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Intentional Provocation

Report from the parliamentary observer of the rally “Beats against genocide”


30/08/2024

The event “Beats against genocide” was organised to raise awareness among young people and the hip-hop scene about the situation in Gaza and Palestine, and of German participation in war crimes. It ended up on the almost endless list of attacks in Berlin against the freedom to assemble around the subject of Palestine.

The planned rally was a thorn in the side of the so-called security authorities from the moment that it was first registered. This can be seen in the dispute around the venue. The organisers had planned Hermannplatz, which has great meaning for the Palestinian community and people who stand in solidarity with them. Regular demonstrations against war and occupation have taken place there, and repression has often been strongest there.

In the first talks about the concert the police questioned the venue, using the shabby justification that there was not enough space. While the organisers reckoned with 300 participants, the police allegedly expected 1,000 and signaled that the public authorities would not allow Hermannplatz. Furthermore, the police argued that traffic would be obstructed, which, according to the organisers, should never be used to justify limiting the right to assembly. Protest is by its nature a disruption of the normal state of things.

As an act of goodwill, the organisers then suggested Reuterplatz. Finally the authorities allocated Südstern. The available space there is significantly smaller than at Hermannplatz. Accessibility is enormously limited by the U-Bahn station and by the several busy roads which meet there. But the police no longer showed any interest in the stated reasons of limited space and traffic safety.

Permission to assembly came with many pages of justification showing that Hermannplatz had been not allowed for political reasons because of its physical proximity to Sonnenallee. As the organisers naturally wanted their event to happen, this change of venue at very short notice was accepted and advertised.

At the event itself, it became quickly clear that the police were making changes which were not part of the previous discussions or the permission to assembly. Among these changes were the unannounced video surveillance from the beginning of the event.

As with every assembly related to Palestine, at the beginning of the event there had to be an announcement of restrictions, including the ban of burning flags and puppets. These acts are already banned, but it was implied that the attendees would be expected to do this anyway.

Only a few minutes after the beginning of the event, as the first music act appeared, the police escalated the situation. After a phrase was used from the stage which the police considered to be “criminally relevant”, several police stormed the area around the stage immediately and without any warning. They brutally arrested the suspect and injured several bystanders. The usual milder methods of protecting the right to assembly of all participants was thus ignored.

Following the violent intervention by the police, the sound system, mixer, and the microphone were no longer useable. This also resulted in the event organisers being no longer able to adequately address the provoked and enraged participants.

In the escalated situation after the police intervention, three or four people chanted “Takbir” and “Hamas, Hamas”. I also described this as problematic to the press, adding that at the same time this was drowned out by the clear majority of the gathering chanting “Free, Free Palestine”.

In order to calm down the situation, the main organiser, in consultation with other organisers, attempted to convince the police not to break up the meeting before the arrival of a replacement music system. The police were only prepared to use their own loudspeaker van to set the conditions for the continuation of the event after waiting twenty minutes.

In the intervening period, people were time and again brutally removed from the event and arrested, inclusing a woman wearing a hijab. As a reaction to the aggressive behaviour of the police, plastic bottles were thrown from the protest. I did not see any of the glass bottles which were reported by the police.

Under these aggravated conditions, the organisers found a megaphone and speaker as quickly as they could and carried out the event in a very slimmed-down form until its end around 9pm.

The trouble didn’t end here. Just before the end of the event, the police announced that participants were not allowed to leave the meeting in the direction of Hermannplatz. It was therefore only practically possible to leave Südstern and go towards Mehringdamm and Urbanstraße. At the same time there was the demand that people do not leave in large groups. The police made a peaceful dissolution more difficult, as people were not able to go home without a great detour.

The heated atmosphere between demonstrators and police has been built up over recent months through brutal police actions and demonstration bans. The right to assembly must apply to all and must not be sabotaged by the behaviour of the police.

This statement first appeared in German on Ferat Koçak’s website. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permisson.

How Germany tries to ban the slogan “From the river to the Sea”

German police have carried out a wave of unprecedented repression against Palestine solidarity, and they are focusing on one sentence in particular


29/08/2024

In the last year, Berlin has seen an unprecedented wave of repression against the Palestine solidarity movement. Police actions range from the horrific – such as violent assaults on underage demonstrators – to the downright bizarre, including bans on speaking Irish and Hebrew. One slogan in particular has been forbidden by law since November 2023, since the German government interprets that as the complete annihilation of Israel: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Just last Friday, police stopped the Beats for Gaza solidarity concert after a rapper used this phrase.

In a country that supposedly guarantees freedom of expression, what is the legal basis for banning a sentence not banned in any other country, including Israel? Last November, Germany’s interior minister Nancy Faeser decreed that the slogan was a symbol of Hamas, a prohibited organization. You don’t need to be a lawyer to realize this is ridiculous. How can a slogan that was widespread in the 1970s and is used by countless Palestinian factions be a unique marker of a group that was only founded in 1987?

With the same logic, I could say that the German national anthem was used by the Nazis, and therefore everyone singing about the “Vaterland” at a football match is declaring loyalty to the NSDAP. A court in Mannheim pointed out that the sentence can be interpreted in myriad ways, and is protected by the constitutional right to free expression. Not all German courts agree, however.

On August 6, the 22-year-old Berlin activist Ava M. was sentenced to a 600 euro fine for chanting about rivers and seas. M., who comes from a family of exiled Iranian communists, made clear at trial that her goal is a democratic Palestine with equal rights for all people living there. Since it would be a bit too silly to accuse her of loyalty to Hamas, prosecutors tried a completely different accusation: “condoning a crime”, prohibited by paragraph 140 of the criminal code. According to the judge, this slogan implies support for every action by Palestinian militants on October 7. This is even more absurd, as the phrase was in use decades before the events it is supposedly referencing.

A second criminal trial, scheduled for August 22, was postponed. Numerous supporters outside the court were detained for – what else? – chanting “from the river to the sea”.

Police have additionally been using a third charge, Volksverhetzung, officially translated as “incitement to hatred”. Paragraph 130 originally banned “incitement to class hatred” and was used to persecute socialists. At the moment, in theory, it could be used against racists. Yet the German state has declared that Nazis shouting “Ausländer raus!” (foreigners out!) are using protected speech – while anyone calling for equal rights for all people in Israel / Palestine is guilty of a hate crime.

Without any evidence, politicians claim the slogan is calling for the expulsion of Jewish people. So what happens when supporters of Israel use the exact same phrase to negate any kind of Palestinian sovereignty? When far-right supporters of Israel called for sole Israeli rule “from the river to the sea”, Berlin police decided this was fine. The founding charter of the Likud party declares “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”. Applying the law consistently, Berlin police would need to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu.

It might seem like all of Germany is solidly behind Israel’s war. While virtually all parties profess their unlimited support for apartheid, this is not true of Germany’s population. According to the semi-official Deutschlandtrend survey, 68 percent do not think Germany should be sending weapons to Israel. The same number think that Israel’s military actions are not justified when Gaza’s civilians are affected. These numbers are astounding given a one-sided media coverage and the manipulative questions in the survey itself.

This is what the judge who sentenced Ava M. meant when she said that German Staatsräson outweighs freedom of expression. As defined by the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, the “reason of state” refers to a “disregard for legal, moral, and religious considerations” when the interests of the state itself are at stake. In other words, this is an explicitly anti-democratic concept – and that is why it is being enforced with such blatant violations of democratic rights.

This is a mirror of Nathaniel’s Red Flag column, published in Neues Deutschland. Reproduced with permission

Crossing the Border into the West Bank

Travelling through the infrastructure of Israeli apartheid from Jordan to the West Bank.


28/08/2024

For most Palestinians, the sole route in and out of the West Bank is through a border crossing located about an hour’s drive from the Jordanian capital Amman. This crossing is known by several names: the Jordanians refer to it as King Hussein Bridge, named after King Hussein of Jordan, who is not well-regarded among Palestinians. The Israelis call it Allenby Bridge, named after the British officer who led the Palestine campaign against the Ottomans in World War 1 and rebuilt the bridge. Palestinians, however, call it Al-Karameh Bridge, named in honor of a battle in the nearby town of Karameh – meaning ‘dignity’ in Arabic – where Palestinian fighters claimed a partial victory against Israeli forces in 1968. Meanwhile everyday people simply call it The Bridge.

The Bridge has three sides: a Jordanian, an Israeli and a Palestinian.

The Jordanian side

Traveling from Jordan (or overseas) this is the side you will get to first, it’s about an hour drive from the capital, Amman, or its airport and is located just outside a small border town. The area looks underdeveloped: small bumpy roads and no proper taxi drop off area or a large parking space. The walls from the outside look old and rusty and it feels very much like you are entering an abandoned area that is being swarmed with people.

Once you get off the taxi the first step is to buy a ticket for the bus that will take you to the Israeli side. There are three windows that sell tickets (a newly opened fourth in a separate area), the windows are in the middle, separated by a tall thick metal fence that makes you feel you are in a cage. On both sides are the doors that will lead you to the next step after the tickets. This place is covered from the sun (as it is outdoors) and has a dozen or so fans, half of which had not been working, judging from the cobwebs, for a long time. There is little respect for queuing while buying tickets, and lots of shouting and pushing as people – with their luggage- move forward. In their defense the place does look as if it is designed for such a thing, or – more likely – not designed for anything. There is an empty VIP lane (a fast-track lane but it’s called VIP) that you can use for an extra fee to skip this queue and subsequent ones. Another common way to skip queues is to know someone, usually a security guard, who will escort you ahead of everyone. Next to the ticket windows there is a large sign in Arabic warning you that photography is prohibited at the crossing, and a smaller sign, in English, that says ‘’No Drones Allowed’.

After the tickets you need to wait for any of the two doors to open once the employees inside open them for a brief time to let people in so that it’s not crowded inside. When it’s crowded outside (which is common) you are more likely to be pushed through the doors than walk by yourself. Inside there is a small room in which you’re separated from your luggage (you will pick it up later on) with the usual luggage scanner that you see in airports next to a single metal detector door. Passing them leads to the Jordanian departure hall, where you need to fill a departure card (known as the white card) with basic personal info, then walk (and queue) to one of the several booths (similar to airport immigration ones) with your passport and the departure card, the officer then checks the documents and passes them through a small hole on their right to another officer servicing another booth and asks you to queue on that booth (most of the trip is spent queuing). The other officer stamps the white departure cards with half a dozen stamps before giving it back to you then you are out.

The next area is a considerably smaller hall that is roughly 100 square meters in size and has a duty-free zone, the zone primarily sells cigarettes and can get extremely crowded and chaotic as people ‘queue’ to buy the maximum allowed packs (two large boxes per person); cigarettes are extremely expensive in the West Bank compared to Jordan (three times the price when duty free) so buying here then selling it later at home will cover the trip costs and leave you with a small profit. Some people buy more than what is allowed and look for strangers who didn’t buy to carry it for them, others are professional ‘smugglers’ who seem to know what they are doing when hiding the cigarette packs in their hand bags.

Leaving that area you are outdoors again and you need to look for your luggage that was thrown in some corner and then get on the bus (less queuing here and more pushing). The buses come one by one and leave one by one whenever the Israeli side allows. Once on the bus and before it moves an officer gets on board to check your ticket and take the bottom half of the white departure card leaving you with the top half. The (manual) gate then opens and the bus takes a short drive to a nearby rest area where it parks till it gets a signal to move again, then passes a sign in Arabic with the odd message: “We are the closest to the crisis in Palestine”. After 10 minutes it continues its trip through a narrow road interrupted by a crossing herd of sheeps then it stops at a checkpoint next to the Military Liaison Office where an officer – still Jordanian – gets on board and takes the remaining top half of the white departure card. After a short drive, the bus crosses the actual bridge where the water has long since dried up and is now just dry grass. A plaque displaying the Japanese flag and the words “From the Japanese People” is placed on the left side. From this point on, the area looks drastically different with large modern roads bearing a new flag and language. 

The Israeli side

Right after crossing the bridge the bus stops at an automated gate like those in parking lots. A few cleaning staff are the only people visible. Once the gate opens the bus drives through artificial small hills with machine gun nests before coming to its final stop in a few hundred meters, everyone then disembarks to pick up their luggage that was just recklessly unloaded from a trolley attached to the back of the bus and checks it into the Israeli area after another queue and more pushing. Inside the Israeli departure hall there is a queue to go through the one sole metal detector door servicing thousands of travellers a day – on average twenty five thousand pass through this door a week. In the event that the metal detector beeps you are asked to go through the adjacent 360 X-Ray scanner, the scanner is there to ensure you have a safe and pleasant trip (or so the sign says). In front of these scanners there are two glass booths with two visibly bored frowning Israelis who don’t say much, but give hand gestures when something beeps to try again or try the other door. There are a number of Palestinian workers to guide you through the scanners and interpret the gestures of the frowning, bored Israelis. After clearing the security area there is one short queue followed by another longer one; in the first booth the Israeli takes your passport and asks a couple of questions and gives it back to you with a small paper that you take to the next booth. The next Israeli officer, the first who isn’t frowning, though still bored, takes the passport and the small paper again, scans and returns them and you are off to pick up your luggage, passing the customs area with more frowning Israelis yelling four or five Arabic words that they know at frustrated travellers (bag!, here!, passport!, come!, etc..).

Outside there is another bus ticket window where you need to buy a ticket to the Palestinian side to get on the bus, sometimes there is queuing here but not this time.

The Palestinian side

After a short drive the bus leaves the Israeli area and enters the Palestinian city of Jericho where the Palestinian side is. You get off the bus and pass a short queue at the immigration booth, then a tiny customs area where the officers are likely to ask you to open your luggage looking for hidden cigarettes then you are done. The surroundings outside looks way more developed than the Jordanian counterpart with proper parking lots for public transport and private cars, a small cafeteria and better overall buildings and roads as well as free WiFi (something the previous sides lacked). From here you can take a shuttle van or a bus to your destination or a short walk into Jericho downtown. 

It’s worth mentioning that even though crossing The Bridge is an annoying and time consuming process; two and half hours on quiet days and five plus hours when it’s busy; aside from 20 minute bus rides, the trip is spent queuing. It has gotten much better over the past decade. Previously, luggage was transported in separate trucks, causing long waits on the Israeli side if you arrived before your bag. Working hours were more limited but now (before October 7th) it operates 24 hours for a day or two; the rest of the days it varies from 8 am till 4.30 pm or 12 pm and closes on Saturdays. There were far more Israeli officers and armed soldiers, some used to get on the bus before its final stop to check everyone’s ID. The changes were most likely not made to facilitate travel for Palestinians but to alleviate the boredom of the Israeli authorities monitoring them. Nowadays the staff at the Israeli side are from private security companies and throughout the whole trip two (female) soldiers could be seen carrying their lunch in the Israeli side before they went into their office.

“Netanyahu made me do it”

It’s myopic to suggest that fascist ideology has been ‘imported’ into Britain and could not possibly be home-grown


27/08/2024

The press and social media are awash with attempts to analyse far-right figurehead Tommy Robinson’s mass mobilisations over the last few months and the riots in the wake of the murder of three children in Southport. There’s a lot we don’t know about the perpetrators of the violence, but there’s also a lot we do know about the far-right and fascist ideologues who supported them.

What we should know from the history of the last century is that the rise of fascism is not easy to make sense of because its explanations for people’s problems, conflicts and fears relate to their real, everyday lives in shifting contexts. Nevertheless, some groups have an interest in treating fascism as though it is detached from “normal” life — a foreign import, like dragon’s teeth planted by outsiders, whose violent consequences we are left to reap.

In the current outbreak of violence, mainstream spokespeople for the state, like former MI6 spy, Christopher Steele, blame money, misinformation and the Russians. Supposedly dissident commentators, like David Miller and Lowkey, blame money, manipulation and the Israelis.

Although there are elements of truth in both of these theories — Tommy Robinson pockets large amounts of money from wherever he can get it, probably including both Israel and Russia — the suggestion that fascist ideology could not be home-grown is myopic. In the 1930s the British state claimed that fascism was a German import. Today it’s being variously attributed to Russia and Israel — but not, notably to all the other fascist movements and governments, including in Poland, Hungary, Italy, India and the United States, with which it is enmeshed.

Most longstanding anti-racists and anti-fascists reject these oversimplified explanations. Instead, they are looking closely at the events, assessing the similarities and differences between the current upsurge in the far right and earlier episodes in order to develop effective strategies for challenging it. They recognise that fascists focus on different targets at different times — Jews in the 1930s; African Caribbeans in the 1950s and ’60s; Asians in the 1970s and ’80s; migrants and Muslims today — but this does not mean that they move on from one to the next. They still hate all minorities, and Tommy Robinson’s flirtation with zionism and Hindutva does not mean he has fallen in love with Jews and Indians.

The people who claim that Israel is the moving force behind the riots take the view that the recent far-right street violence has made a fundamental break from classical fascism. This time, they say, hatred of migrants is a side-issue (which will be news to the refugees too terrified to go out of their homes). Instead, we’re told, these are “Islamophobic riots” and this proves that they are inspired by zionism to punish Muslims for supporting the Palestinians. According to David Miller: “The riots show that Israel is trying to burn down the UK.”

Illustrating this in his latest video are pictures of demonstrators draped in Israeli flags. Pause the video and look closely, though, and it’s clear that these are not images of the riots. They are photos of a far-right zionist counter-protest at one of the London Gaza demonstrations, probably the one on April 27 2024. No nicer, but not the same thing as the marauding mobs in Southport three months later.

In this scenario, racism against Muslims is treated as a novel, alien phenomenon, brought in from outside, which is odd, given Europe’s centuries-long record of persecution of both Muslims and Jews going back to the Crusades and the Inquisition.

But even this tortured logic is missing from Lowkey’s interpretation of the riots in a recent Double Down News video. He lists names, episodes and “facts” — some reliable, others questionable — leaving us to string them together and draw the conclusion that Robinson is being financed and worked from behind by Israel. It would have muddied the waters to mention Robinson’s well-established connections with other far-right groups, parties and governments, such as when he travelled to Poland in 2017 to join the 60,000-strong far-right nationalist march on Poland’s independence day. It would be even more confusing to show that Robinson’s Polish far-right friends are as anti-semitic as ever, as well as Islamophobic, anti-Roma, anti-refugee and anti-zionist from a right-wing perspective.

The juxtaposition of this outbreak of fascism in Britain with Israel’s devastation of Palestinian lives is significant. There are connections between the genocide being enacted in Gaza and the upheavals on our streets. For thoughtful commentators this shines a light on the dynamic interrelationship of colonialism, racism, capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism, their economic foundations and their social and political manifestations.

John McDonnell has given a measured analysis of the different layers of far-right activism, saying: “At the top are leading demagogues, the political provocateurs … Beneath them are a relatively small phalanx of hardline foot-soldiers, who have been trained and involved in fascist groups like the English Defence League over the years … the true-believing fascist muscle behind the riots. …Then there is a larger group: the disgruntled, the dispossessed and the disillusioned, who are prey to the simple, beguiling message that someone else is to blame for how they feel.”

The emphasis on Robinson by those trying to hang the riots on the Russians or Israel, and the downplaying of other fascist groups and individuals, as well as the role of successive governments and the British state, creates a thoroughly distorted picture. We have just fought an election in which both Labour and the Conservatives tried to outbid Reform UK in blaming migrants and minorities especially Muslims, for poverty, powerlessness and the disintegration of state services. And the government’s response to the riots has been to ramp up deportations and announce the reopening of immigration detention centres?

We’ve also witnessed Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, feeding the mob with the claim that the police were withholding the truth about the Southport killer, and defending the rioters’ “sense of injustice” about “two-tier policing.” It is peculiar in the extreme to detach this sophisticated political operator from Robinson and his followers, many of them with longstanding links to football violence and anti-lockdown disorder, chanting: “We want our country back!”

In a recent interview, Robinson linked “mass immigration” with the “New World Order” and castigated the “far left” for allegedly being funded by the wealthy progressive Hungarian Jew, George Soros. This is a classic fascist, anti-semitic reference to the Great Replacement Theory which alleges that a shadowy Jewish conspiracy is replacing white Christians in the West with Muslims.

Despite all this evidence of a deep-rooted far-right ideology and relationships between different far-right entities, nationally and internationally, including fascistic elements in Israel and Russia, an alluringly simple analysis has captured the imagination of some anti-racists, including the targets of the rioters and their supporters.

The exclusive focus on backing from zionists (actually, far-right zionists, or the fascist-infused Israeli government) to the exclusion of their other backers is very dangerous. The fascists blame international forces for people’s troubles, rather than naming capitalism or the super-rich and the governments that sustain them.

But Lowkey and Miller are creating a mirror image of that claim. It seems extraordinary that anyone locating themselves on the left should ignore the breadth of support for far-right activism. How does this fit in with the backing of Donald Trump and US white supremacists, whose roots go back to transatlantic slavery? Or Robinson cosying up Indian fascism with its roots in Hitler’s Nazism? Not to mention his active support from far-right and fascist movements across Europe.

This exclusive focus strongly implies that the far right is simply being manipulated by Israel. This is worryingly close to a persistent anti-semitic thread in Western culture that portrays the Jews as puppeteers, controlling the world from behind the scenes. Miller’s latest theory is that the government’s decision to drop its objections to the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, and rumours that they might stop selling arms to Israel “would be enough for them to push the riot button.” Apart from the absurdity of the image, this lets the fascists at every level — the ideologues, the organisers and the rioters on the streets — off the hook.

No-one made them set fire to hotels full of migrants. No-one made them throw bricks through the windows of mosques. No-one made them whip up fears of so-called “Asian gangs.”

“He made me do it” is for the playground. These far-right activists take money and political support from wherever they can get it. But whether it comes from Tel Aviv, Moscow or New Delhi, Washington DC or Warsaw, they are not helpless puppets but are responsible for their own decisions to wreck and loot, and to force migrants and minorities to live under a pall of fear.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star. Reproduced with permission

Life in the Occupied Town

Wartime mission: remain sophisticated.


26/08/2024

In the past, both in Russia and Ukraine, there was a tradition of burying virgins in wedding dresses. The dress symbolized purity and innocence. For many women back then, marriage was a significant life goal, a solemn transition from one state to another. Death could be seen as a passage to another world, and the wedding dress symbolized this transition, much like the transition from maidenhood to married life.

The first time I saw an elaborate wedding dress sticking out of a coffin  I was in school. Across from my school was an abandoned nine-story building. Someties, teenagers jumped from its roof. It happened quite often, maybe a couple of times a year. This time it was a girl from the neighboring building who took her own life. Through window of my school, I could see both the abandoned building where she jumped from due to heartbreak and the entrance to her home where the coffin stood.

I had a friend named Nina. She thought I liked her, but I actually liked her brother. She also watched the funeral from the school window. Later, she asked me to walk her home. Nina wanted to show me something.

Now she is 34 years old, and her child is the same age we were back then. Nina took me home and pointed to the wardrobe. She seemed suspiciously nervous. She didn’t want to open the wardrobe herself, so I had to do it. Inside a wedding dress hung on the clothes rack. Nina asked, “Do you think my parents want to get rid of me?”

The dress was big and white. That day, it was easier for us to imagine such a dress in an open coffin than at a wedding, because funerals had become the main topic at school. Suddenly, Nina asked if I wanted to see her in the dress. I didn’t. But I noticed she blushed. I felt she wanted me to see her in it. So, just for that reason, I nodded yes.

Nina took off her sweater and t-shirt. She removed her jeans, wearing only underwear. I tried not to look at her, but she took so long to change that it made me angry. I asked her to hurry up, and she started rushing. When she put on the wedding dress, she said, “My parents have been yelling at me a lot. They probably want to bury me. But I wanna live. Will you protect me?”

I told her she was silly and walked away. Only ten years later, recalling this episode by chance, I realized that young Nina was trying to flirt with me. She knew it was her mother’s old wedding dress. Our ciuntries have many weird traditions. We not only bury virgins in wedding dresses but also keep wedding dresses for life, even though we know there won’t be another chance to wear them. At least not in an acceptable way, one not associated with nervous breakdowns and nostalgia.

This morning, I called Nina. For some reason, I thought it would be amusing to suddenly ask her what happened to her mother’s wedding dress. But I must have interrupted her from something important. Nina didn’t understand which dress I was talking about. Nevertheless, we ended up talking on the phone for almost an hour.

Now she knows I’m gay. She knows I never noticed her attempts at closeness. I know her husband in person. They have a wonderful son growing up. They still live in our hometown, which used to be in Ukraine but now is in Russia. It’s an unusual life experience. But raising their son takes all her strength, so Nina admits she doesn’t have time to process everything going on. She’s just living day by day. She asks, “You won’t blame me for this, will you?”

It’s becoming more common among those who stayed in Ukraine to hear that during job interviews, a new norm is to ask: “Do you have relatives or friends in the occupied territories?” If you answer yes, you might be seen as unreliable. I don’t tell Nina that during our conversation. I don’t want to upset her with the knowledge that my connection to her could harm my reputation. Nina is important to me because we share childhood memories: the dead virgins in wedding dresses, the abandoned house where teenagers jumped from the roof, and school.

Nina says there are unexpected benefits to the occupation. The new generation of teenagers enjoys hanging out on the roof of the abandoned house. Nina used to worry her son might end up there and something bad would happen to him. But now, there are military personnel all over the town. They guard banks, mines, the mayor’s office, and the local sanatorium. The military also guards the abandoned building. Because of this, in the two years since the occupation began, not a single teenager has jumped from the roof.

I tell Nina about my cousin who stays indoors because he fears forced military conscription. I tell her how boys are caught on the streets in Ukraine and force to go to war. Nina knows about this, but she says it’s different in our town. In Donetsk and Luhansk, they also catch men, but in our mining town, they don’t. Men are stopped more often than women here to check their documents, but usually, that’s where it ends. I hear anger in Nina’s voice when she says, “If Ukraine liberates us, we’ll have to flee the country to keep my husband from being taken to war. But I don’t want to flee. I want to live in my hometown.”

Nina says she still can’t get used to the curfew. Just a couple of days ago, she told her husband how much she misses their nighttime walks on the beach. That same day, the Ukrainian army shelled our town. Ukraine is having problems with electricity. People in Kyiv are without power for 6-7 hours. They say the situation will get worse. Meanwhile, Ukraine continues to sell electricity to the EU. The Ukrainian army has intensified shelling of our town to reclaim the nuclear power plant located nearby. A few days ago, a substation was blown up. The town was without electricity for over a day, but it’s been restored now.

“When I heard the explosion, I was home alone,” Nina tells me, her voice becoming detached, as if she’s talking about someone else. “My husband took our kid to visit his parents. I needed some rest. I couldn’t get out of bed for a long time. And then I heard a very loud explosion. You know what I did? I got up right away. I dressed up. There was no electricity. I just sat in the armchair and waited. I thought if a missile hit my house, at least they would find my body dressed.”

Then Nina asks how much Pepsi costs here. She mentions that at the beginning of the occupation, Pepsi disappeared from the stores. Some Russian equivalent appeared instead. But now Pepsi is back on the shelves. She’s curious about the prices of soft drinks, as well as meat and seaweed, because she wants to understand the price differences.

Initially, stores had prices in two currencies: hryvnia and rubles. Now, only rubles remain. But Nina says there’s a different exchange rate here. Everything is more expensive. Prices are high, but salaries have also increased. Nina says it’s livable. She mentions she’s tired of the explosions. Even after two years of war, the explosions still scare her. But she’s also scared of rumors that Russia might stop using dollars all together as a result of sanctions. Nina doesn’t really understand it. Everyone keeps their savings in dollars, so does she. Nina’s worried about what will happen to her money.

“There are things you can never get used to,” says Nina, and her voice becomes familiar again. “You can’t get used to kids ending their lives every year, jumping from the roof of the same building. You can’t get used to explosions when your son sleeps nearby and you don’t know what to do to protect him.”

Then we discuss Nina’s intimate life and my new lovers. We talk about the book she’s reading this week. Only at the end of our conversation does she say, “You know, it’s strange how kids have been ending their lives from that building’s roof for years without anyone caring. It’s odd they only blocked the entrance due to the war now. Isn’t that rather strange to you?”

 

This piece is a part of a series, The Mining Boy Notes, published on Mondays and authored by Ilya Kharkow, a writer from Ukraine. For more information about Ilya, see his website. You can support his work by buying him a coffee.