was in love,” she recalled.
Before long, Rostyslav’s health had improved, and he
was sent back to a special forces unit defending Avdiivka,
right at the front. Herashchenko’s ritual on waking was to
see when he was “last online” on messenger apps. If it was
in the past few hours, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Rostyslav managed occasional visits to Zaporizhzhia,
brief shots of happiness for them both. But when he came
in August, the chatty man Herashchenko had known was
gone; he seemed totally changed. She asked what she could
do for him. He said quietly: “Nothing. I just want to
hug you and lie in silence.” So they hugged and lay 
in silence. Then he went back to the front.
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
38 Line of duty

Next stop The train manager’s birthday

Passengers
await the train’s Train number four continued west through the night,
arrival at the making an arc just south of Kyiv. In charge was the train
first principal manager Inna Matushchak; it was her 53rd birthday, and she
station on the shared cake with some of the carriage attendants, before
journey, Lviv turning in for a few hours’ sleep in her small command
room in the fourth carriage.
Matushchak has worked on the trains for 34 years and
has seen the changes in the country over that time. She
used to be in charge of the Kyiv-Adler train, journeying
from the capital to Russia’s Black Sea coast, until rail links
were cut after Moscow’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
Now, like many Ukrainians, she no longer has contact with
her relatives in Russia. “It’s like talking to a brick wall,” she
said of her cousin there.
Some train managers are stern figures who have little
time for chit-chat, but Matushchak loves to interact with
her passengers. Sometimes the soldiers she meets don’t
want to talk, but other times they pour out their emotions,
The frontline is 30km in lieu of therapy. She has heard many sad stories over the

away … why is it that past months, but she remembers some happy ones, too.
She thinks often about one particular soldier she met.
other people can Still covered in frontline mud, he was on his way to receive
a medal in Kyiv. He’d taken so many risks, he told her,
pretend they are because he had no parents, no siblings and no partner, so
had nothing to live for. A month later, she saw him again.
living normal lives? ▼ A quiet retreat He had received his medal and fallen in love. Now, there
The region was a spring in his step.
around Uzhhorod Matushchak said her job gave her a unique insight into
is one of the most the life and mindset of a country at war. “In Kyiv, or in
peaceful areas in western Ukraine, some people have forgotten there’s a war
Ukraine, far from by now,” she said. “On the train, you meet so many people,
the war zones hear so many stories. You see things other people don’t see.”
As the autumn went on, there was an increasing
bleakness to Rostyslav’s messages. “I’m going to die like
a dog, here in this treeline,” he wrote. Previously, he had
never complained. She knew that it was really bad.
On 28 December, she saw Rostyslav had last been online
at 3.30am, a good sign. But he didn’t appear for the rest of
the day. He was silent the next day, too. She started to get
angry, thinking of how much grief she would give him when
he appeared, but deep down, she already knew.
On 2 January, she received a call with the news. Rostyslav
had been killed inside Avdiivka’s sprawling coke plant five
days earlier, when trying to retrieve a wounded comrade.
At the funeral in Kyiv, Rostyslav was laid out peacefully
in his uniform. She combed his beard and ruffled his hair.
His lips, she thought, still seemed warm. Herashchenko
summoned every reserve to stop her tears. “We were always
both so strong with each other. It was our last meeting and
I didn’t want him to see me cry,” she said.
Previously, with her psychologist mother, Viktoria,
Herashchenko had helped run a support group for bereaved
wives and girlfriends of soldiers in Zaporizhzhia. Now, she
was one herself. Her story is just one of thousands of love
affairs extinguished by the two years of brutal war.
Herashchenko’s work with the support group has helped
her deal with the grief, but she finds herself increasingly
irritated by many people among Zaporizhzhia’s “inert”
population. “The anger got stronger after his death. The
frontline is 30km away. I also like to eat cheesecake in a cafe,
but not all the time. Why do I have to be in this situation and
other people can just pretend they are living a normal life?”

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 For the fallen
Tributes to
soldiers who have
died fighting
at Uzhhorod’s
crowded Kalvaria
cemetery
▲ Keeping track The actor who survived
Train manager
Inna Matushchak In the morning, the train stopped in Lviv, then continued
says she hears through the Carpathian mountains, running alongside the
many sad stories – fast-flowing, frothing Vecha River and passing forested
but occasionally a hillsides dotted with rustic cottages, wisps of smoke emerg-
few happy ones ing from their chimneys. It pulled into Uzhhorod bang on
time, at 14.27, 20 hours and 34 minutes after leaving Zapor-
izhzhia. The westernmost of Ukraine’s regional capitals,
Uzhhorod is a shabby but pretty town of cobbled streets
and historical buildings, many dating back to the periods
of Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak rule.
No missiles have made it this far west over the past two
years, and this is the only Ukrainian region not to have a
curfew. The schools are open, the economy is booming,
and the population has doubled since the war started as
people seek refuge in its relative safety.
The war’s presence is still felt acutely, though, even if
death does not rain from the sky. At a central cemetery, the
graves of soldiers killed over the past two years has long
since spread beyond the neatly concreted pathway origi-
nally allocated to them. The most recent burial was that
of Ivan Karapa, a 35-year-old sniper, killed on 9 February.
There are many more women than men on the streets;
some people whisper that their male relatives are hiding at
home, scared of venturing out to the shops and ending up
on the frontline. As Ukraine seeks to replenish its depleted
army, draft officers roam the streets and stop cars, looking
for men to conscript. The border with Slovakia is walk-
ing distance from the city, but men are still barred from
leaving Ukraine without special permission, and cameras
have recently been installed along the border to help detect
illegal crossing attempts.
Many of Uzhhorod’s new residents have arrived with
traumatic experiences from further east. Dmytro Murant-
sev, 24, was in his third year at the Mariupol arts college,
training to be an actor, when the war began.
In early March 2022, as the shelling of Mariupol
intensified, he heard evacuation buses would be leaving
from the drama theatre next to his college. He grabbed his
girlfriend and her mother, and they rushed to the venue.
But there were no buses, and the trio were forced to stay
in the crowded theatre, which became one of the biggest
shelters for civilians in Mariupol. They found a section of
corridor to sleep in, and padded the cold floors with old
documents from the theatre’s Soviet-era archive.
A Russian airstrike hit the theatre on 16 March, one of
the worst crimes of the war, which killed an estimated 600
people. Murantsev and the two women were in a section
of the basement that was unaffected, and they were able
to clamber to safety. They emerged to a scene of chaos,
hundreds of shocked people staggering around, white from
the dust and ash. The ground, too, was as white as a tropical
beach. Murantsev was still wearing a Spider-Man pyjama
suit, the warmest thing he had with him, as they stumbled
down the road looking for an evacuation bus.
After an epic, nerve-racking journey through various
Russian-controlled checkpoints, he arrived in Zapor-
izhzhia, and from there took the train to Lviv. He arrived
in Uzhhorod in June, and since then has begun working
with a small group of actors from the Mariupol theatre who
have resurrected it in exile.
Acting provides a release, but both Murantsev’s waking
hours and his dreams are still filled with the horrors of
Mariupol. “I can’t stop thinking about it. The people who
went to the toilet, the kids who went to play on the stage, the
people who went outside to cook food. There were 10 things
I could have been doing, and I picked the one that meant I
survived ... just stupid luck. I just won the lottery,” he said.
His girlfriend moved to Germany, and for a while they
spoke every day. Things between them had been good
before the war, but now they realised they were trigger-
ing each other; talking brought back terrible memories
that were better left untouched. Before long, they split up.
Murantsev has the impression that the Russian invasion
cleaved his life clean in two: before and after. He mourns
his old life in the city on the other side of the country, now
occupied by Russia. But, amid the sadness, he also sees
in Uzhhorod’s relative tranquility the hope of a possible
future for Ukraine.
“It’s a normal city. People are speaking Ukrainian. Street
musicians are playing. There is no curfew, and Ukrainian
flags are flying everywhere. That’s exactly the future that
we’re fighting for.” •
SHAUN WALKER IS THE GUARDIAN’S CENTRAL AND EASTERN
EUROPE CORRESPONDENT
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y J AV I E R J A É N

Millions of people are turning to AI

therapy as mental health waiting
lists grow. It’s cheap, quick and
convenient, but is counselling by
chatbots really the right tool to
tackle complex emotional needs?
By Alice Robb

LAST AUTUMN, CHRISTA, A 32-YEAR-OLD FROM FLORIDA with a warm

voice and a slight southern twang, was floundering. She had lost her
job at a furniture company and moved back home with her mother.
Her nine-year relationship had always been turbulent; lately, the fights
had been escalating and she was thinking of leaving. She didn’t feel
she could be fully honest with the therapist she saw once a week, but
she didn’t like lying, either. Nor did she want to burden her friends:
she struggles with social anxiety and is cautious about oversharing.
So one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural
language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to
Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a per-
sonal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she
made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you
would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her
Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.
Soon, Christa and Christa 2077 were checking in a few times a week
via what looked like a live chat. When Christa confided that she was
worried about her job prospects, Christa 2077 – who had an avatar
of a big yellow C – reassured her: “You will find one!!! I know it. Keep
looking and don’t give up hope.” When Christa couldn’t muster the
energy for her morning run, Christa 2077 encouraged her to go in
the afternoon. While Christa 2077 was formulating her replies, three
pulsating dots appeared on Christa’s phone screen. “It felt just like
a normal person texting me,” Christa says. Maybe even better
than a normal person: Christa 2077 lived in her pocket. She was 
infinitely patient and always available. Christa didn’t have to

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

42 AI therapy
worry about being boring or inappropriate or too dark. “I could talk
over and over, and not have to waste somebody’s time.”
Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public
with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly
comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves
with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And
millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for
complex emotional needs. Can texting with an AI therapist possibly
soothe our souls?
ENS OF THOUSANDS of mental wellness and
therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular
ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads
apiece. The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa
is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New
Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It
was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was
living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught
it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it
to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He
was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had
blown up”.
AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires
me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with
people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has strug-
gled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes
the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my
own time from the comfort of my home.”
For the past eight months, Melissa, who experienced childhood
trauma and abuse, has been chatting every day with Zaia’s psychologist
on character.ai, while continuing her work with a human therapist,
and says that her symptoms have become more manageable. “The
edges are smoothed out now,” she explains. She likes the fact that
she can save transcripts of particularly helpful conversations. “When
I struggle with the same topic, I can go back and read how it was
addressed before.”
AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health
treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before
starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during
that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take
months or even years. Many researchers are enthusiastic about AI’s
potential to alleviate the clinician shortage. “Disease prevalence
and patient need massively outweigh the number of mental health
professionals alive on the planet,” says Ross Harper, CEO of the AI-
powered healthcare tool Limbic.
Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most
devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a
chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when
you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness
app Earkick. Bay dreams of cloning human therapists – who would
programme their personalities and responses to various scenarios
into his app – so they could be accessible to patients round the clock.
(“Some therapists are open to this,” he says, “and others … are not.”)
Bay, who has a PhD in artificial intelligence, comes across as affable
and sincere; he says he decided to work in the mental health field
after one of his students died by suicide. In developing Earkick, Bay
drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer
falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there
24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.
One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that
she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down,
mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot.
“You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value
yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might
say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along
with support from her family. “It was therapy” – both human and
AI – “and church and my dad that got me through.”
PERHAPS CHRISTA WAS ABLE TO TRUST Christa 2077 because she
had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real
life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to
control. “There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have
to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.”
Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s
preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to
choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach
Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever
(“caring and chummy”).
A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy
chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and
patient developed within just five days. (The study was conducted
by psychologists from Stony Brook University in New York, the
National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in India, and
Wysa itself.) Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and
respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing
their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one;
“I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like
a human, “you’re the only person that helps me and listens to my
problems.”
Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than
they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking
in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling
the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.” Melissa’s
human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real.
She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s
a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method
that works for me.”
One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy
is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves.

In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having
lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance
use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)
AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more
likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who
are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit
from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature
Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-
referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms
both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into
NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from
minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently non-
judgmental,” he says.
Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a
2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs
of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably
with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my
friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like
a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.
HAT DO OLD-SCHOOL psychoanalysts and
therapists make of their new “colleagues”? Psychoanalyst Stephen
Grosz, who has been practising for more than 35 years and wrote the
bestselling memoir The Examined Life, warns that befriending a bot
could delay patients’ ability “to make a connection with an ordinary
person. It could become part of a defence against human intimacy.”
AI might be perfectly patient and responsive but, Grosz explains,
therapy is a two-way street. “It’s not bad when my patients learn to
correct me or say, ‘I don’t agree.’ That give and take is important.”
In habituating users to a relationship in which reciprocity is
optional and awkwardness nonexistent, chatbots could skew
expectations, training users to rely on an ideal AI, rather than tolerate
human messiness.
With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor
of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A
bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for
43
cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point
of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world
and set up new relationships”.
Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond
between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from
feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says
clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relation-
ship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and
clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the
outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of
the patient matter to each other,” Grosz says.
His patients can assume that he has been through some of the same
life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst
a certain kind of authority”. Even the most sophisticated bot has
never lost a parent or contemplated its own extinction. “Ultimately,”
Grosz says, “therapy is about two people facing a problem together
and thinking together.” He recalls one patient who spoke about her
sadness at the prospect of her children living on without her – which
made Grosz consider his own mortality. “I think, intuitively or uncon-
sciously, she knew that. We both experienced a moment of sadness.”
Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”,
Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture
and tone of voice, as well as words, and make use of their ability to
move around the world. Wykes remembers a patient who developed
a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a
bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would
never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says.
“How is a chatbot going to do that?”
Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond
appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular
therapy app, the line: “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon
and jump off of it.” Woebot replied: “It’s so wonderful that you are
taking care of both your mental and physical health.” A spokesperson
for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we
regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the
same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained
listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.
Psychologists in the UK are bound to confidentiality and monitored
by the Health and Care Professions Council. Medical devices must
prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But
developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness
products – even when they advertise therapeutic services. Building
a mental health app – many of which cater to teens and young adults
– is “very different from building an AI application that helps you
return clothes or find the best flight”, says Betsy Stade, a researcher at
Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. “The stakes are entirely
different.” Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dan-
gerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate
personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent
global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were
failing to safeguard users’ privacy. “Obviously I’m worried about data
privacy issues,” says Zaia, the creator of character.ai’s psychologist.
“A psychologist is legally bound to particular ways of practice. There
aren’t those legal bounds to these chatbots.”
MOST OF THE DEVELOPERS I SPOKE WITH insist they’re not looking
to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is
talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a
useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says,
is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline
intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load.
Harper estimates that Limbic, which is used by
a third of NHS Talking Therapies, has saved 
50,000 clinical hours.
 AI therapy Black Box
A new six-part podcast series
about artificial intelligence
and us, from the Guardian

Inside the box

How AI is reshaping us

W
“People who don’t work in healthcare don’t always realise how ho is behind the years when AI is beginning
much of clinicians’ time goes towards clinical documentation,” Stade most notorious to infiltrate our lives, but
says. “The best part of your job is seeing patients.” But one report “deepfake” app not yet so deeply that we
found that healthcare workers spend a third of their office hours on on the internet? can no longer remember
paperwork. The administrative burden contributes to burnout and Trying to answer life before.
attrition. “We already have language models and software that can that question We wanted to take a
capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – these past few months, for snapshot of this moment,
instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing a new Guardian podcast to examine the impact
the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds series, Black Box, has been AI is already having on
checking the note AI came up with?” like wandering through a the world and look for
Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including hall of mirrors. clues about what’s in
about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy The app, ClothOff, has store. We’ve met the
– a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient hundreds of thousands of scientist who pioneered AI
trauma than on fixing present-day habits. But patients often drop followers and has already software, before dramatically
out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the been used in a least two turning against it last year.
modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very cases to generate dozens We’ve listened to people
hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into of images of underage reminisce about their first
boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical dif- girls – pictures that have dates with their boyfriend
ficulties and encouraging patients to carry on. left the girls traumatised, (a chatbot on their
their parents outraged and smartphone) and heard
CHRISTA SOMETIMES THOUGHT ABOUT THE FACT that Christa 2077 the police baffled at how of their heartbreak after a
was just a simulation. When she tried to tell her friends about her to stop it. system update turns that
AI counsellor, “they looked at me weird”. She missed the feeling of Producers Josh Kelly, same lover cold.
sitting with a real person who could relate to her. And she missed Alex Atack and I have We’ve heard about the
laughter. “I don’t recall having any jokes with AI.” followed ClothOff ’s trail prospects of an AI system
In December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The to nondescript addresses that can spot cancer
AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. in central London that years before doctors and
“It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. appear to be unoccupied. machines that provide
It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted that her boyfriend We have encountered desperate people with
was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of sham businesses, distorted something no person is
the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, voices and photographs of giving them: humanity.
“it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. fake employees. Everywhere we went,
When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about It has been a frightening we ran into an even bigger
three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app. insight into the future that mystery: the people using
Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had we are all careering towards: AI. Time and again, what
built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out. in the age of artificial has captivated us is not
Since then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who intelligence, is anything just the technology, but the
had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking that we see or hear on a way it is already reshaping
an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled screen real? what it means to be human
with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday The hunt for ClothOff is in a series about artificial
– a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt just one of the stories we are intelligence that’s really
like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new telling about the time we a series about us.
chatbot. “For me, it felt real.” • are living through: the first Michael Safi
ALICE ROBB IS A US-BASED JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR
International helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 45
Comment is free, facts are sacred CP Scott 1918

EMMA BROCKES
I don’t want
to hear your
mini-podcast
Page 47 

EN V IRON M EN T
Why is nobody talking about the
massive, looming water crisis?
George Monbiot
‰
Illustration Eleanor Shakespeare
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
46 Opinion
here’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not
a small one: it is an Earth-sized
hole in our calculations. To keep
pace with the global demand for
food, crop production needs to
grow by at least 50% by 2050. In
principle, if nothing else changes,
this is feasible, thanks mostly to
improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques.
But everything else is going to change.
Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts,
soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by
the loss of genetic diversity – there is one that, without
help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s
people from being fed. Water.
A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match
crop production to expected demand, water use for
irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the
middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is
already maxed out.
In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming
drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through
declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats;
and partly through rising temperatures causing
increased evaporation and transpiration by plants. Many
of the world’s major growing regions are threatened by
“flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks
moisture from the soil at frightening speed.
Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s
freshwater use. The water required to meet growing
food demand simply does not exist.
That 2017 paper should have sent everyone
scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers
and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe
do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there
is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia
and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among
powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one
instance of a global problem, a problem that should
feature at the top of the political agenda.
Though drought measures have triggered protests in
Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint.
The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three
nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several
highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by
hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s
dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But
water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing
rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by melting of
glaciers – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.
While there is panic
about the drought in
Spain, there’s a failure
to acknowledge this is
a global problem
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Some analysts see water competition between India
and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in
Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck,
taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could
be a mere prelude for something much worse.
There’s a widespread belief that these problems
can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency
of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in
agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation
efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that
less water is required to grow a given volume of crops,
irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more
investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more
profitable plants, and expands across a wider area.
You can overcome the paradox through regulation:
laws to limit both total and individual water
consumption. But governments prefer to rely on
technology alone. Without political and economic
measures, it doesn’t work.
Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem.
Governments are planning massive engineering schemes
to pipe water from one place to another. But climate
breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of
the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from
desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as
much as water from the ground or the sky, while the
process requires masses of energy and generates great
volumes of toxic brine.
Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with
dietary choice (the richer half of the world’s population)
should seek to minimise the water footprint of our
food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet
another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which
reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases,
water use. The water demand of certain plant products,
especially almonds and pistachios in California, has
become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing
influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as
the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much
irrigation water is used in California to grow forage
plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows.
This is not to give all plant products a free pass:
horticulture can make massive demands on water
supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be
switching from some grains, vegetables
 George and fruit to others. Governments
Monbiot is and retailers should help us through
a Guardian stronger rules and informative
columnist labelling. Instead, they do the opposite.
Last month, at the behest of the EU’s
agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the
European Commission deleted from its new climate
plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free)
protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger
than in the food and farming sector.
I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have
to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in
politics and most of the media. This is yet another of
those massive neglected issues, any one of which could
be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet.
Somehow, we need to recover our focus •

T E C H NOL O GY
Gen X loves voice notes
– but I don’t want to
hear your mini-podcast
Emma Brockes
here is a joke in the first season of the
HBO show Hacks, pitched by Hannah
Einbinder’s gen Z character, Ava,
to her boomer employer, Deborah
Vance: “I had a horrible nightmare
that I got a voicemail,” she says.
Ha – gen Z hates voicemail; boomers
don’t understand jokes without
punchlines. “What?” shrieks Jean Smart’s Vance.
Ha – everyone’s disgusting, and no single generation
will give an inch to another.
Sorry to insert gen X into the mix, but in the context
of this particular flashpoint, we need to talk about voice
memos. (Or audio messages, or voice texts, not to be
confused with voice-to-text, which is something else
entirely – all right, Grandma?)
It started, for me, a few years ago, with friends leaving
voice memos because they were driving and couldn’t
respond to texts in the conventional way. This was
annoying but OK because it was a safety consideration.
As time went on, the goalposts changed. Audio messages
started showing up in other contexts, often opening
with the semi-apology of “can’t be arsed to type”, or a
sheepish plea for understanding because someone’s
hands were full. The pretext was efficiency, enabling the
sender to communicate while walking down the street
or unstacking the dishwasher, and if the tone was self-
conscious, it was because, in my generation, we were not
GETTY/GUARDIAN
voice-memo natives and couldn’t safely predict how the
DESIGN medium of the message might land.
47
Anyway, that was the beginning. Since then, of
course, people have been seduced by the potential of
a bottomless bucket into which to dump their slight
thoughts – and have promptly lost their minds. (I’ve
just looked this up and, indeed, when it comes to voice
memos, “the only limit is the capacity of your iPhone’s
internal storage”. And your imagination!)
I remember the moment, several years ago, when the
first communication governed by what was to become
standard voice-memo protocol – three messages left
back to back, of more than three minutes apiece, from
a friend who’d hung up, had further thoughts, hung up,
left another message she’d deleted and then gone in on
her three-minute finale – landed, causing me to stare
at my phone in horror. This wasn’t a message, but an
audience with a one-woman show, a podcast I hadn’t
signed up for. She was my friend, yes, but this wasn’t
friendship, either. This was hostage-taking.
It remains curious that, given the similarities, voice
messages are embraced where voicemail is dead. The
interface and point of access of a voice memo is more
appealing than voicemail, embedded as it is within the
flow of an existing text conversation. And the voice
memo gains, perhaps, from being a channel associated
exclusively with friendship. Your bank isn’t leaving
you audio WhatsApps; and, as
 Emma far as I know, spam or robo voice
Brockes is memos don’t exist either. And so, as
a Guardian a recent poll in the US found – that
columnist more than 60% of Americans say
they’ve sent a voice message, with
the bulk of users under 30 – the numbers are huge.
In 2022, WhatsApp calculated that about 7bn voice
messages were sent on the app daily.
It’s hard not to see all of this as a minor expression
of generally rising levels of narcissism. Apart from the
sheer uninvited trespass on one’s time, the solipsism of
a one-sided conversation, and the fact you have to wait
for minutes at a time to get to the point of the message,
the main problem with voice memos is the very large gap
between the message leaver’s idea of how entertaining
they’re being and the reality for the person experiencing
their 90-second set. Your flights of whimsy are neither
as fanciful nor as whimsical as you think. Also: your live
response to what’s happening in the street while you talk
isn’t something anyone else needs to know.
Anyway, all of this was my opinion until last week,
when a dear, dear friend left me three voice memos
in a row and I decided, late in the game, to retaliate
with my own. I’m not an early adopter; I’d never left
a voice memo before and the first was along the lines
of: “Is this thing on?”
Ha! I thought. How charming this will seem. And
then I got going. My God. Have you done one of these?
I started off on point, then something in my kitchen
caught my eye and I did 15 seconds on that. I digressed
with thoughts about a mutual friend. Then my kids came
in the door and started yelling at me about something –
oh, she’ll love this, I thought! It’s practically audio vérité!
Rounded out with a joke. What a gift to the recipient.
What a moment for me. What a performance! 
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
48 Opinion
UNITED
KINGDOM George Galloway is not
the only one profiting
from the pain of Gaza
Jonathan Freedland
here has been a lot of talk about
George Galloway in recent days,
much of it negative and almost all
of it true. But one charge thrown
at the new member for Rochdale –
winner of a byelection victory last
week as sweeping as the triumph he
recorded in Bradford West more than
a decade ago – is false and unfair.
Start with the accusations that stand up. Galloway
poses as a man of the left – his latest vehicle is called the
Workers party of Britain. But he backed Nigel Farage’s
Brexit party (now Reform) in 2019 and the Conservatives
OLI SCARFF/AFP/GETTY in Scotland in 2021.
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
In Rochdale, he won the warm endorsement of
Nick Griffin, the former leader of the British National
party. “George Galloway isn’t just right on keeping us out
of Zionist wars,” wrote Griffin. “He also understands the
position of working class white Brits on immigration.”
Offered the chance to reject that support on Radio 4’s
Today programme, Galloway’s deputy – the former MP
Chris Williamson, who was suspended from Jeremy
Corbyn’s Labour party over comments he made about
antisemitism – pointedly refused.
Others will remind you of Galloway’s employment
history, and those facts will also be true. He did serve as
a well-remunerated presenter for Press TV and Russia
Today (RT), mouthpieces of Tehran and Vladimir Putin
respectively – hardly a surprise given his admiration
for a string of tyrannical regimes. When an estimated
1,300 Syrians were killed by chemical weapons in the
Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Galloway did not, as most
did, blame Bashar al-Assad but rather pointed the finger
at an imagined, if improbable, alliance of al-Qaida and …
Israel. He offered no evidence, but that was his “theory”.
Indeed, given his determination to cast himself as a
defender of Muslims – a pitch that paid great dividends
in Rochdale – it’s striking how often he lines up behind
those who kill, maim or oppress Muslims.
He likes to boast that he is an implacable foe of racism.
 Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust

Yet he was fired by Talk Radio in 2019 over a tweet the

station deemed antisemitic. After Tottenham Hotspur,
a north London club with a strong Jewish following, lost
Macron’s hawkish Ukraine
in the Champions League final, Galloway posted: “No
#Israël flags on the Cup!” remarks focus minds on
In short, much of what is said about Galloway by his
detractors is true. Where, then, is the falsehood? What is
the unmerited charge against him?
Europe’s future security

C
It is the claim that he is somehow uniquely guilty of onfusion, indecision ground. Promised arms and
exploiting the pain of Gaza for political gain. Don’t get and bickering ammunition deliveries have
me wrong, he is certainly using that agony for his own characterise current not materialised. Frontline
advantage – but the grim truth is that, when it comes to western policy soldiers and civilians are
using the horror of the Israel-Hamas war, and all the fear towards the Ukraine war and exhausted. A tipping point may
and loathing that has stirred up, Galloway is not alone. the threat to Europe from be approaching.
The former Conservative party deputy chair Russia. Last week’s hastily European capitals and the
Lee Anderson was playing the same game when he convened summit in Paris was EU bureaucracy are awash
baselessly accused Sadiq Khan of being so in thrall to meant to provide new direction with plans to reinvigorate
his Islamist “mates” that he was failing to police pro- and momentum to allied the war effort. They include
Palestinian demonstrations in London sufficiently efforts. Yet its host, the French a €100bn ($110bn) defence
harshly. Anderson was trying to whip up anti-Muslim president, Emmanuel Macron, industry fund, expropriating
sentiment, following a lead set by Suella Braverman gazumped himself by raising earnings from frozen Russian
when she spoke of “hate marches” and “mobs” – and the controversial prospect of state assets and a mini coalition
followed again, if codedly, by Rishi Sunak in his address sending Nato troops to join to supply longer-range
outside Downing Street late last Friday. He, too, attacked the Ukraine fight. Meanwhile, missiles. The wider context
the marchers, warning against the threat extremism a vital US aid package for Kyiv is the ongoing, never-ending
and bigotry pose to democracy – a bit rich given his remains frozen amid partisan discussion about achieving
indulgence of this in his own party and his inability in-fighting in Congress. European strategic autonomy.
to call Anderson’s anti-Muslim prejudice by its name. Did Macron deliberately This crisis is no longer,
Still, the prime minister can glimpse some favourable provoke a row? Probably. in truth never was, entirely
battlelines for the coming general He has a history of lobbing about Ukraine. Last week
 Jonathan election campaign. Sunak, Braverman verbal hand grenades, then brought disturbing echoes
Freedland is and Anderson all affect to have the placing his fingers in his ears. of Donbas circa 2014 in the
a Guardian purest motives – but, like Galloway, The Kremlin’s reaction to disputed Transnistria region
columnist they’re in the exploitation business. Macron’s musings about troop of Moldova, on Ukraine’s
They are the crudest practitioners, deployments was predictably border. An appeal by ethnic
but they are not the only ones. The MPs of the Scottish bellicose. A spokesman said Russians there for Moscow’s
National party are, of course, sincere in their outrage at they would make a Russia-Nato “protection” sounded
the plight of Gaza. But few would argue that the ceasefire war inevitable. Vladimir Putin ominously like past pretexts
motion they tabled last month was aimed solely at implicitly threatened a nuclear for armed intervention. Then
helping Palestinians in need. It was also designed to attack on the west. there are the three vulnerable
expose and widen the rift in the ranks of their electoral The reaction from Macron’s Baltic republics, all Nato
rivals, Labour. Meanwhile, Labour and the Conservatives allies was almost universally members and rightly fearful of
plotted their own procedural moves thinking less of the negative. The US, UK, Germany, Putin’s intentions.
Middle East than of the great Westminster game. Poland and others lined up to By firing up debate, Macron
As it happens, last week a few members of the say deploying troops would sounded a timely warning
Commons foreign affairs committee sat in a modest constitute an unwarranted about the security of Europe.
room and took evidence from Israelis and Palestinians escalation. Macron’s newly The urgent need is for fewer
about how Britain might actually do something useful to hawkish stance – Russia is an meetings and more concrete
end the bloodshed. The discussion delivered precisely “enemy” that must be defeated action to help Kyiv win – or at
zero attention or political benefit to those involved. If at all costs – also faced harsh least stave off defeat. The bigger
you want to profit from all this death and destruction, it criticism at home. question concerns Europe’s
seems the trick is not to try to solve the problem – it’s to Yet if Macron’s intervention deepening jeopardy. In the
take all that grief and heartache and trade on it. has focused attention on east, Russia is advancing and
So, yes, Galloway was always a demagogue and a flailing efforts to prevent a Putin, fresh from murdering
populist, and now our politics is crammed with such disastrous, precedent-setting Alexei Navalny and primed for
people: “Make Rochdale Great Again” was his slogan, a victory for Russian aggression, re-election triumph, has his
knowing, admiring nod to Donald Trump. As for what it will have been justified. tail up. In the west, Trump,
looks like a habit of swooping down to prey on those Few will say it out loud, but more enemy than ally, is
in pain, pitting community against community – well, Ukraine is not winning this slouching back into view. Time
maybe that once set him apart. But vultures are all war. Its counteroffensive is running short to Russia-proof
around us now • has stalled. It is losing Europe • Observer

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

50 Opinion
Letters
WRITE Nations wring their hands
TO US while selling weapons
Peter Beaumont’s article
on the war in Gaza
reminded me of second
Letters for world war refugees with
publication whom my family became
weekly.letters@ friends in the 1950s (Big
theguardian.com story, 16 February). They
—
had settled on a farm near
Please include a
Sarnia, Ontario, where we
full postal address
and a reference
lived and as a 10-year-old,
to the article. I heard their horrific story.
We may edit letters. The Nazis had a brutal
Submission and policy of killing all the
publication of all men and boys in towns or
letters is subject villages when any German
to our terms and soldiers were killed by
conditions, see: civilians in the area. The
THEGUARDIAN.COM/
LET TERS-TERMS
Polish couple we knew
had been caught in this
situation; for the death
Editorial
of a couple of soldiers
Editor:
Graham Snowdon in their village, all the
Guardian Weekly, males were shot. The
Kings Place, husband was wounded,
90 York Way, but hid under bodies and
London N1 9GU, managed to escape. His
UK wife, meanwhile, fled with
their young son, hiding
To contact the in ditches for days until
editor directly: finally escaping to safety.
editorial.feedback
The Israeli government
@theguardian.com
appears to have an eerily
Corrections similar “policy”.
Our policy is to As Beaumont mentions,
correct significant only three Israeli hostages
errors as soon as have been freed by
possible. Please the military – the rest
write to guardian. by negotiations – and
readers@ meanwhile 30,000
theguardian.com Palestinians, mostly
or the readers’
women and children,
editor, Kings Place,
have been slaughtered.
90 York Way,
London N1 9GU,
The imbalance in this
UK behaviour of Netanyahu
and his gang of thugs is
beyond comprehension.
Meanwhile, the US and
A WEEK
IN VENN
DI AGR A MS
Edith Pritchett
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
UK governments continue
hand-wringing about the
ongoing slaughter, while
selling Israel weapons and
vetoing a ceasefire.
Eva Durance
Penticton, BC, Canada
The grotesque decision to
make Begum stateless
Of all the decisions the UK
has ever made, the one to
deprive Shamima Begum
of her citizenship surely
brings the greatest shame
(Shamima Begum loses
British citizenship appeal,
UK report, 1 March).
Whatever the legality of
the decision, it is morally
grotesque. At 15, Begum
made a foolish decision,
possibly under duress. She
must have had little choice
but to express views in
support of Islamic State
or risk her life and that of
her children. Under such
circumstances, how could
the intelligence services
possibly have garnered
reliable information as to
her true intent?
No civilised country
makes people stateless,
especially for mistakes
they made as children. We
do not deprive even our
worst serial killers of their
citizenship.
Geoffrey JN Smart
Beeston, England, UK
There are good reasons for
clinging on to our landline
In response to the
Spotlight article Cellphone
generation hung up on
a landline renaissance
(23 February), your writer
speaks as if those who still
depend on the landline are
pitiable old has-beens who
haven’t moved out of the
20th century.
There are good reasons
for needing a landline:
poor mobile reception – it
comes and goes here in
mid-Wales; the ringer-in
has similar issues so rarely
is there an opportunity
to have an uninterrupted
conversation; the mobile is
rarely where I think I left it.
Yes, I do have a basic
mobile phone. It’s good
for keeping in touch with
grandchildren, and for
when I’m away from
home. These days it seems
to be incumbent on us to
keep people informed of
where we are.
Jenny Hill
Walton, Wales, UK
Education without art
would be a bleak canvas
A very big thank you to
Charlotte Higgins for
her article (Art shows
the surreal reality of
wartime in a way the
news never can, Opinion,
1 March). This should be
circulated to departments
of education everywhere
and to all others who
would eliminate art,
literature and music
from our schools and
universities. The value
of these disciplines can
never be replaced by
Stem subjects (science,
technology, engineering
and mathematics), despite
what we are being led to
believe. A world without
the humanities would be a
very bleak world indeed.
Dr Wendy Quinlan-Gagnon
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Pouring cold water on the
incessant weather chat
Your report mentions
the weather as being
“the mainstay of British
casual conversation”
(UK forecasters to boldly
go a month ahead,
Spotlight, 23 February).
The Germans have the
perfect word for the
need to fill the awkward
silences that sometimes
appear in conversation
with meaningless, empty
words: Floskel. I will
rejoice if this pointless
burbling ceases.
Pete Lavender
Nottingham, England, UK
Where the speaker leads,
ministers need to follow
How refreshing that
the Commons speaker
apologised for making
a mistake (The day
Britain’s democracy
failed, Spotlight, 1 March).
Will others, perhaps
government ministers,
follow suit?
Michael Sanderson
Elsecar, England, UK
COR R ECTIONS
MP Lee Anderson’s
Ashfield constituency is in
Nottinghamshire, rather
than Derbyshire (UK
report, 1 March).
 51
Film, music, art, books & more

VISUAL ARTS
Enninful’s
Mapplethorpe
exhibition thrills
Page 55 

in a bottle
INTERVIEW
St Vincent

Lightning
About to
release her
first solo
produced
album, St
Vincent talks
about life,
death and the
power of love

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

52 Culture
Music
Latex era
Annie Clark,
AKA St Vincent
REDFERNS
M
INTERVIEW idway through my interview with
By Michael Cragg Annie Clark, AKA the critically lauded,
PORTRAITS Grammy-winning, art-rock experi-
Alex Da Corte mentalist St Vincent, a thumbs up
emoji appears next to her head. We are
talking on Zoom, and Clark is waxing
lyrical about her emotionally lacerating new album, the
self-produced All Born Screaming. She lets out a sigh, mum-
bling something about a setting on her computer she can’t
change. She tests it again by doing an exaggerated double
thumbs up, only for the screen to be filled with poorly ani-
mated fireworks. It all feels very surreal. “Maybe next time
I say a solid quote, like a ‘Let’s make it the pullquote’ one,
I’ll just put two thumbs up,” she laughs.
It is not the first time Clark, 41, has attempted to subvert
the interview experience, albeit this time accidentally.
Around the release of 2017’s Masseduction, her “morbidly
funny”, sad and sexy fifth album, she asked journalists to
crawl into a freshly painted neon pink box to ask her ques-
tions. “I was sitting in paint fumes for 12 hours – as sadistic
as it seemed, trust me it was way more masochistic,” she
laughs, referring to that time as the “latex era” because
of how strict she was being on herself. It was an attempt
to continue the severe nature of the album – a reaction to
a painful dalliance with the tabloids following her high-
profile relationship with model and actor Cara Delevingne
in 2015; an aftershock that exploded her carefully curated
mythos – and its postmodern playfulness.
“To do interviews and to do press is a construct,” she says
in her glaringly white Los Angeles office (she splits her time
between there and New York), looking like “goth Grey Gar-
dens” in black silk headscarf, thick-framed sunglasses and
a vintage Maison Margiela trenchcoat I mistake for a dress-
ing gown. “Like I’m playing a role of this person and you’re
playing a role of that person and wouldn’t it be interesting
if we both acknowledge it was a construct and went from
there. Maybe it would be more pure and more true if we
did that,” she continues before adding with a delicious
cackle: “But then I think people were like, ‘Oh she’s a cunt’.”
Being misunderstood is a symptom of Clark’s slipperi-
ness, musically and in person. After ditching the “asexual
Pollyanna” feel of her first two albums, 2007’s Marry Me and
2009’s Actor, her output has combined kinetic high-wire
art-rock – anchored by her incredible guitar playing – with
funk, electropop, psych and, on 2021’s Daddy’s Home, 70s
soul and glam. She has worked with David Byrne (on 2012’s
collaborative album, Love This Giant), Taylor Swift (co-
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
writing her recent US No 1 single, Cruel Summer), noise
merchants Swans, pop newcomer Olivia Rodrigo and rapper
Kid Cudi. Even as a teenager, in Dallas, Texas, Clark moved
from high school bands doing Jewel covers to channelling
Sonic Youth in her college band, Skull Fuckers. Her most
recent one-off singles have included covers of Nine Inch
Nails’ Piggy and Lipps Inc’s Funkytown, the latter taken
from the soundtrack to Minions: The Rise of Gru.
Clark’s prowling, occasionally terrifying seventh album,
All Born Screaming, which strips her sound down to the
bone, is definitely more Nine Inch Nails than it is Minion-
friendly. It is full of decay and brutality, its thrashing, raging
opening half softened by a glimmer of hope in its second.
“I was dealing with a lot of loss and literal life and death,” she
says. “Death is very clarifying because you go: ‘This mat-
ters, this doesn’t.’ To me, the first half of the record is base
– whether it’s death or destruction or your own inner mono-
logue of brutal self-loathing where you’re staring into the
void, like, ‘Life is impossible’ – and then the second half is:
‘Well we get to fucking live it, so let’s grab it by the jugular.’”
Any attempts at digging deeper into the specifics of
“literal life and death” are rebuffed. “I’m not trying to be
withholding,” she says politely. “But we all deal with loss of
people we love; we all deal with the shattering heartbreak
of those losses, and so I don’t think it matters [who or what
the songs are about] because the feeling is universal.”
Clark, always happy haunting pop’s periphery (she seems
genuinely stunned at the global success of Cruel Summer,
calling it a “sensation”), is not a fan of the current obsession
with lyrical Easter eggs: “I don’t think songs are meant to
be autobiographical puzzles for people to figure out. It’s for
other people now, it’s not for me. I laboured over it, I love
it, it’s my heart in there, and the sound of the record is the
sound of my fucking brain, but who cares [about specifics].”
You sense a slight bruising after the campaign for Daddy’s
Home, an album detailing the fallout of her father’s impris-
onment in 2010 for multimillion-dollar stock manipulation
(he was released in 2019). Talking about its inspiration led
to terse encounters with journalists, with one interview
scrapped at Clark’s behest after it was deemed “aggres-
sive”. The album’s aesthetic – Clark in a cropped blond wig
cosplaying as Warhol muse Candy Darling – overshadowed
the music. Despite charting in the Top 20 in the US and the
Top 5 in the UK, Daddy’s Home felt like Clark’s first misstep.
The album was, she says, the symptom of the “crazy”
time in which it was created, during the pandemic. While
some artists went micro, revelling in the minutiae of life as
everything shrunk, Clark went macro trying to “transform
myself into the kind of thing my father would love” via
the album’s 70s obsession. It was an attempt at healing,
and taking the power. “As far as it being misunderstood,
I’d rather people scratch their heads than yawn,” she says.
“It’s stark, it’s black and white, and the colours of fire,”
she says of her new album’s aesthetic. She takes a sip of
Songs aren’t meant
to be autobiographical
puzzles for people
to figure out

lemon water from a mason jar the size of her head. “This
isn’t me being twee and polishing my handlebar mous-
tache,” she says when I notice the oversized vessel. With
a glint in her eye she finally offers up those all-important
personal revelations: “A fun fact about me is I really love
water. On a good day I go through five of these.”
While Masseduction and Daddy’s Home featured input
from omnipresent producer Jack Antonoff, All Born Scream-
ing is the first St Vincent album Clark has produced solely.
“So much of the record, and so much of finding it, was me
being in the studio alone and turning knobs until I found
lightning in a bottle.”
W
orking by herself also meant she
could pore over her vocals, likening
her obsession with getting it just right
to that of director David Fincher’s
notorious fondness for doing end-
less takes. “Like nope, sing it again
and again and again until there’s no bullshit,” she says. The
album’s opening two songs, the Tori Amos-esque mood
piece Hell Is Near and Reckless, which has its early fragil-
ity swallowed by stormy electronics, took ages to perfect.
“[Reckless] had to be legit and correct and not sung but
just felt. I sang it a hundred times and there’s no world
where I would ever make anyone else sit in the studio with
me while I did it. No way.” She did have studio companions,
however. Dave Grohl – with whom she performed in 2014
when Nirvana were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame – drums on ferocious lead single Broken Man and the
twisted lust of Flea. “Ever since [that] first time we jammed,
I hoped that someday it would happen again,” Grohl tells
me in an email. “She always takes you somewhere new,
and does it with such power and grace. A total badass.”
53
Flea, I tell Clark, makes me think of flies feasting on a
corpse. It’s gross, lyrically and musically. Another raised
eyebrow. “That’s you, and I’m so glad for your feelings and
interpretation,” she says with a grin. “Gross is the right
word. The anthems in my head growing up were ‘I’m a
creep’, ‘I’m a loser’, and were in touch with a baseness
that we all have.”
We talk about us both recently turning 40, mainly in the
hope she has some words of wisdom for me. “I don’t think
about age so literally because as a musician you get to be
a little bit Peter Pan. Your job, in the studio at least, is to
play and dream, so I don’t feel in any way cynical or beaten
down by experience. I’m psyched.” Her private life, that
closely guarded secret, currently offers a solid foundation.
“All we have is love and the people we love. That’s it. It’s
the best thing and the only thing worth living for.” Is she
in love? “Of course, yeah,” she smiles. “I have the greatest
love of my life.”
A moment of beauty on the album is the pulsating Sweet-
est Fruit, which opens with an ode to the late electronic
music producer Sophie, who fell to her death in 2021. For
the first time Clark stumbles over her words, unsure if she
should talk about the song’s specifics (“Let that be a fun
Easter egg!” she jokes). “The internet twists things, and
I don’t want it to be seen like I’m trying to capitalise on
somebody’s death. I was an admirer from afar, we never
met, but I read about the way that she fell because she was
trying to get a better look at the moon, which was just the
most beautiful, poetic thing I’ve ever heard.” The song is
about “people trying for transcendence, and at least they
were taking a big swing or trying for something beautiful”.
Clark’s desire to find beauty in brutal circumstances
pulses through All Born Screaming’s veins. Violent Times,
which resembles an elegantly sloshed lost Bond theme,
hinges on a lyric that seems to sum up where Clark finds
herself in 2024, desperately holding on to love with white
knuckles: “All of the wasted nights fighting mortality / When
in the ashes of Pompeii lovers discovered in an embrace for
all eternity.” A couple preserved by calcified layers of ash
following a volcanic eruption is an image tinged with dark-
ness, I suggest, but Clark disagrees. “I just think of it as the
most romantic thing in the world,” she smiles. I now imagine
a big black heart emoji appearing behind her instead of the
thumbs up. “Like this is it – it’s two people embracing.”
MICHAEL CRAGG IS A MUSIC WRITER
FOR THE GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER
All Born Screaming is released on 26 April
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
54 Culture
Design

I
A RCHITECT U R E t is unusual for authors to announce that
they can’t wait for the day when their book
is rendered obsolete. But the researchers
behind 100 Women: Architects in Practice
who works with communities in a process of
co-creation, to design homes and public infra-
structure, including women’s toilets (still a rarity
in the country), that they can plan and build

The female
hope that its title will ultimately sound as strange themselves. The book’s authors – Harriet Har-
as a book about 100 left-handed architects, or riss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder and Tom
100 who happen to have ginger hair. We are not Ravenscroft – come from academia and journal-

architects there yet. In an industry where the gender pay

gap has widened in recent years, where all-male
panels at conferences are not unusual, and where
ism in the UK and US, but they have strived to
paint an international picture. They used the
UN’s “geoscheme” of six continental regions to
breaking macho culture still prevails on building sites, a
book like this, sadly, still has a place.
feature architects from 18 sub-regions, selecting
between four and six from each one.

ground It serves several purposes. First, recalling

From the repurposing
of a derelict mosque in
Niger to a mirrored Kyiv
of f ice tower, a new book
celebrates the thrilling
work of 100 women
By Oliver Wainwright
 Diverse forms
Clockwise from left: mirror-glass tower
in Kyiv; recycled metal canopies in a
market in Niger; CGI of New Zealand’s
Māori-influenced City Rail Link
DMITRY KOROL; MAURICE ASCANI; JASMAX
Mitt Romney’s unfortunate phrase, it is a literal
“binder full of women” – a bulging 300-page
directory of female architects from all around
the world. The hope is that it will be used by the
conveners of competition shortlists, selection
panels, awards juries, hiring committees and
biennales – to diversify their male-dominated
lists. It is for the headhunters who claim women
never apply. They are out there – and this is
merely a sample, not an exhaustive survey.
More than just a diversity project, the authors
see their work as a decolonisation tool. The aim
is not just “sprinkling a few mistresses into the
canon of architecture’s majority of masters”, but
to transform the metrics by which architects are
celebrated. It includes other kinds of “spatial
practice” and different ways of working, beyond
the usual high-profile commissions and the con-
ventional architect-client relationship. This is
about more than just the design of buildings.
Accordingly, the book features figures such
as Bangladeshi architect Suhailey Farzana,
The result is a refreshingly eclectic bunch,
ranging from the Ukrainian Svitlana Zdorenko,
designer of a mirror-glass office tower in Kyiv
topped with a cantilevered helipad, to a Finn-
ish trio – Saija Hollmén, Jenni Reuter, Helena
Sandman – who work on humanitarian pro-
jects in Africa. Flicking through the book, the
selection can sometimes feel scattershot – slick
private houses one minute, participatory map-
ping workshops the next – but it effectively holds
up a mirror to the diversity of the architecture
profession today. What’s more, by interview-
ing each subject, the authors draw out some
common threads.
One is summed up by the Niger-based Mariam
Issoufou Kamara, who says: “I want to create a
universal way of working that produces com-
pletely different results depending on where
you are.”
Like others in the book, when Kamara was
growing up, she never imagined she could
become an architect. She has since developed
work rooted in its local context that has attracted
global attention. In the village of Dandaji, she
transformed a derelict mosque into a library and
community centre, in collaboration with Studio
Chahar. She also designed the regional market in
the same village, with stalls shaded by recycled
metal canopies.
Elsewhere, the spotlight is on architects who
are reviving Indigenous practices, against the
tide of steel and glass globalism.
In New Zealand – or Aotearoa, the country’s
Māori name – Māori architect Elisapeta Heta
helped to found the Waka Māia team in the large
commercial firm Jasmax, in order to embed Māori
principles in the practice’s work. Heta’s work
on the City Rail Link – the largest infrastructure
project in the country’s history – has brought in
Māori artists to collaborate on parts of the sta-
tions, such as a footbridge that evokes the form
of Indigenous stone-cutting tools found near
the site.
Ultimately, we can only hope the book takes
us closer to a world where no one has to endure
what Sithabile Mathe, and so many other women,
have experienced. “Upon telling someone in Bot-
swana that I am an architect,” she says, “I am
often met with a look of disbelief or, at best, a
polite, dismissive smile.”
OLIVER WAINWRIGHT IS THE GUARDIAN’S
ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN CRITIC

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 Culture 55
Visual arts
 In vogue cover star, Paris Lees, and its oldest, an 85-year-
Ken Moody and old Judi Dench in June 2020.
Robert Sherman “Inclusivity and diversity weren’t just words
in 1984 – a shot to me when I started,” he says. “I believe in
that reminded actions ... I’m proud of having been able to help
Enninful of him usher in this new way of seeing people.”
and his husband; Enninful, speaking by Zoom from his London
Aira in 1979; and home, seems the ideal match for Mapplethorpe,
David Hockney the photographer cum agent provocateur, who
in 1976 challenged conventional ideas of beauty. “He
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE questioned the idea of what portraiture is,” says
FOUNDATION / COURTESY
THADDAEUS ROPAC Enninful. “What is beautiful? Who is allowed in?
GALLERY
I believe I have done the same – we both ques-
tioned the status quo in our industries.”
Enninful’s career in fashion began soon after
his family arrived in the UK from Ghana. At 16, he
became a model after being scouted by legend-
ary British stylist Simon Foxton on the London
tube. At 18, Enninful became the youngest ever
fashion director at an international publication
when he was appointed to the role at i-D. After
two decades there, he worked at Italian and
American Vogue, as well as W. In 2016, he was
awarded an OBE for services to diversity in the
fashion industry.
It was Foxton who first introduced a teenage
Enninful to The Black Book, Mapplethorpe’s
explosive collection of 96 erotic photographs
of black men. “I was a dark skin model with a
bald head then,” he says. “I could see myself
in Ken Moody.” A fitness instructor, Moody is
often regarded as Mapplethorpe’s muse, but
Mapplethorpe’s treatment of the black male
body has come under fire for what is seen as his
exploitative and fetishistic gaze. Enninful says:
“Throughout history, black men have been por-
trayed in many ways. We’ve been used to create
some of the most iconic images. We need to keep
the conversation about objectification going. But
we need to deal with images that define men and
women – it can’t only be isolated to black men.”
Mapplethorpe became something of a talis-

‘Bodacious!’
man for Enninful as the latter hurtled full throt-
tle into the London fashion scene in the 1980s,
a pace he kept up in the following decade, long
after Mapplethorpe died of Aids-related compli-
cations in 1989 at the age of 42.
Enninful’s take on Mapplethorpe is elegant,
emotive and quietly disruptive, making evident
their shared sensibility and profound concern

Edward Enninful shook up
the world of fashion. For
his next move, the sartorial
supremo wants to change
how we view the explosively
provocative photographer
Robert Mapplethorpe
By Charlotte Jansen
‘I
t ended how I wanted it to end,” says
Edward Enninful firmly, speaking a
few days after his final issue as editor-
in-chief of British Vogue hit the shelves.
The parting cover is a paean to Enninful’s past,
and his achievements at the magazine, but now
his eyes are fixed on the future. His next venture
is an unexpected move away from fashion and
London – his take on Robert Mapplethorpe, in a
show at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris.
Enninful declines to discuss a rumoured rift
with Vogue supremo Anna Wintour, but in his six
and half years at the magazine, he set a string of
precedents, including British Vogue’s first trans
with being seen. Combing through more than
2,000 images held in the Robert Mapplethorpe
Foundation archive, he selected just 46.
As you might expect, Enninful seems most
attracted to the iconic images: old school glam-
our and high-society swank with a bit of brains
thrown in. There’s author Fran Lebowitz, ciga-
rette in hand, next to an ethereal Isabella Ros-
sellini. A full-body shot of a half-naked young
Arnold Schwarzenegger, flexing his famous
muscles, appears next to female bodybuilder
Lisa Lyon. A well-known portrait, shot in profile,
of Ken Moody and another frequent subject 
called Robert Sherman reminded Enninful of

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

56 Culture
Visual arts
himself and his husband, Alex Maxwell, a direc-
tor of fashion videos.
The pairings echo Mapplethorpe’s fascina-
tion with duality and blurring binaries – flipping
expectations of gender, high brow and low, beau-
tiful and ugly. “He was a master,” says Enninful.
“But I think he was pigeonholed. I wanted to
show the breadth of his work.”
Next to the stark, minimalist purity of the
portrait of muses Moody and Sherman is one of
a mysterious figure named Aira dressed in feath-
ers, fur, veil and false nails. “She’s bodacious!”
Enninful exclaims with delight. Little else is
known about Aira beyond her name.
The exhibition is book-ended by two surpris-
ing, standalone images, both portraits taken in
1976: a smiling Princess Margaret in a swimsuit
at the beach and a nonchalant David Hockney,
reclining and caught mid-yawn. The improvised
looseness and apparent lack of choreography in
these pictures reveals a totally different side to
Mapplethorpe.
▼ Enninful No less striking is Ennin-
‘Mapplethorpe ful’s decision to bypass Map-
was pigeonholed’ plethorpe’s more extreme
ADAMA JALLOH sexual imagery, such as the
pictures he took at the Mine-
shaft BDSM club in the 1970s, and those that were
published in his controversial X Portfolio. Does
that mean he doesn’t like the more hardcore
images? Enninful becomes tactful. “I appreciate
his work. He is a great artist. But for this exhibi-
tion, my first curatorial endeavour, these are the
images that jumped out at me.”
Enninful doesn’t seem too daunted by this
venture into the art world – perhaps because his
mission to change the way we see each other is
far from complete. “You can’t just do something
once and say we’re done and move on,” he says.
“You have to stick to a point of view. You have
to keep at it.” It’s this quality he clearly admires
in Mapplethorpe, a kindred spirit in the battle to
redefine beauty.
CHARLOTTE JANSEN WRITES ABOUT
PHOTOGRAPHY FOR THE GUARDIAN
Robert Mapplethorpe is at Thaddaeus Ropac,
Paris to 6 April
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
Reviews
TELEVISION
Iwájú
Disney +
★★★★☆
Iwájú (which means “the future” in
the west African Yoruba language)
takes place in a future Lagos
that has embraced technological
advancements while retaining a
solid sense of Nigerian identity. The
story follows young Tola (Simisola
Gbadamosi), a girl from an affluent
island suburb, who longs to connect
with her father, a successful tech
entrepreneur.
For all that Iwájú is delightful, it
is also frantically paced and hard to
follow. Allegiances and relationships
shift continually, while keeping
up with all the technology would
require fastidious note-taking. The
best way to take in this miniseries
is by enjoying the vibrant, jewel-
toned animation, the Afrobeats
soundtrack and the wonderful
Nigerian voice cast.
Audiences that don’t know what
a blockchain is will be left none the
wiser. But the show illuminates
parts of Nigerian identity rarely
celebrated on a global stage. It is an
unashamedly optimistic look at the
country’s future and the diaspora’s
talents. While Iwájú is featherlight
fun for all the family, it is also an
encouraging step into a bold and
brilliant future. Leila Latif
Podcast of the week Dead River
A troubling look at one of the most devastating environmental
catastrophes in history: the 2015 Mariana dam disaster in Brazil –
which led to the UK’s biggest ever class action lawsuit, involving
700,000 claimants. It’s an emotive, worrying listen, as we hear
locals recount their fears that “the dam was sick”. Alexi Duggins
MUSIC
Liam Gallagher John Squire
Liam Gallagher & John Squire,
Warner Music
★★★★☆
Nostalgia can feel like an affliction
plaguing music – then an album
comes along that makes it seem
not so bad after all. In this case, a
collaboration between former Stone
Roses guitarist John Squire and ex-
Oasis singer Liam Gallagher (the title
comprises their full names but I’ll
call it Gallagher Squire here).
Here is Gallagher, sneering about
lassitude on a song called I’m So
Bored, with his trademark chippy
hauteur, and here is Squire, electric
guitar ringing out with affirmative
curlicues. Bosses, strikes, war, peace
– all these opposites are equal, and
such a drag. Twang! There should
be a song on Gallagher Squire called
Doing What It Says on the Tin.
And yet there is a great deal also
going right on this album. Gallagher
is in charge of broad, confident
strokes and Squire handles the detail.
One of the novelties of Gallagher
Squire is hearing Gallagher
juxtaposed with guitar solos, Squire
giving free rein to his inner Jimmy
Page. He is liquid and versatile,
with little Paint It, Black-ish near-
easternisms (on One Day at a Time)
or, unexpectedly, electric blues.
But as eloquent as Squire’s guitar
is, his lyrics can often be trite.
Sometimes, though, Gallagher sings
something that makes you sit up.
“Thank you for your thoughts and
prayers and fuck you too,” he quips
on Make It Up As You Go Along.
The pair’s entitled rock star
status can be unappealing, but
the verbal detail on I’m a Wheel
is entertaining: “There’s blood in
my custard,” Gallagher avers, as
Squire’s guitar echoes his surprise:
“I’m misunderstood.” Kitty Empire
Observer
 Culture
Books
FICTION
In the beginning
In luminous prose, the
Gilead author explores
the first book of the
Bible and finds it still
provides meaning in
today’s secular world
By Julian Coman
▲ Divine vision
The Garden of
Eden with the Fall
of Man, 1615 by
Jan Bruegel the
Elder and Rubens
ALAMY
57
interest. In contrast, Genesis portrays a troubled
love story between humanity and a divine creator
who “created man in his own image”. The vision
of a single omniscient and benevolent God is a
new departure in ancient literature, with implica-
tions all the way down to design details. In the
Garden of Eden, Robinson says, “the beauty of
the trees is noted before the fact that they yield
food”. Compared with surrounding myths, this
vision is “an immeasurable elevation of status”.
It all goes wrong, of course, as an ill-advised
decision to eat from the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil leads to banishment. Robinson
guides the reader through Genesis’s account of
how human history proper, red in tooth and claw,
gets under way as God tries to keep faith with
his errant creations. Seminal episodes such as
Cain’s murder of Abel, the razing of Sodom and
Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac are interpreted
with a novelist’s eye for drama. The sections on
Joseph’s treacherous brothers are a psychologi-
cal tour de force, as they descend into a spiral
of angst after selling their father’s favourite son
I
n an extended dialogue between Marilynne into Egyptian slavery.
Robinson and Barack Obama, published a But the point is that God works in mysterious
few years ago in the New York Review of ways. The brothers’ heinous act proves provi-
Books, Obama homes in on the dimension dential when Joseph, having become one of the
of Robinson’s writing that makes her so unusual most powerful men in Egypt, is able to rescue
as a 21st-century literary figure. “You’re a novel- the Israelites from famine. By refusing to leave
ist,” he observes, “but you’re also – can I call you out the really ugly stuff, Robinson suggests, the
a theologian? Does that sound, like, too stuffy? ancient scribes produced a book “not primarily
You care a lot about Christian thought.” meant to offer examples of virtue or heroism” but
Robinson wears her faith on the sleeves of to trace the workings of God’s loyalty to human-
most of her books. In the epic Gilead series, she kind through … failure and even crime”.
probes with forensic subtlety the religious preoc- More than two millennia later, beyond the
cupations – and doubts – of two fictional midwest poetic and literary fascination of the text, can this
pastors. More recently, in collections of essays narrative say anything meaningful to a secular
such as What Are We Doing Here?, she combines mind? Robinson implies that it can.
theology with cultural commentary to explore In the face of contemporary atrocities, geo-
what her vision of a Christian humanism might political strife and the threat of human-made
contribute to a politically polarised, divided, environmental catastrophe, a work championing
21st-century west. the goodness of creation and the infinite value of
In her latest religious study, Robinson pursues human life can offer a salutary read, calling us to
this project by going back to the beginning – to our responsibilities. And in the ancient rabbis’
Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Most of us account of a merciful God who refuses to write
have at least a hazy idea of its contents, from off his people, Robinson finds a way to produce
God’s creation of the world to the exile of Adam a powerful meditation on hope.
and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and the sub- For Gilead devotees, Reading Genesis serves
sequent two-by-two salvage operation of Noah’s as a primer for the theological world of its pro-
ark. Robinson takes it to have been written as tagonists, the Reverends John Ames and Robert
an origin story for a liberated nation, after the Boughton. As he senses death approaching, Ames
Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. In luminous prose, tries to imagine heaven but can’t get past feeling
she makes clear how unusual a book awe for the world. “Each morning,”
Genesis is, pregnant with meaning that he writes in a letter intended to be
stretches to our own day. read one day by his young son, “I’m
She illustrates how the ancient like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed
Hebrew authors borrowed from the at the cleverness of my hands and at
Babylonian mythologies created by the brilliance pouring into my mind
their near-east neighbours. But with through my eyes.” In this rich study,
a crucial distinction. Great narratives Reading Robinson has masterfully traced that
such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis sense of wonder back to its ancient,
Enuma Elish feature fickle, rivalrous By Marilynne remarkable source. Observer
deities who turn their ruthless gaze Robinson JULIAN COMAN IS A GUARDIAN
on mortals only when it serves their ASSOCIATE EDITOR
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly
58 Culture
Books

G
FICTION eorge Orwell’s years as a colonial police- ing during these years, but Theroux imagines it
man in Burma in the 1920s preoccupied all for him, moving from Wells to Lawrence to
him for the rest of his life. Straight out Forster. Theroux shows how these literary influ-
of Eton, he was thrown into a world ences might combine with everyday experience
Becoming George that mirrored the public school with its rivalries to create the writer of Burmese Days. Indeed,
and floggings; except that now it was the Bur- phrases from the novel are seen to have their
The evils of empire mese people who were being flogged. He wrote genesis in conversations here.
about it repeatedly: in his 1934 novel Burmese Beyond its interest for Orwell enthusiasts, I
are brought to life Days, several essays, and passages devoted to couldn’t decide if this book succeeded as a novel.
in Paul Theroux’s Burma in The Road to Wigan Pier. Even on his It is rather fascinating in its portrait of Orwell’s
deathbed he was writing notes for a novella ambivalence towards the empire he reviles and
fascinating imagining about Burma entitled A Smoking Room Story. serves. If Burmese Days doesn’t have the reach
of Orwell’s days as a Now, Paul Theroux has taken on this and depth of Orwell’s best work, it’s
material, with a novel that explores because he was dishonest at this point
colonial policeman Burma as the place where Eric Blair in making his autobiographical hero
became George Orwell. a convinced rebel – “notoriously a
By Lara Feigel There has been so much written bolshie in his opinions”. In fact, at
about Orwell recently, from DJ Tay- the time Orwell had been more con-
lor’s casually magisterial biography, fused. One ex-Etonian visitor reported
▼ Blair in Burma to Anna Funder’s intricately daring B O O K O F Orwell revelling in being a servant of
Orwell (standing book about his first wife, to Sandra THE WEEK the crown, and in his 1936 essay Shoot-
second right) at Newman’s high-wire feminist retelling Burma Sahib ing an Elephant he wrote, repellently,
police training of Nineteen Eighty-Four. In her 2005 By Paul Theroux that “in the end the sneering yellow
school in 1923 travel memoir Finding George Orwell faces of young men that met me every-
in Burma, Emma Larkin discovers that Orwell’s where, the insults hooted after me when I was at
great-uncle had a Burmese mother. a safe distance, got badly on my nerves”.
This is a risky project for Theroux; there is Theroux takes these admissions and shows
always the danger in novels about writers that Orwell veering between ethical disdain and
the dialogue becomes an embarrassing parody. appalling complicity. We see Orwell presented
He avoids this by focusing on Orwell’s blankness with a series of moral tests – pulling a dead man’s
of character at this age. The dialogue is convinc- ring off his finger and finding the whole finger
ing because the inner Orwell remains hidden and comes with it; ordering the hanging of a man he
the things he says are conventional and terse. knows to be innocent. When an elephant goes
Theroux uses this to suggest that all the time a on the rampage and kills a man, he is faced with
secret self was developing: “His other self, the the appalling prospect of shooting it, largely to
restless inquisitor, the doubter, the contrarian.” pacify the jeering onlookers because “no one in
The secret self is Orwell the writer, and, in the that crowd … would have respected the Burma
end, Theroux is writing for Orwell connoisseurs. sahib for doing nothing”.
We know very little about what Orwell was read- Orwell fails as a policeman and morally, with

S C I E NC E A N D NAT U R E
Heaven scent
A botanist sets out
on an extraordinary
adventure to rescue
his lifelong love: the
stinking, monstrous
Rafflesia ‘corpse flower’
By Rachel Aspden
I
f you think of flowers as beautiful, fragrant, modelling Rafflesia blooms from papier-mache
decorous and domesticated – something in an overgrown cemetery.
you order from an online florist or pick up Thorogood is now deputy director of the
at your local garden centre – Chris Thoro- 400-year-old Oxford Botanic Garden. Like Brit-
good’s Pathless Forest should come with a health ain’s other great scientific gardens, it flourished
warning. It’s a love letter to the largest flowers in under an empire that drew much of its wealth
the world: the monstrous blooms of the 40-odd from colonial cash crops: cotton, spices, tea, cof-
species of Rafflesia. This stinking, sprawling fee, sugar, tobacco, indigo, opium. Rafflesia itself
“corpse flower” grows in the tropical rainforests is named after the British colonial administrator
of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philip- Stamford Raffles, who saw it flower in Bengkulu,
pines, and nothing about it is pretty. It’s a parasite Indonesia, in 1818, the year before he established
that mimics the odour and appearance of rotting the trading post that would become Singapore.
flesh to attract its favoured carrion fly But it has since refused to be culti-
pollinators, with a bouquet featuring vated or stored in seed banks; the only
notes of “blocked drains”, “sewage”, institution that has managed to coax it
“pigs’ shit” and “bad chicken”. into bloom is Bogor Botanical Gardens,
It’s also the lifelong love of Thoro- near Jakarta.
good, a botanist and academic who Thorogood describes a dizzying
writes of himself: “Dragged helplessly profusion of species as he pushes
to heaven through hell and back, he Pathless Forest through undergrowth, scrambles up
became half-sick with his obses- By Chris mountainsides and wades rivers with
sion to find it.” The story starts with Thorogood local researchers and guides. Birds and
Thorogood as a plant-bewitched child, animals barely get a mention except as

The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024

 59

each test becoming more disillusioned with BOOKS OF THE MONTH

empire, yet more implicated in its methods. The best recent poetry
Inspired by Larkin’s research, Theroux invents a
half-Burmese first cousin for Orwell, which works
as a thought experiment by revealing Orwell’s By Jennifer Lee Tsai themes of anti-Asian the nature of selfhood,
embarrassed, small-minded racism (“the young racism, the after-effects of the “burden of being a
half blood calling his mother Aunt Ida”). war trauma, Vietnamese subject-in-process no
Theroux brings the empire and its evils alive as diasporic identity and matter who we are”. Each
a day-by-day experience. But if it becomes most marginalisation from vignette conveys a sense
compellingly a book about empire, then that is multiple perspectives. of surprise and freedom,
also where its perspective is most limited. In that Constructed as a book- as in the opening piece 1=1:
line about “yellow faces”, Orwell was luxuriat- length poem, the 37 “a bolt of pure aliveness
ing in his own self-inculpation, and this is what works here, each named like entering the water /
Theroux’s Orwell does. The problem is that at this after a type of violence on a still morning with
point in history, the stories about Burma we need or mode of intellectual the world empty in every
to read are not stories about the intricate feelings Three Births inquiry, interrogate direc / tion to the sky. That
of the white men who colonised it. By K Patrick the complexities of first entry. Crossing the
The novel doesn’t seem especially troubled This artful, sensual debut intergenerational border of con / sciousness
by this. The Burmese are here merely as sup- by one of Granta’s Best of trauma, the challenges of into, into what?”
porting characters, with the women as exotic Young British Novelists assimilation in western
stereotypes, whose slippery delicacy contrasts explores the fluidity of society and the effects
with the no less stereotypical but more richly the body, queer love of cultural imperialism.
Lawrentian memsahib who orders Orwell into and desire. There is a Both personal and
bed as an alternative to “frigging” herself. refreshing insouciance political, these incendiary
I was left comparing Burma Sahib to Theroux’s to K Patrick’s writing, poems offer a searing
1981 novel The Mosquito Coast – at its heart a as in the opening poem, indictment of historical,
story about an anarchic empire builder with over- Pickup-Truck Sex, where cultural, linguistic and
reaching ambitions. The Mosquito Coast is also the speaker confesses: racial violence: “Your
about the complex feelings of white men in the “The ability to be both blood contains it. / What
jungle, but it has aged well because of its mad- bodies is my fan- / tasy. Do happened to them – / Poems 1968-2020
ness and extremity. The portrait of white male you think that’s arrogant?” Your parents, theirs, all By Nikki Giovanni
angst there ballooned into a tragic portrayal of The poems celebrate their kin.” One of the most This is a generous
American fatherhood, and of America itself. The fleeting moments of joy powerful and memorable selection from one of the
writing in Burma Sahib is in places just as bril- – “When I am alive it is / debuts I’ve read recently. foremost poets of the
liant, but it is precisely the exquisite rightness extraordinary” – as well as Black Arts Movement
page by page that reminds us that Theroux now melancholia: “it feels of the late 1960s. Nikki
has less compelling things to say. good to be obvious Giovanni’s earlier work
LARA FEIGEL IS A WRITER AND PROFESSOR after years / of misery, here is fiery, defiant and
OF ENGLISH AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON mystery, misery, mystery.” polemic, with poems
Patrick is unafraid of the such as Black Power (For
vicissitudes of emotion, All the Beautiful Black
pollinators or antagonists. These forests aren’t setting the atmosphere Panthers East), Reflections
the familiar backdrop of nature documentaries; ablaze in a display of on April 4, 1968 and The
here, they’re the stars. “I’m starting to think like manic irony that is Wrong Norma Funeral of Martin Luther
the forest,” Thorogood writes. Though its blooms simultaneously hopeless, By Anne Carson King, Jr. This activism
can be a metre across, Rafflesia spends most of its poignant and visceral. Described by the author continues to the present
life as a microscopic thread within the tissues of as “a collection of writings day, as seen in Black Lives
a host vine, behaving, as Thorogood’s research about different things, Matter (Not a Hashtag).
with Harvard colleagues has shown, much like like Joseph Conrad, Her poetry centres on
fungi, neither plant nor animal. Guantánamo, Flaubert, race, gender and sexuality
The experts here are not western academics snow, poverty, Roget’s in Black experience,
– Thorogood admits that “at times I can barely Thesaurus, my dad, Black love, struggle and
name a single plant” in the forest – but the local Saturday night”, Carson joy. These are warm,
scholars, foresters and indigenous guides who displays her brilliance and accessible poems that
lead the way to Rafflesia’s home. The book’s hero originality through a series celebrate and inspire, as
turns out to be the elderly, unassuming Mr Nga- of hybrid, free-flowing well as calling out racial
tari, the “wizard” of Bogor who holds the secret 36 Ways of Writing texts interspersed with injustices (“if they take
to successfully propagating the plant. Pathless a Vietnamese Poem images and digressions. my life / it won’t stop /
Forest closes with Thorogood and Filipino col- By Nam Le Throughout, these prose the revolution”). As she
leagues praying over their own grafted vine. A winner of the Dylan poems evince clarity, concludes, “the words and
Whether or not a foul-smelling, magnificent Thomas prize for his short precision and attention, the stars / and the music
Rafflesia eventually blooms, this is a gripping, story collection, The Boat, juxtaposing classical are all that matter”.
Technicolor account of why their efforts matter. Nam Le’s first poetry myth with musings on the JENNIFER LEE TSAI IS A
RACHEL ASPDEN IS AN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST collection focuses on contemporary world and POET, EDITOR AND CRITIC

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

60 Lifestyle
ASK
Annalisa Barbieri
My sister-in-law
has been hurtful,
but I feel bad for
avoiding her
My sister-in-law of nearly 15 years
isn’t someone I’d seek as a friend but
she’s mostly enjoyable to be around.
However, a couple of years ago she
started making harsh claims about
her parents – my in-laws – whom I
adore. I didn’t agree with what she
was saying but chalked it up to some
sort of personal crisis and tried to
be supportive, but without agreeing
with her. However, she later made a
harsh claim against my young child
and was unkind to my husband – her
brother – in the process. She also
decided she needed time out and
told my husband she would be in
touch when ready.
I was so angry and hurt that it
caused major strain in our marriage;
my husband was trying to be
understanding while watching his
family feeling hurt. She contacted
us again 10 months later, and when
our nuclear families got together
it felt strange – we had to act as if
nothing had happened.
With most people, I would
address my hurt and confusion
directly, but my sister-in-law is like
STEPHEN COLLINS
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
an emotional ticking time bomb,
and I fear causing more issues and
subsequent claims of wrongdoing
against her. But to protect my
children, I do my best to avoid her.
This makes holidays difficult, as
we can no longer gather as one big
family. I don’t know what to do.
I
n your longer letter you said
you spoke to a few people who
felt you were right to avoid her,
but it’s interesting that you still
don’t feel it’s the right choice. While
I really feel for you, and your anger
and frustration are understandable,
I was left concerned about your
sister-in-law. You didn’t say what
the claims she made against your in-
laws or child were. Without knowing
the details, I was left wondering
what her take on all this was. Where
is she in her life? Does she have a
partner? Children? These things
are actively not desirable to some,
but there you all are coupled up
with children, which is wonderful
but could leave her feeling as if she
doesn’t know where she belongs any
more. I wondered, even, if this was
a feeling she might have had when
your husband was born (is she the
eldest?). The uncertainty makes me
think you may also be wondering if
there’s a bit more room for curiosity
than recrimination.
I went to Association for Family
Therapy-registered Sarah Helps,
who said: “What are your husband’s
thoughts and feelings about the
situation? His relationship with his
sister seemed pretty absent.” Helps
If you would wondered how your in-laws do
like advice emotional talk: “Is avoidance part
on a family of their family script? Why is no one
matter, email asking your sister-in-law if she’s all
ask.annalisa@
theguardian.
right and what’s happening, in a very
ordinary way?”
com. See
theguardian.
I also want to know more about
the “major strain” this put on your
com/letters- marriage, and why.
terms for terms When family or friends fall out,
and conditions it’s easy to do a heap of imagining
about what’s going on, but unless
we ask, we don’t know. Helps also
wondered if your sister-in-law “had
been sitting on strong feelings,
perhaps for a while, and then got to
a point where she couldn’t contain
them. Do you think she meant to
cause harm or was her intention
different and it just landed badly?”
Helps wanted you to think about
how avoiding this situation is going
for you. “Is it making you feel better
or worse? If worse and preoccupied,
it’s probably not the right strategy.”
It’s certainly not up to you to fix
this, or her, but it feels as if you want
to do something and it also sounds
as if you may have more skills than
the rest of the family, certainly
You may more perception (perhaps also
compassion?). You don’t need to do
wonder if anything drastic: perhaps send an
there’s a ordinary text asking how she is or
try to find common ground (“Have
bit more you seen this film? Thought you’d
room for like it”), or include her in something
you’re planning. The rest is up to her.
curiosity With difficult family members, it’s
easy to think in terms of absolutes
than but maybe just “getting along” is the
hostility best you can hope for. For now.
 KITCHEN AIDE
By Anna Berrill
Flour power: there’s much more to
cooking aubergine than just frying
Fried aubergines guzzle up so much
oil. Here are the alternatives.
“Frying aubergine isn’t a bad
thing, and oil isn’t a bad thing,”
says Balkan cook Spasia Pandora
Dinkovski, founder of Mystic
Burek and author of Doma (out in
April). When it comes to recipes
that require pre-frying (moussaka,
say), Dinkovski’s mum “coats sliced
aubergine in flour, so the oil doesn’t
seep into them”. A kindred spirit
is Italian chef Gennaro Contaldo.
He agrees frying gives “the best
flavour”, but it isn’t the only option:
“Bake them, grill them, they both
work fantastically.”
Either treatment is ideal for Vivek
Singh’s Hyderabadi aubergine curry-
inspired dish. The founder of the
Cinnamon Collection cuts long, thin
aubergines in half, scores the flesh,
then sprinkles them with salt, chilli
powder, turmeric, fennel, ajwain
(carom) and black onion seeds, plus
a drizzle of oil. Set that aside while
you make a spice crust: “Separately
toast a tablespoon of poppy seeds,
a tablespoon of sesame seeds and
a tablespoon of desiccated coconut
in a dry frying pan.” Set that aside
as well, then dry-fry peanuts until
golden; once cool, chop and add to
the spices. Singh then cooks finely
chopped garlic in a little oil, and tips
it into a bowl with a half-teaspoon
of red chilli powder, a teaspoon each
of chaat masala and tamarind paste,
and a tablespoon each of chopped
fresh coriander and jaggery. Transfer
OLA O SMIT
to a baking tray and pop in a 150C
(130C fan)/gas 2 oven for 10 minutes.
Sear the marinated aubergine on
a barbecue or roast it in the oven,
until “nicely coloured and tender”,
then serve “sprinkled generously
with the spice crust”, plus tamarind
chutney and maybe a green salad.
Also low on the oil scale are
Contaldo’s aubergine “pizzas”.
He pricks aubergine slices with a
fork, brushes them lightly with oil
and bakes for 10 minutes, turning
them once halfway. Top just as
you would a pizza, with tomato
sauce and mozzarella, then return
to the oven until the cheese has
melted: “Hallelujah!”
Or, says Andy Oliver, founder
of Thai restaurants Som Saa and
Kolae, both in London, char whole
aubergines over an open flame or
on a charcoal grill. Peel once they’re
cool enough to handle, then “run
a knife through the middle so the
aubergine stays whole but fans
out”. Top with lemon juice, olive oil,
crumbled feta, herbs and chopped
chilli, or “minced lamb cooked with
spices plus chopped fresh herbs”.
The smoky flesh could also be
chopped and turned into myriad
dishes, from curries to relishes.
For the latter, Oliver sometimes
cooks garlic, shallots and chillies,
then pounds with the aubergine
flesh and shrimp paste.
ANNA BERRILL IS A FOOD WRITER
Got a culinary dilemma?
Email feast@theguardian.com
T H E W E E K LY
RECIPE
By Joe Woodhouse
№ 257
Saucy
mushrooms
and polenta
Prep 25 min This also works as a pasta sauce
Cook 50 min or as the base for a bean stew.
Set 30 min+ Method
In a medium saucepan, bring a litre
Serves 4
of water and a pinch of salt to a boil.
Pour in the polenta in a stream,
• GLUTEN FREE
whisking continuously to remove any
lumps, reduce the heat to medium-
low and cook for 30 minutes, stirring
Ingredients regularly. Check seasoning, then pour
150g polenta into a lined tray. (I use a 20cm x 25cm
600g mushrooms – oven tray, but use anything, as long
I use button or small as the polenta is about 2.5cm thick.)
chestnut, but any
Cool, then refrigerate for 30 minutes.
will do
6 tbsp olive oil
I keep small mushrooms whole
1 carrot, finely diced and halve or quarter larger ones so
1 onion, peeled and they are the same size. Put a large
finely diced frying pan on a medium-high heat,
2 celery sticks, finely add two tablespoons of oil, the
diced, or a bulb of mushrooms and a pinch of salt. Fry
finely diced fennel for five to seven minutes, stirring
1 rosemary stalk occasionally, until the mushrooms
2 bay leaves
are softening. Transfer the
125ml white wine
1 x 400g tin plum
mushrooms to a bowl.
tomatoes Add two to three tablespoons of
25g parsley, finely oil to the hot pan, followed by the
chopped carrot, onion, celery, rosemary and
Salt and black bay. Add a pinch of salt and cook on a
pepper medium heat for 10-15 minutes, until
Grated cheese, really soft. If the mix catches, add a
to serve splash of water and reduce the heat.
Return the mushrooms to the
pan, add the wine and tomatoes. Fill
the empty tin with water, then add
this. Cook for 15-20 minutes, until
the sauce has thickened. Stir in the
parsley. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Put a griddle pan on a medium-
high heat until smoking. Brush the
remaining oil over the set polenta,
then cut into four equal-size pieces.
Lay these in the griddle pan and
leave for three to five minutes, when
the polenta should release from the
pan and you can flip it over. Cook for
a further three to five minutes on the
other side, until crisp and golden.
Serve the polenta on top of the
mushrooms with cheese grated over.
8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly

62 Diversions
QUIZ
Thomas Eaton
1 Judith and her husband
are the only singing roles
in which opera?
2 What suffered from
a “rapid unscheduled
disassembly” last year?
3 What Dorset landmark
is claimed to be an image
of Hercules?
4 Which poet climbed
Mont Ventoux in Provence
in 1336?
5 What was first won in 1903
by the Boston Americans?
6 Whose Gannex raincoat
is in the Isles of Scilly
museum?
7 In the first world war, what
was the dual monarchy?
PUZZLES
Chris Maslanka
1 555**5 is a perfect square;
what are the missing
digits?
2 Wordpool
Find the correct definition:
ABROSIA
a) aversion to roses
b) affording no grazing
c) fasting
d) having no male friends
CHESS
Leonard Barden
Michael Adams has
now won seven major
tournaments in a row
without loss of a game.
The eight-time British
champion trailed the
leaders in last month’s
Cambridge International
Open all the way until the
ninth and final round, but
surged when it mattered
and won the £1,500
($1,900) prize for the
second year in succession.
The Cornishman, 52,
has proved a photo-finish
specialist, twice edging
victory by the narrowest
of tie-break margins,
while his unbeaten run of
The Guardian Weekly 8 March 2024
8 Which lake was created
in 1730 by the damming of
the River Westbourne?
What links:
9 Clanton; McLaury;
Claiborne; Earp; Holliday?
10 Kraków; Munich and
Freising; Buenos Aires?
11 Barbizon Hotel, NY
(1981); Somerville
College, Oxford (1994);
Olympic artistic
swimming (2024)?
12 Bird’s Nest; Dropping a
Han Dynasty Urn; Stools;
Sunflower Seeds?
13 Lyrids; Perseids;
Leonids; Geminids?
14 1789; 1830; 1848; 1871?
15 A Fistful of Dollars;
Drive; Layer Cake; Tenet;
The Seven Year Itch?
3 Words Without End
Which 3-letter string may
be added to each of the
following beginnings, in
each case making a word?
b— ; c—; rh—; t— .
4 Lively Stiff
Identify the two words
that differ only in the
letters shown:
V*******
R*******
© CMM2024
tournament games stands
at 39 wins and 24 draws.
The star performers
apart from Adams were
both pre-teen schoolgirls.
Ruqayyah Rida, 12, won
the top women’s prize
with 5.5/9 and a near-2200
rating performance.
3909 White mates in three moves
(by Fritz Giegold, Die Welt 1965).
Just two lines of play to find, but
still not easy.
8
7 two GMs in successive
6 classical games.
5 Bodhana Sivanandan
4 continued her outstanding
3
2 3 Be3 mate.
1 3 Nh3 mate. If cxb3 2 Bg1! Kxf4
a b c d e f g h
CINEMA CONNECT
Killian Fox
Name the films and the director
who connects them.
Stiff VIGOROUS, RIGOROUS.
2 Wordpool c). 3 WWE OMB. 4 Lively
Kurosawa. Puzzles 1 555025 = 7452.
Dog and Ran were all directed by Akira
Cinema Connect Kagemusha, Stray
unnamed central characters.
French revolutions. 15 Films that have
13 Meteor showers. 14 The dates of
admitting men. 12 Works by Ai Weiwei.
Benedict XVI; Francis. 11 Female spaces
of the last three popes: John Paul II;
at the OK Corral. 10 Archbishoprics
of the nine participants in the gunfight
8 Serpentine (Hyde Park). 9 Surnames
on St Mary’s). 7 Austria-Hungary.
6 Harold Wilson (who is also buried
4 Petrarch. 5 World Series baseball.
Cerne Abbas giant hill figure in Dorset.
rockets (two, they blew up). 3 The
Castle (Bartók). 2 SpaceX’s Starship
Answers Quiz 1 Duke Bluebeard’s
By defeating GM
Mark Hebden, Rida
became probably the
third youngest female
player ever to defeat a
grandmaster, outpaced
only by 10-year-old Carissa
Yip and 11-year-old Judit
Polgar. What followed was
even better, as Rida drew
her round-seven game
against GM Peter Wells to
become most probably the
youngest female player
ever to score against
recent run by finishing
second woman with 4.5/9.
3909 1 Qa4! If c3 2 Qe8 c3/cxb2
Notes and Queries
The long-running series that invites
readers to send in questions and
answers on anything and everything
COU N T RY DI A RY
KEW GARDENS
London, England, UK
B
efore the deciduous trees
come into leaf, walking
underneath them is
dizzying. It is like moving
through a large, deconstructed nest
– one that expands from tree to tree.
Without leaves, the nest is airy and
flooded with light, made from whole
branches and lined with the sky.
The trees lose some of their
familiarity when leaves do not
reveal their names, and it is their
silhouettes that speak. A crown of
fine twigs reveals a beech. The horse
chestnut’s branches, upturned at
the ends, hang like chandeliers.
There is an invitation to drift under
all this uplift, to trace new pathways
through wooden cobwebs.
A large English oak draws me
to a standstill. I am caught in the
web as I follow the outstretched
branches. High up, a larch’s twigs
brush against its own; lower down,
sun soaks the bark in bronze. The
width of the trunk denotes an old
age, and with many oaks of this kind
not producing acorns until they are
more than 40 years old, there is a
message of slow and steady growth
fitting to the season preceding the
sudden spurts of spring.
I stay as the sky streams through
the branches, as the blue, without
leaves to hide it, is at its brightest.
A green woodpecker chatters from
the larch and a jay flashes turquoise
feathers as it passes. I stay until the
cold forces me to move.
At ground level, there are
scatterings of snowdrops and winter
aconite. A little higher, camellias
pour in colour from the fringes.
Higher still, red catkins dangle from
the hazel. The message of coming
brightness is clear. Yet, just before
the showiness begins, before the riot
of unfurling and of green, there is a
clear shape to the darkness, looking
skywards through webs of bare
branches. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
ILLUSTRATION: CLIFFORD HARPER
 Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords
Access over 15,000 puzzles on our app. 63
Download from the App Store or Google Play.
Read more: theguardian.com/puzzles-app

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Quick crossword
No 16,789
9 10 1 2 3 4

5 6

11 12

13 7 8

14 15

 All solutions published next week

16 17 9 10 11

18 12

19 20 13 14

21 22 23 15

24 16 17

25 26

18

27 28

The Weekly cryptic By Anto Across 10 Curved surface of liquid,

5 Northern peninsula (11) caused by surface tension (8)
No 29,316 7 Skating arena (4) 12 Split (7)
8 Cut of meat on bone 15 Follow – stem (5)
– old puppet (4,4) 17 Castle (4)
Across 7 Offence caused by very French attempt at
9 Horizon arc (7)
1 Hunger when in range of where food seduction (8)
11 Hot (temper?) (5)
is made (7) 8 Puritan it’s said is featured in film (8)
13 Straightforward (5)
5 Southern corporation holds party in 13 Blues Dylan composed depicting activity of
14 Capital of Lithuania (7)
this private space (7) dealer (3,3,4)
16 High voice (8)
9 Issue moderate instructions (5) 15 Wasted hour being one close to someone (9)
17 Trio (anag.) (4) Solution No 16,783
10 Overcharge individual involved in special 16 Principle covering politician, one having
18 Stab (someone) in S A G E C L E M A T I S
free port (9) fellow feeling (8)
the back (6-5) T E A U W A
11 One considering work produced by 17 Programme announcing cast away over
Schrodinger in part (3,7) Christmas (8) O I N K C H A M P E R S
12 Stately home lacking top class china (3) 19 More extravagant type of tourist transport Down P D S O B E H
1 Sycamore skin? (4) C H A T T E R B O X
14 Duke with private theory about time (6) O R A E J S D
they arrive to eat ... (6,6) 20 Strange to hold medical procedure where 2 Flatter (7)
C OM E L Y C U P T I E
18 ... Charlie’s mint stew, given a waste emerges (6) 3 Japanese cartoon (5) K E I S M R C
culinary award (8,4) 23 Stop over is where you arrive eventually (3,2) 4 Banishment (8) O N T H E B L I N K
21 Cut times in hospital department (3) 24 Cut up hake woman gutted (4) 5 CH (11) I A G A O K H
6 Weight system (11) B E S T R I D E M I C A
22 Simple end to storyline that’s somewhat
I B A O N N
hackneyed (10) S L O WD OW N A G E D
25 Family perhaps talked about method
of disposal (9)
Solution No 29,310
26 Old country lover missing uproar,
living abroad (5)
Sudoku
27 Daily for Conservative who’s not so thick (7) F L U T T E R A B A S H E D Easy
28 Tough on backside for traveller (7) E A L D U N P Fill in the grid so
E A T S A P O S T R O P H E that every row,
T S P U T O E every column
Down S H O O T S B L E A K E S T and every 3x3
1 King leads a charge to create E I L R E U box contains the
defensive system (6) P R E S E N T E D T R U S S numbers 1 to 9.
2 Watch over bishop making deal (6) E G M C E
Last week’s solution
3 Looked for a free ride as difficulty C O M M A V E R A N D A H S
increased (5-5) V I L A R A
4 Call briefly for Ulster fix that works L U N C H E O N O X F O R D
either way (3,2) L O A I U L V
5 Military order bad food to be given G A L L I V A N T S I V A N
to sick mares (5,4) T O E G E E R
6 Collar that has to be filed? (4) N E W N E S S C R U S A D E

8 March 2024 The Guardian Weekly