LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN UNDER THE TALIBAN
New but old dress code
Although it is not yet mandatory for women to wear a burqa, many do so out of fear of reprisals. This Afghan woman is visiting a local market with her children. There is a large supply of second-hand clothes as many refugees have left their clothes behind.
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Where is Italy's populist Five Star Movement headed?
Prime Minister Draghi's unity government is on the brink of collapse because an important coalition partner, the populist Five Star Movement, has pulled its support. What's the current state of the once-popular party?
Once allies: Foreign Minister di Maio (left) and Conte as prime minister in 2019
The background to the latest government crisis in Italy is a power struggle within the Five Star Movement (M5S), led by former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. The movement boycotted a parliamentary vote on a €26 billion ($26 billion) relief package, thereby refusing to support current Prime Minister Mario Draghi. Despite winning a vote of confidence, Draghi offered his resignation, which was then rejected by Italy's president, Sergio Mattarella.
The populist M5S, which saw itself as a counterweight to established political parties, won the largest percentage of votes in the 2018 parliamentary elections. Initially, it shared government duties with the right-euroskeptic Lega Nord (LN) party and right-wing extremists.
Street art left- and right-wing populists mocks Luigi di Maio and Matteo Salvini
This coalition broke up in 2019, when LN leader Matteo Salvini saw a chance of becoming head of government himself. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, then not yet formally a member of the movement, surprisingly managed to forge a new coalition with the center-left Democratic Party (PD). This new alliance, however, broke up as well.
In January 2021, Conte stepped down and was replaced as prime minister by the independent "technocrat" Mario Draghi, who led a "coalition of national unity" that included almost all parties, except the right-nationalist Brothers of Italy (FdI). Conte became leader of the M5S, which then split in June, when Foreign Minister Luigi di Maio — who had led the party till 2020 — and about 60 allies, left the party's parliamentary groups in Italy's bicameral Parliament after Conte took a critical stance toward arms deliveries to Ukraine.
Currently, there are two M5S groups in Parliament as di Maio also claims to represent the legitimate part of the movement. In addition to the split on Ukraine, the groups are at loggerheads when it comes to social policy issues. Conte supports more radical positions, whereas di Maio supports Draghi's policies.
In 2021, Mario Draghi took over government duties from his predecessor Conte
M5S was founded in 2009 by the TV comedian Beppe Grillo, who had become a popular figure through his satiric attacks against Italy's established political parties. Grillo was supported by internet entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio.
In the course of the financial crisis and protests against austerity measures in Italy, Grillo — himself barred from adopting a political post due to a previous conviction — managed to considerably increase M5S's popularity. In the 2018 parliamentary elections, M5S won the largest share of the vote in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.
Beppe Grillo speaking to an audience on a square in Turin (2013)
Dozens of MPs have since left the party and joined other parliamentary groups. Recently, personnel and party manifesto votes conducted via the Rousseau online platform were seen as intransparent by many lawmakers and party members. M5S is currently polling at about 11%; it had garnered nearly 33% of the vote in 2018.
Grillo has withdrawn from the active leadership circle; he remains, however, head consultant and mentor. Roberto Casaleggio, the son of the now-deceased Gianroberto, continues to be involved with the M5S.
Political analysts view Conte's refusal to support Draghi as an attempt to position himself as a left-wing alternative prior to the upcoming parliamentary elections in 2023 — a risky undertaking in Italy's fragmented party landscape.
This article was originally written in German
Russia's Gazprom says no sign of Nord Steam 1 turbine
Russian energy giant Gazprom says it has asked German engineering firm Siemens for the return of a turbine that was being fixed in Canada. There are fears state-owned Gazprom could use the opportunity to cut off gas.
The powerful Portovaya compressor station pressurizes gas to the required level
for transport through Nord Stream 1
The Russian gas supplier Gazprom said Saturday it had asked German engineering company Siemens for details about the return of a turbine — under maintenance in Canada — to ensure the delivery of gas from the Nord Stream pipeline to Europe.
Gazprom is conducting maintenance on the pipeline over a 10-day period and has stopped delivering gas through the conduit, which runs beneath the Baltic Sea.
European countries, particularly Germany — to which the pipeline runs from Russia — are anxious to see if gas supplies are resumed.
There are fears that Moscow could use the annual work on the pipeline — which was scheduled well in advance — to shut down gas deliveries in response to Western sanctions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Gas supplies via the pipeline had already dwindled by about 60%, even before the switch-off, with officials blaming problems with the gas pumping turbine.
Moscow has already said the restart of supplies depends upon actions taken by the West, and that it depends on preventing negative effects of unlawful restrictive measures."
Canada has issued a "time-limited and revocable permit" last week that would exempt the turbine from sanctions imposed on Russia by Western nations, but Gazprom says it has seen no evidence that the turbine will be sent.
Despite the waiver, Gazprom has said it does not know if the turbine — which is used at a compressor station for Nord Stream 1 — will be returned.
"On July 15, Gazprom submitted an official request to Siemens to obtain the documents... to allow the export of the gas turbine engine of the Portovaya station, a critical facility for the Nord Stream gas pipeline," the firm said in a statement.
"Gazprom is counting on the Siemens Group to unconditionally fulfill its obligations with regard to servicing gas turbine engines on which depend the reliable operation of the Nord Stream pipeline and natural gas supply to European consumers," the company said on Saturday.
The turbine is believed to still be in Canada, with a spokesman for Siemens saying company experts were "working intensively on all other formal approvals and logistics."
Ukraine summoned Canada's ambassador on Monday and described the decision to return the repaired turbine as "unacceptable." The World Ukrainian Congress filed a lawsuit asking the Canadian federal court to review the decision in the hope of having it overturned.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to the criticism, saying the sanctions "are aimed at Putin and his enablers, and aren't designed to harm our allies and their populations."
Trudeau said the "difficult decision" to allow these parts to be shipped to Germany was taken to avoid a possible major energy crisis in Europe, and to prevent popular support for the West's backing of Ukraine from ebbing away.
Germany, the digital desert
The crash of Germany's online tax filing system left some 36 million property owners in the lurch. It is the latest embarrassment for a country that is routinely mocked for the woeful state of its digitalization.
The crash of Germany's online tax filing system has put Germany's digital dilemma in the spotlight yet again
Germany's only free, government-approved tax preparation software, Elster, crashed earlier this week. It was simply not able to handle hundreds of thousands of property tax returns filed in response to a government call for a reassessment.
Whether it's a lack of cell service even in the middle of cities, fax machines in doctors' offices, or a dearth of official services available online, there is near universal acceptance that Germany is stuck in the technological past.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz is seemingly unphased. At the re:publica conference in Berlin, he laughed at the fact that Germans are having to wait for hours at city hall just to renew their ID cards. "I can't say exactly when that will change because I know how things go in Germany," he said.
In many countries most things can be done easily online — not so in Germany
A 2021 survey by the internet industry association Eco found that 71% of Germans are dissatisfied with the state of digital infrastructure across the country.
On the campaign trail last year, the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) promised to finally get serious about implementing a 2020 law called the Online Access Act (OZG), which stipulates that all administrative services must be fully online by the end of 2022.
Now, the FDP controls the Ministry of Digital and Transport as a member of the coalition government along with Scholz's center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the Green Party.
Yet despite the party's position of power, a recent report from the German Economic Institute (IW) found that only 80 of 575 services are partially online, and a mere 35 are set to be fully online before January next year. Even that may be counted as a success, however, when one considers that the ratio is much worse when it comes to services offered by regional or local governments.
Moreover, the IW found that while in some places the number of services offered online increased from 2021 to 2022 — such as in the eastern state of Thuringia — in others they actually decreased. For example, in many municipalities in Germany's most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, local governments dropped online offers that had gone digital in 2020 due to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Germany's Federal Audit Office has also cast doubt on how the rate of digitalization is quantified, accusing the coalition of padding the numbers by including things that are only partly online.
The FDP's Volker Wissing heads the Ministry of Digital and Transport
"The federal government is getting bogged down in developing overly complex digital solutions that offer no advantages to simple systems that already exist," the IW says, offering one possible explanation for the digital desert.
For example, their report says, the government insisted on introducing a blockchain-based ID for digital startups that has been plagued by functionality issues, even though the regular digital identification system that already exists would work just fine.
There are also those who blame lawmakers and bureaucrats for simply being too stuck in their ways for too long.
In 2013, former Chancellor Angela Merkel of the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU) was ridiculed both at home and abroad for calling the internet "Neuland" (unchartered territory). Hartmut Gieselmann, a tech writer for the industry magazine c*t, told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk that the CDU "slept through years, if not decades" of technological progress.
In the same expert roundtable, writer Eva Wolfangel added that there were also the issues of Germans' deep-seated resistance to spending too much money and a longtime obsession with balanced budgets. She said lawmakers and bureaucrats were more afraid of how much it will cost to improve digital infrastructure than they were concerned with how much more it will cost in the long run to postpone it.
Another cultural issue at play is a general distrust of technology, particularly when it comes to Germans' closely guarded privacy. "People in Germany are much more skeptical of technology than people in East Asia," for example, a study by the Otto Beisheim School of Management in Düsseldorf found.
"People from Germany overwhelmingly focus on the risks rather than the advantages," according to the report, which surveyed 700 people from five countries.
For Süddeutsche Zeitung technology editor Helmut Martin-Jung, federalism contributes stumbling blocks as well.
"The responsibility is fragmented between the federal, state and local governments," he wrote, with different organizations either refusing or simply unable to communicate with one another, working with a complex labyrinth of bureaucratic offices and rules that may overlap or contradict each other.
Some progress is, however, on the horizon. The FDP has recently pushed through a new plan to cover Germany in fiber optic cables — long commonplace in other countries — by 2030, which will drastically improve the country's sometimes dismal WiFi.
But again, the new strategy is already the subject of disputes between different levels of government as to who is responsible for which parts of the implementation and when they should be carried out.
While you're here: Every Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
Germany: Neo-Nazi march blocked by opponents
Thousands of anti-racism protesters pushed back a small march by an extreme-right group in the western city of Mainz. Police said clashes broke out between officers and some of the demonstrators.
The neo-Nazi march in Mainz was outnumbered by thousands of counterprotesters
Anti-racism groups and political parties on Saturday broke up a planned gathering of a German neo-Nazi group.
According to police, around 3,000 people — made up of church groups, labor unions and antiglobalization activists — helped to push back the extreme-right march through the western city of Mainz.
About 50 members of the hard-right New Strong Party (NSP) had gathered for a protest, around half of the number the party said would show up.
NSP members shouted slogans like "Nazi city Mainz" and "Revolution now" before being prevented from moving forward, police said.
Clashes then erupted between officers and NSP members, and police said they responded with pepper spray.
The neo-Nazi group then relocated to another part of the city, according to the EPD news agency.
Local media reported other scuffles between police and the counterprotesters.
Earlier Saturday, Mainz Mayor Michael Ebling led a gathering of some counterprotesters at the city's main railway station and used a speech to denounce the planned Nazi meeting.
"They should take their brown backpacks, pack them up and start their journeys back home," said Ebling.
He also warned against underestimating the danger from the extreme right.
The Interior Ministry of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate said the group was "obviously neo-Nazi."
In April, German police raided around 50 premises in a nationwide crackdown on banned neo-Nazi groups.
Four suspected right-wing extremists were arrested.
In February, members of neo-Nazi groups marred the remembrance ceremony of the World War II bombing of the city of Dresden.
The participants of the far-right march walked into the city center to the sound of Richard Wagner's music.
The German composer, whose known antisemitic views have drawn widespread criticism, was Adolf Hitler's favorite composer.
mm/kb (dpa, EPD)
Abortion: Is Africa becoming more liberal?
The abortion debate in Africa is going in the opposite direction to the one in the US. Experts say that legislation in countries such as Benin and South Africa is becoming more progressive. But there are exceptions.
Many pregnant women opt for illegal abortions when their country prohibits safe termination
Since the US Supreme Court overturned protections on abortion rights in the US last month, the controversial issue has been back on the global agenda — including in Africa.
Five days after the US ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion, Tedros Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), described it as a setback.
However, the WHO chief said many world regions had strengthened the right to abortion over the past 40 years, adding that it's more important than ever to protect that right.
"All women should have the right to choose when it comes to their bodies and health. Full stop," he said.
Tedros stressed that safe abortion is health care: "It saves lives. Restricting it drives women and girls towards unsafe abortions; resulting in complications, even death."
The legal and medical standards defined by the WHO aim to improve access to safe abortion and are supported by numerous NGOs working in Africa.
One of the most active organizations in abortion rights is the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which aims to advance reproductive rights.
CRR advises African legislators and supports women's organizations and families with money, know-how, legal protection, and counseling.
These and similar organizations' goals are to provide women with accessible and legal access to safe abortions, especially in Africa's poorer, most populous countries.
The advocacy work is increasingly producing the desired effects and results in many African countries — for example, Benin.
After long and controversial debates, Benin's parliament lifted many restrictions on women's right to abortion in 2021 that had been in place until then.
Until last year, abortions were only allowed in Benin if the pregnant woman's life was in danger or if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.
Benin thus joined the list of African countries that allow women to have abortions legally and safely under certain conditions. On the African continent, Tunisia, South Africa, Cape Verde and Mozambique have similar liberal legislation to Benin.
Another country on the verge of partially legalizing abortion is Sierra Leone. President Julius Maada Bio recently introduced a bill aimed to that effect. The country's parliament is currently debating the legislation in Freetown.
In addition to national legislative initiatives, other African countries also have projects at the local and regional levels that promise women access to safe abortion.
For example, the Nigerian commercial metropolis of Lagos plans to offer abortions in public hospitals.
The city of 15 million people could become a pioneer for liberal abortion rights in a country with enormous economic, cultural, and social disparities. For instance, some Nigerian regions have a powerful cultural and religious-based resistance to abortion.
Abortion in Africa, like the rest of the world, remains controversial
In many African societies, the issue of abortion is still taboo. Opinions on the subject differ, as was the case when DW put the issue of abortion rights up for discussion in the youth program "The 77 Percent."
It was noticeable that many young men who are critical of the liberalization of abortion laws in Sierra Leone took part in the debate.
"Human rights already apply to unborn children in the womb. These innocent children are crying out for brave men and women to defend their rights courageously," Pender Aghogho, a DW 77 Percent social media user, said.
And another user named Simony Kuban concurred: "Our girls are having abortions, even if it's not legal. So I reject this proposal by the president of Sierra Leone."
Julius Bio's proposal, he said, is "evil and barbaric."
Religious and cultural beliefs are strong opponents to the legalization of abortion
According to the WHO, a ban does not lead to fewer abortions. DW's fact check also concluded that abortions performed under unsafe conditions are a much bigger problem by far.
In many countries in Africa, access to safe abortion remains highly restrictive.
According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, abortion remains illegal in eight countries. In Madagascar, for example, medical workers who secretly perform abortions on women face up to ten years in prison. Yet nearly 75,000 abortions are performed in Madagascar each year, according to CRR.
"We try to save the lives of pregnant women, even in countries where abortion is illegal," Dr. Jean Kalibushi Bizimana, an obstetrics and gynecology consultant with Doctors Without Borders, told DW.
Bizimana said the medical charity organization does everything necessary to ensure women's confidentiality and safety — a principle to which all doctors worldwide should be committed.
Edited by Keith Walker
Iraq wants to criminalize homosexuality, Saudi Arabia has targeted rainbow flags, and Egypt insists on a gender binary. Activists say new threats to LGBTQ communities are based on wrong ideas about tradition.
Observers say there's an unusually intense crackdown on LGBTQ+
communities in the Middle East at the moment
Most of the people around him don't know he identifies as queer, the 20-year-old Iraqi student told DW. But life in his comparatively conservative southern city of Najaf is dangerous for him anyway.
"Once I wore a pink shirt and I was harassed, just because of the color," said Haiden, whose full name cannot be published for his safety. "Sometimes people are harassed and even killed just because they don't look like everyone else."
And, he said, things are getting worse for LGBTQ communities in Iraq. "We're already exposed to all kinds of harassment and attacked on a daily basis," he said. "And that's even before this law to criminalize homosexuality has been enacted."
In July, Iraq's government announced that it was planning a law prohibiting homosexuality. Iraq is one of three Arab-majority countries in the Middle East that doesn't explicitly criminalize same-sex relationships. The others are Jordan and Bahrain.
If the law is passed, it would bring Iraq into line with the rest of the region. Most other Middle Eastern nations outlaw same-sex intimacy more directly, punishing it with anything from fines to prison to, in Saudi Arabia, the death penalty.
"The new law will hold homosexuals to account and impose the most severe penalties on them," Aref al-Hamami, a member of parliament who sits on the parliamentary legal committee, told DW.
The law is yet to be voted on but al-Hamami said he believed that it would pass, despite criticism from domestic and international human rights organizations.
"We are a Muslim country," he said. "We have customs and traditions — and Islam forbids these actions."
This argument — that same-sex relationships are not part of Middle Eastern culture — is one that is often used by those opposed to them. But it is also wrong.
Just like the Bible, the Koran mentions homosexuality several times in a disapproving way. But, despite religious condemnation, same-sex relationships featured regularly in poetry and art in the Islamic world.
Shortly after Pride events were canceled by Lebanese authorities in June,
a related billboard in Beirut was also destroyed
In Iraq, for example, the eighth century poet Abu Nawas is celebrated with a statue in central Baghdad. Abu Nawas was an infamous libertine, who penned paeans to such things as the delights of the local bathhouse, or hammam, where he could observe handsome men naked — at least "until the towel bearers come in and spoil the fun."
Some researchers maintain that, for centuries, Arab culture was more permissive about same-sex relationships than European culture.
"Pre-modern Arab-Islamic thought … had no term for the concept of homosexuality as understood today," Sultan Alamer, a visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, wrote in an essay published in New Lines magazine in June.
This changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Victorian era popularized the idea that sexual pleasure was sinful or shameful, and in 1885 the British brought in some of the first laws to criminalize sex between men.
Arabs began increasingly to adopt conservative European attitudes. Alamer describes how one Arab visitor to Paris in the early 19th century praised the French for "not being inclined toward loving male youths and eulogizing them in poetry.”
Previously acceptable ideas about homosexual desire and poems about male beauty would come to be considered uncivilized.
Some of the first laws against homosexuality in the Middle East were actually imported because European legal systems were also used in European colonies.
According to British legal advocacy organization, the Human Dignity Trust, most of the modern laws against homosexuality in the Arab world are based on religion. However even today some of those still have their roots in historical British law. This is true of Sudan and Egypt — the former colonies simply kept those old rules when they became independent.
Same-sex relations have become a "cultural battleground," Katerina Dalacoura, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, wrote in a paper published in The Third World Quarterly.
"The identification of heterosexuality with cultural authenticity in Middle Eastern societies is a distortion of the historical record," she argued.
According to Dalacoura, authoritarian governments and religious fundamentalists stoke public sentiment against LGBTQ communities to secure their power. "Their authority is shored up by the call to protect an 'authentic' culture which, if it ever existed, has long ago been wiped out," she wrote.
The situation seems to be getting worse for LGBTQ communities in many Middle Eastern countries. "Right now, the entire region seems to be seeing a plethora of homophobia and transphobia," said Andrew Delatolla, a lecturer in Middle Eastern studies at Leeds University in the UK, whose research centers on race, gender and sexuality.
This includes the Saudi government's campaign to remove rainbow-colored toys from shelves, a state clampdown and threats from a militant Christian group directed at LGBTQ communities in Lebanon, and a hashtag campaign that originated in Egypt recently that uses "fetrah," the Arabic word for "instinct," to insist that there can only be two genders.
"It's not something I've seen emerge in quite this way before, and I think part of the reason why is that there have been so many advances in the way that society has been thinking about sexuality in general, and queerness in particular," Delatolla said. "For a lot of socially conservative individuals, that poses a threat to the moral values they rely on for maneuvering through society and the state."
In New Lines magazine, Alamer concluded that authoritarian Arab leaders often substitute "moral authority" for "democratic legitimacy."
"In the past five decades, this moral authority was exercised through regulating religion and subjugating Arab women," he wrote. "If you are an Arab dictator and want moral legitimacy, but you do not want to derive it from Islam or gender, what is the most convenient source that fits your new secular, conservative agenda? Arguably, the answer is adopting anti-homosexuality and, to a lesser degree, anti-atheism discourse."
Prominent Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said same-sex marriage caused the pandemic
This appears to be behind what is happening in Iraq too, activists say. "Politicians who have failed to manage the state's affairs are distracting people with laws that have a big impact on the street," said Sam, a consultant who works with IraQueer, which describes itself as Iraq's first national LGBTQ organization.
There are other recent examples of similarly attention-getting laws in Iraq, on pornography and paternal custody, as well as against normalizing relations with Israel, said Sam, who asked that his full name not be used.
"Iraq lives under the shadow of a political class that's failed to form a government and which is trying to cover up its own corruption," Sam said. "It does so by deluding people that these laws preserve Islamic principles."
Azhar Al-Rubaie contributed reporting from Iraq.
