Kazakhstan among world's leading crypto producers

8 hangars in area of 15 hectares work 24/7 since 2019 with 55,000 computers to make Bitcoin

4/01/2023 Wednesday
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Kazakhstan stands among the world’s leading countries in Bitcoin production although there has been tax rises and limitation to the access of electricity toward cryptocurrency producers over the past year.


According to the latest report published by Cambridge University experts in January 2022, Kazakhstan, which ranks third after the US and China with a share of 13.22% in cryptocurrency mining, has about 300 crypto mines.


Anadolu Agency has displayed the data center of Enegix company, which has been operating in the country since 2019 and is among the largest crypto mines across the world.


To get to the huge facility near the city of Ekibastuz in the country’s northern region, it is necessary to travel about 300 kilometers (over 186.4 miles) from the capital Astana.


It is no coincidence that the facility is located in Ekibastuz as the cold climate of this place in winter and the mild climate in summer allow crypto computers that work continuously day and night to work regularly without heating up.


Built on a total area of 15 hectares in the middle of a wide steppe and where strict security measures are taken, there are eight large hangars where computers designed for cryptocurrency mining are placed.


As many as 55,000 computers are working there non-stop to earn Bitcoin, the most expensive cryptocurrency in the world, for its owners.


However, those who enter these hangars for the first time are greeted by a noise they are not used to. This buzz coming out of the machines is called by crypto miners the “sound of digital money.”


Yersayin Nurtoleuov, the director of the Hosting Department of Enegix Company, told Anadolu Agency that as a company, they hold a 1.3% share of global Bitcoin.


He said the facility has the power to provide customers with 180 megawatts of electricity per hour, saying: "We call our customers who have placed their device (computer) in our data center investors.”


“They only bring their devices here. We take care of the subsequent processes such as switching on the devices, connecting them to the internet, and providing access to the global crypto network power.


“In other words, our company hosts crypto mining devices in general and provides the basic infrastructure for their operation,” he stressed.


Noting that they have all kinds of opportunities at the facility for Bitcoin mining, the director mentioned that the most important of them is the uninterrupted provision of electricity and 24/7 supervision of devices.


He emphasized that they employ more than 100 people so that not a single computer is disabled.


"Usually young Information Technologies specialists work,” he said, adding that they train these employees themselves.


“Due to the fact that they work with a 15-day shift method, there is a dormitory and a dining hall within the boundaries of our facility,” he also said.


- Consuming 3.5 kilowatts of electricity per hour


The data centers of the facility, monitored by over 150 cameras, are also constantly monitored by system operators such as Ilya Fomin.


Fomin explained that his main task is to do his best to ensure that the Bitcoin devices in the data center are operational 24/7, saying: "If these devices work, the Bitcoin network also works and crypto production is carried out."


Expressing that the most important raw material for the operation of the Bitcoin devices is electricity, Fomin noted: "A Bitcoin device located in the data center in this hangar consumes 3.5 kilowatts of electricity per hour.


“So if there is no electricity, it means that there is no crypto money either,” he underlined.


He said the essence of Bitcoin mining consists of the direct transmission of transactions without any intermediaries.


"These devices with chips reveal a string of letters and numbers that are too long to be broken to create the necessary cache for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.


“After all this, the data transaction is considered to have been successfully transferred, and the owner of the device receives a profit in the form of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies,” he underscored.


The authority of the facility, which was the world's second-largest crypto mine last year, stressed that they are working with imported electricity because of the crisis in Kazakhstan and the world, adding that they have limited their activities as Bitcoin has lost some of its value in the world.


Meanwhile, Nurtoleuov said that as a company, they see these as temporary problems and said: "If we look at the Bitcoin graph, we see that it is always fluctuating.”


“We are experiencing the 'crypto winter' this year,” he said, expressing that they expect a significant rise this year to “about $100,000.”


- Digital mining ‘licensed activity'


Sergey Putra, a member of the Kazakhstan Blockchain and Data Center Industry Association, pointed out that some of the disputes between the government and the industry are due to the lack of legal order.


Putra underlined that the main problem is crypto mines operating unregistered, saying: "A large number of crypto devices have been smuggled into the country by illegal means.”


“Now those who have obtained these devices are mining crypto money by hiding in places such as car washes, pizzerias.”


Criticizing that they are against it, he noted: “We support crypto mines that we call 'white miners' who pay taxes and have data centers.”


The draft law "On Digital Assets" that will legalize cryptocurrency mining is being discussed in the Kazakh parliament, Putra stressed, saying he also took part in the preparation of the draft law as an expert.


Putra explained that the process was difficult because a draft law had not been developed in such a sector in the country before, emphasizing: "With this draft law, digital mining will now be a licensed activity.”


“These licenses will be issued in two categories. The first category will cover the owners of data centers where mining equipment is placed, and the second will cover only the individual entrepreneur who has a mining computer,” he mentioned.


According to another article in the draft law, all mining devices to be brought to the country from now on will be marked and registered in a single system, Putra said, stressing that this is important for the transparency of the sector.


He also said electricity consumption below 1 megawatt will be prohibited in crypto mining, adding: "This is the lowest ceiling we have set to prevent those who mine unregistered cryptocurrency in a 1-megawatt home environment, garage, or other places."

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Ex-GE employee sentenced for stealing trade secrets for China

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen on Tuesday called the espionage case against Xiaoqing Zheng "textbook economic espionage." UPI/Kevin Dietsch | License Photo


Jan. 3 (UPI) -- A U.S. federal judge has sentenced a former GE employee to two years' imprisonment for conspiring to steal trade secrets from his company for China, the latest U.S. conviction over Beijing corporate espionage.

U.S. District Judge Mae D'Agostino handed down the sentence to Xiaoqing Zheng, 59, of Niskayuna, N.Y., on Tuesday following a four-week trial that ended March 31

Zheng is also sentenced to pay a $7,500 fine and serve one year of supervised release.

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division described Zheng's case as a textbook example of economic espionage.

"Zheng exploited his position of trust, betrayed his employer and conspired with the government of China to steal innovative American technology," Olsen said in a statement following sentencing on Tuesday.

"The Justice Department will hold accountable those who threaten our national security by conniving to steal valuable trade secrets on behalf of a foreign power."

Zheng, a engineer specializing in sealing technology with GE, was charged in a 14-count indictment in April of 2019 along with Chinese national Zhaoxi Zhang, a relative of Zheng's and the majority owner of Liaoning Tianyi Aviation Technology.

According to the court documents, Zheng, who worked at GE Power & Water in Schenectady, N.Y., from 2008 until his arrest in the summer of 2018, also had an aviation parts supply business in China called Nanjing Tianyi Avi Tech Co. Ltd.

Prosecutors accused Zheng of using his position at GE to steal proprietary design models, engineering drawings, configuration files and material specifications in connection to GE gas and steam turbines, many of which he sent to Zhang in China.

The pair then used the stolen trade secrets to advance the business interests of their two companies that manufacture parts for turbines, court documents state.

Zheng was convicted by a jury in March of conspiring to commit economic espionage, but was acquitted on four counts, two counts each of economic espionage and trade secret theft. The jury also failed to reach a verdict on seven other counts.

The pair were charged during the Trump administration's now-shuttered China Initiative, which sought to clamp down on economic espionage stemming from the Asian nation

Though dozens of professors and professionals were charged under the program launched in 2018, some of those cases were subsequently dropped. And Olsen of the Biden administration's Justice Department announced the shuttering of the program in February under criticism it showed departmental bias.

However, the Justice Department continues to seek convictions over corporate espionage, and in November, Yanjun Xu, the first Chinese government intelligence officer to ever be extradited to the United States to stand trial, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted a year prior to several counts of economic espionage.

"American ingenuity is an integral part of the United States economic security -- it is what has guided the U.S. to become the global leader, even as China seeks to topple our sates. Xiaoqing was a Thousand Talents Program member and willingly stole proprietary technology and sent it back to the PRC," Assistant Director Alan Kohler Jr. of the FBI Counterintelligence Division said in a statement. The PRC is the initials of China's official name, the People's Republic of China.

"Let today's sentencing serve as a reminder that the FBI remains dedicated in our pursuit of those who collaborate with the People's Republic of China and steal American trade secrets."

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS
Tons of cocaine are washing over the coasts of East and Southern Africa.

Cocaine Trade Grows in East and Southern Africa

BRAZIL/4 JAN 2023 BY ALESSANDRO FORDEN

As global cocaine markets continue to expand, a new investigation suggests countries across east and southern Africa are receiving much larger drug shipments from South America than was previously believed.

Drug market research in 16 countries has found both substantial local consumption and bulging transit flows to Europe and Australia, according to a Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) report.

These primarily travel by maritime container from Brazil’s port of Santos, though a steady stream of human carriers also flies smaller quantities from Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos Airport. Most of the cargos land in coastal states like South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, and Tanzania, before either being transhipped to other continents or heading inland.


SEE ALSO: South Africa Raises Profile as Cocaine Trafficking Hub

The result is a blooming drug trade whose full scale is hidden by feeble interdiction capacities. West and North Africa are the continent’s more famous cocaine corridors, yet given their much higher enforcement profile -- with French naval carriers patrolling the Gulf of Guinea -- it is hard to compare based on seizure data alone.

Below, InSight Crime provides three key takeaways on cocaine’s push into east and southern Africa.

Cocaine retail prices across the region. Courtesy of Jason Eligh and the GI-TOC
Large-Scale Flows

Cocaine traffickers are despatching regular, large-scale consignments to various countries in the region. This occurs in three ways: in containerized shipments, in seagoing vessels, such as fishing boats, and in drug trafficking schemes from Latin America.

The investigation identifies several top reception ports, including Durban in South Africa, Pemba and Nacala in Mozambique, Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar in Tanzania, Mombasa in Kenya, and Walvis Bay in Namibia.

Meanwhile, ships land or drop off drugs “along the east and west coasts of South Africa, Mozambique’s northern coast between Angoche and Pemba, the coastal waters of Zanzibar and Madagascar, the Kenyan coast from Kilifi to Lamu, and the coastal waters of the Somalia-Kenya maritime area,” noted the report.

Microtrafficking schemes are the most diverse, both in smuggling method and destination. Generally involving cocaine loads of under 5 kilograms, these can travel by post, by human carriers on commercial flights, and in unaccompanied airline baggage collected by complicit airport staff.

Interception rates are very low, and human carriers travel easily across the region. Abundant flight connections mean Ethiopia’s Bole Airport in Addis Ababa and South Africa’s OR Tambo Airport in Johannesburg are the main transit hubs to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Nigerian drug traffickers have long dominated maritime and aerial flows since establishing outposts in Brazil’s Sao Paulo in the late 2000s. By 2013, they organized up to 30% of the cocaine exports by ship or container from the local port of Santos, according to a report published that year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

Brazil's port of Santos.

Most recently, in December, police arrested an alleged Nigerian cocaine smuggler in São Paulo. He was accused of shipping 5 tons of cocaine in October 2021 from the port of Rio de Janeiro to Europe via Mozambique. However, this case aside, it is thought Nigerian actors have lost ground, said Jason Eligh, the report’s author and a senior expert at the GI-TOC.

“They play a role, particularly in the capacity of cocaine distribution regionally in east and southern Africa. How big that role is today -- compared to a decade ago, for example -- is a question mark,” he told InSight Crime.
Arrival of Brazil’s PCC

The meteoric rise of another group may have displaced the Nigerians: Brazil’s most notorious prison gang, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC). Since the mid-2010s, the São Paulo-based PCC has dominated drug trafficking from Brazil to Europe, turning the port of Santos into a world trade center for cocaine.

They have also begun directing increasing volumes of powder to Africa’s Atlantic coast in recent years to diversify transit to Europe and establish new markets in Africa and Asia. Linguistic, historical, and transport links have made Mozambique an important route, especially given its proximity to South Africa, the region’s primary cocaine hub.

“The country has become a regional transit node for the gang’s cocaine shipments from Santos port both to the regional market -- particularly South Africa -- and to Europe and beyond,” states the report

.

The Mozambican coast.

“With its mix of pliable local officials, moderately developed infrastructure, multi-modal transport connections to European markets, a shared language, and a habit of looking the other way when it comes to the movement of illicit goods such as heroin, the gang obviously sees Mozambique as a viable transit point for its cocaine flows,” the document concludes.

SEE ALSO: Mozambique Becoming Southern Africa’s Cocaine Platform

In 2020, international fugitive and Brazilian drug trafficker Gilberto Aparecido Dos Santos, alias “Fuminho,” was famously arrested alongside two Nigerian associates in Mozambique’s capital of Maputo, where he was reported to be arranging drug deals for the PCC. Brazilian press claimed he had already conducted business in several neighboring countries.

Since then, there have been no further arrests of PCC members in the region. Looking forward, however, it seems likely it will increase its targeting of southern Africa. The only question is whether the group will dispatch “baptized” gang members like Fuminho to organize shipments -- as it is allegedly doing in Portugal -- or merely rely on external brokers.
Surprisingly High Consumption

A principal finding of the report was that east and southern Africa’s cocaine markets are much more developed than expected. Both powder and crack were widely available across the area, with consumption calculated to be surprisingly high in several countries.

For example, a rough estimate concludes that South Africa’s 60 million people could consume up to 19 tons of cocaine annually. Per capita, it is comparable to Australia, one of the world’s top cocaine users. Its 25 million people consumed an estimated 5.6 tons of cocaine from 2019 to 2020, according to the country’s latest Illicit Drug Data Report.

Furthermore, purity is also relatively strong. The UNODC’s most recent available figure from 2017 placed the mean purity for a gram of cocaine powder in South Africa at 55%, compared to 60% in the United Kingdom that year, Europe’s biggest cocaine consumer.

Three grams of cocaine powder being divided in a coastal village in Kenya. 

(Courtesy of Jason Eligh).

And revenues are healthy. As of December 2022, a kilogram of cocaine powder wholesales in South Africa for around $26,000 to 29,000, said Jason Eligh. That is just below what it would fetch in parts of western Europe. Likewise, the report estimated the mean retail price per gram as being $38 in South Africa in 2021, which, while low in Europe, still turns a tidy profit.

Nor is the market confined to South Africa. Neighboring Eswatini and Lesotho consume a staggering quantity per capita, while Malawi is alleged to have eight times more cocaine than heroin users. Crack is widely smoked across Zambia, and Kenya’s cocaine trade is lucrative enough to spark violent competition between distributors.

“In short, the research found that the region should no longer be viewed as existing on the periphery of the global cocaine trade,” said Jason Eligh. “It is a major market destination.”

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS

Philippines orders all top cops to resign, says alleged drug links ‘big problem’

Police officers inspecting the belongings of prison inmates for contraband and illegal drugs in October 2022. PHOTO: AFP

Mara Cepeda
Philippines Correspondent
\

MANILA – The Philippines on Wednesday ordered all police colonels and generals to hand in their “courtesy” resignations, as the government moved to cleanse the police force of alleged links to the illegal drug trade.

Appointed government officials in the Philippines allegedly involved in wrongdoing have been asked to resign out of respect for the appointing authority. They will continue to perform their duties until their resignations are accepted.

Department of the Interior and Local Government Secretary Benhur Abalos said that only the resignations of police officers proven to have drug links would be accepted by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, but he did not give a timeline.

This means the Philippine National Police (PNP) will be able to function even with the mass resignations expected in the coming weeks.

Mr Abalos said the resignations may be the “only way to make a fresh start” for the PNP, which gained international notoriety for carrying out former president Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war.

“We have a big problem in our police force. We have generals and colonels involved in drugs. And based on the recommendation of our PNP chief and other officers, I am appealing to all colonels and generals to submit their courtesy resignation,” Mr Abalos said.

“It’s hard to fight in a war when your ally will be the one to shoot you in the back,” Mr Abalos said. “We need to cleanse our ranks. The people who trust us must trust us even more.”

Several high-ranking police officers have been linked to the drug trade in the Philippines.

Mr Duterte, who was president from 2016 to 2022, earlier named several generals supposedly embroiled in the illegal drug trade. Cases were filed against some of these so-called “narco-generals”. Some were sacked, but there have been no criminal convictions to date.

Mr Abalos said a committee will be formed to investigate PNP officers’ alleged involvement in illegal drugs, but he did not say who would be part of this body.

Thousands of drug suspects died in police operations under the Duterte government, which the International Criminal Court (ICC) is now seeking to investigate for crimes against humanity. The PNP denied the killings were executions and claimed the victims resisted arrest.

Mr Marcos has pivoted from Mr Duterte’s bloody approach to the drug menace.

He has said that his anti-illegal drugs campaign would focus more on prevention and rehabilitation. But his government has also sought to block the ICC probe on his ally, Mr Duterte.

The United Nations Human Rights Council said in October 2022 that justice remains elusive for victims of Mr Duterte’s drug war, as many of the cases remain unresolved.

Human rights groups criticised Mr Duterte’s anti-drug campaign as a “war against the poor”, as it failed to target high-level drug traffickers and instead targeted small-time drug users and pushers, who are often among the poorest of the poor in the Philippines.

Killings in Philippine anti-drug operations will be minimised, says police chief

Philippine police officer jailed in rare Duterte drug war conviction

Sixteen thousand Canadians amongst those whose private data is up for sale on Internet

Yesterday

At least five million people have had their online identities stolen and sold on bot markets for 8 CAD on average. Out of all the affected people, 16 thousand people are from Canada.

This data comes from research by the cybersecurity company NordVPN, which looked into three major bot markets.

The word “bot” in this situation refers to data-harvesting malware. Bot markets are online marketplaces hackers use to sell data they have stolen l from their victims’ devices with bot malware.

The data is sold in packets, which include logins, cookies, digital fingerprints, and other information — the entire digital identity of a compromised person.

“What makes bot markets different from other dark web markets is that they are able to get large amounts of data about one person in one place. And after the bot is sold, they guarantee the buyer that the victim’s information will be updated as long as their device is infected by the bot,” says Marijus Briedis, CTO at NordVPN.

A virus might take a snapshot of the user’s screen during a malicious attack. It can even take a picture with the user’s webcam.

When a virus attacks the user’s device, it may grab logins saved to their browser. The research found 26.6 million stolen logins on the analyzed markets. Among them were 720 thousand Google logins, 654 thousand Microsoft logins, and 647 thousand Facebook logins.

Cookies were also usually stolen from a user’s browser and helped criminals bypass two-factor authentication. The research found 667 million stolen cookies on the analyzed markets.

During the research, 81 thousand stolen digital fingerprints and 538 thousand autofill forms were found on the analyzed market.

“To protect yourself, use an antivirus at all times. Other measures that could help – a password manager and file encryptions tools to make sure that even if a criminal infects your device, there is very little for them to steal,” adds Marijus Briedis.

Shazia Nazir, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Milton Reporter, Milton Reporter

RIP
Ruslan Khasbulatov, Whose 1993 Showdown With Yeltsin Led To Deadly Parliament Shelling, Dies Aged 80

Former Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov (file photo)

Ruslan Khasbulatov, a Russian politician whose dramatic standoff with then-President Boris Yeltsin in 1993 led to the deadly shelling of the parliament building in Moscow, an event that transformed post-Soviet Russia's political trajectory, has died at the age of 80, according to Russian state television.

Khasbulatov died at his home outside Moscow, state television reported on January 3, citing relatives.

Khasbulatov, an ethnic Chechen, was a close ally of Yeltsin in the last days of the Soviet Union in 1991. Both were elected in 1989 to the new Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union in which Yeltsin headed a faction that criticized then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program as not radical enough.

Yeltsin became president of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic in June 1991 and appointed Khasbulatov speaker of the Russian parliament.

But Yeltsin and Khasbulatov became rivals, and Khasbulatov allied himself with Aleksandr Rutskoi, Yeltsin's vice president who attempted to remove the president in 1993 after Yeltsin’s decision to dissolve parliament. Their memorable showdown led to the shelling of the parliament building -- known as the White House -- by troops loyal to Yeltsin who stormed the building and placed Khasbulatov and Rutskoi under arrest. Both were jailed but later pardoned.

The events gave Yeltsin an opportunity to change the constitution to consolidate power in the presidency, something his successor, Vladimir Putin, would exploit to nearly erase any remnants of democracy.

Khasbulatov in a commentary written for RFE/RL 15 years later said the events in 1993 precipitated the destruction of parliamentary democracy in Russia and led to the adoption of a strong presidency.

Yeltsin Destroyed Parliamentary Democracy In Russia

Khasbulatov also played an important role in political developments in Chechnya between the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin's decision in 1994 to dispatch troops to Chechnya to “restore constitutional order.”

This brought Khasbulatov into conflict with Dzhokhar Dudayev, who was elected chairman of an informal All-National Congress of the Chechen People in November 1990. Seven months later, on June 8, 1991, the Congress proclaimed an independent Chechen republic outside the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and the U.S.S.R.

Khasbulatov traveled to Grozny in September 1991 as Yeltsin’s envoy with the intention of forcing Doku Zavgayev, then head of the Checheno-Ingush region committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), to resign. But he was outmaneuvered by Dudayev, who was elected president in late 1991 with 90 percent of the vote.

Five days later, Dudayev signed a decree reaffirming Chechnya’s independence from the crumbling Soviet Union, prompting Yeltsin to send Russian forces into Chechnya. The conflict ended in August 1996 with the recapture of Grozny by Chechen resistance forces and a formal peace agreement.

Khasbulatov later claimed that in the fall of 1994 it would have been possible to remove Dudayev “practically without firing a shot,” but that Moscow intervened rather than risk Khasbulatov succeeding him. Khasbulatov chronicled his role in a book titled How They Prevented Me From Stopping the War In Chechnya.

Khasbulatov continued to comment on developments in Chechnya. His analysis included insights into the psychological impact on Chechen society of the massive destruction of infrastructure and the republic’s economy.

Khasbulatov was born in the village of Tolstoi-Yurt, north of Grozny, on November 22, 1942, and grew up in Kazakhstan. He entered Moscow State University in 1962 and graduated with a degree in law. Following the family tradition, he went on to study for several higher degrees, focusing on the political, social, and economic development of capitalist countries.

Khasbulatov's political engagement began in the late 1980s at the time when Gorbachev, then still general-secretary of the Communist Party, decreed the first multicandidate elections in the history of the Soviet Union as part of his reformist agenda.

With reporting by former RFE/RL analyst Liz Fuller

Opinion


I Know What Savage Fear Really Lies at the Heart of the American Dream

Costica Bradatan 

Wednesday, 4 January, 2023 - 

I wrote a book in praise of failure, which is like a fish praising water. I’ve been swimming in failure for as long as I can remember — even before that. Quite a lot of who we are, what we do and especially what we cannot do is determined well before we are born, by history, geography, the rise and fall of empires, that farcical god we call luck. I came into this world with failure in my blood and bones. Sometimes I wonder if there is anything else there.

I come from Romania, a country as insignificant as it seems cursed, a place that has been submerged in failure for as long as it has been in existence. Failure seems to be everywhere: in the air people breathe, in the water they drink, even in the language they speak. Especially in the language. Romanian is any linguist’s dream: Layer piles upon linguistic layer like geological strata, indicating the foreign armies and empires that have at one time or another colonized the place, exploited it at length or merely marched through it — raping it in haste: Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Hungarian, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, then Soviet.

As with the local cuisine, which is so rich because it combines all the neighboring culinary traditions but has no clear identity of its own, the Romanian language is a purely Babelian affair: a dozen tongues in one. There are countless words for “failure” in Romanian, of different origins and verbal constructions so exquisite that you want to fail only for the pleasure of putting your experience into words. Coming from such a place, how could I not write in praise of failure?

At the time I was born, in the 1970s, the country was in the middle of an intense affair with utopia. Nothing breeds more failure than an obsessive quest for purity. The closer you get to perfection, the more abject the failure. We were supposed to reach the communist paradise any day, even as people’s lives were becoming progressively more hellish. The state was supposed to wither away, per Friedrich Engels’s prophecy, yet it was becoming more and more oppressive. Everything was owned in common, even though there was nothing much to be owned. For good measure, the utopian experiment was run largely by a gang of thugs. That strikes me now as a logical arrangement. You had to be either an incurable idealist or rotten to the core to believe in utopia, and idealism was never a plant to grow roots in that part of the world.

The Romanian state did everything — from the repression and surveillance to the police beatings and windows broken in the middle of the night — in the name of the working class. The regime was called “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” but that must have been a grammatical error: It was most obviously a dictatorship over the proletariat. The workers were kept deep in misery, ignorance and poverty. They were treated like beasts of burden and told that they were lucky, that under capitalism, their lives would be so much worse. In school, many subjects were covered, but the discipline most widely taught was the art of cognitive dissonance: how to look at all of this and pretend to see none of it. If you mastered the craft, you could survive, even though you were left seriously broken inside. I lived in “1984,” knew it like the back of my hand, long before I discovered the book.

Books. It took me a while to discover them. For if there was one social class even worse off than the working class in the communist utopia, it was the peasant class.

I came into the world in a family of barely literate peasants, and there was not one book in the home where I grew up. Later in life, I would collect books compulsively, thousands of them, in an impossible effort to fill up the haunting emptiness of my bookless childhood and adolescence. You could, in principle, borrow books from the village’s library, but it was risky. You could get punished if you were caught reading. That was precious time stolen from productive work; child labor was routine in that quasi-paradise.

In the home in which I grew up, few words were spoken. The use of words was a too-demanding affair for people whose main job was sheer biological survival. An angry look, a jolt or the occasional beating were much more effective means of communication. Intellectual atrophy in that environment was a social epidemic. My early socialization was largely with the cows I attended. Later in life, I embraced the craft of words in a desperate effort to fix, retroactively, all that was wrong with my wordless childhood.


By the late 1980s, some of the thugs got bored with the communist experiment and realized that it would be more fun if they turned capitalist. That’s how the regime collapsed, under the weight of its own absurdity, catching us, the children of utopia, amid its ruins. Not that this hurt us (by that point, we were too damaged to be hurt by anything), but it left us with a privileged relationship with failure, an affinity for it, even a special flair for it. Once in utopia, you are doomed; you carry its nothingness in your bones wherever you go.

In Romania, with its masochistic history, a venerable tradition has taken root: You do everything you can to distance yourself from the country, to shed it like a serpent sheds its skin and adopt a new identity, any identity.

Apart from a remarkable gift for failing, Romanians have a knack for living in a state of painful separation, leaving a place and missing it unbearably. “Dor” (from the Latin “dolor,” or “pain”), the word used to express that state, is one of the most defining in the Romanian vocabulary. Many a folk song, countless poems and even works of philosophy have been built around this one word.

When my turn came to follow this tradition, it was a relatively simple decision. I would emigrate to the United States. For I knew right away that America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.

The New York Times

Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University

2022’s Best Investigative Stories in Russian and Ukrainian

By Olga Simanovych| 
 

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 turned life in the region upside down. Many Ukrainian journalists have decided to defend their country with weapons while their colleagues support them on the information front, postponing other projects so they cover news on the front lines and in the rear. Using advanced online search techniques and working in the field, investigative journalists are identifying and finding war criminals and their commanders, tracking down sanctioned assets, and documenting war crimes for use in future court cases.

In Russia, the government increased its pressure against the few remaining independent media outlets. Where it previously labeled these sites as “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations,” the Putin regime has now moved on to raids, arrests, and reprisals, including a new law dictating prison terms for those who dared to call the war a war. Journalists in that country were forced into a difficult choice between their homeland and profession, censoring themselves or trying to reach their audience from abroad.

Despite all these difficulties, journalists in the region continued to undertake watchdog reporting, offering inspiration to their colleagues abroad as well as compelling case studies in how to use investigative methods and tools. In our review of 2022 investigative stories, we follow the chronology of publications without prioritizing importance.

Behind the Export of Sanctioned Belarusian Oil to Estonia, Baltica (Latvia), Belarusian Investigative Center (Belarus), and Delfi.ee (Estonia)

Image: Screenshot, Re:Baltica

Journalists from Belarus, Latvia, and Estonia collaborated to tell how the export of Belarusian oil products to Estonia tripled between 2020 and 2021, despite supposedly tough EU sanctions on the Lukashenko regime. The joint team tracked the deals through a network of companies linked to a sanctioned Belarusian oligarch, whose nickname is “President Lukashenko’s energy wallet.” The journalists reported finding a clever trick by changing customs codes, which they say allowed the banned trade to continue unhindered.

 
Blood Baths and Putin’s Health, Proekt. (Russia)

Image: Screenshot, Proekt.

Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet, relocated in exile after the Russian Prosecutor General’s office declared it undesirable in July 2021. Less than a year later, its journalists released an investigation into one of the Kremlin’s most closely guarded secrets: the state of President Vladimir Putin’s health. An average of nine doctors accompany Putin on his travels, including a surgical oncologist specializing in thyroid cancer, according to Proekt. The team also reported that Putin relies on alternative medicine to prolong his life, including bathing in blood extracted from the antlers of Atlai Maral stags. Animal rights activists characterize the painful process of removing the severed antlers to torture, similar to pulling out a person’s fingernails.

Stolen Exports: Tracking Russian Confiscation of Grain from Ukraine, Texty.org.ua (Ukraine)


Satellite images of Sevastopol in April 2022 show the number of trucks (blue) and train wagons (red) increased dramatically from the year prior, and loaded cargo vessels (green) began to regularly depart from the port. Image: Screenshot, Texty.org.ua (Planet Inc.)

Comparing ship movements, satellite imagery, and trade information, a team from Ukrainian data newsroom Texty reported finding evidence that Russia steals Ukrainian grain and exports it through occupied Crimean ports. Despite widespread sanctions on Russian imports, Texty journalists reported that the total volume of grain sold by Russia in 2022 had not changed compared to 2021. In fact, the main importers of Russian grain — Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, among others — received more of these supplies. According to the report, the stolen grain is likely exported from Sevastopol on “gray ships” — vessels that leave port without indicating their destination and sail with their tracking beacons off. The BBC’s Ukrainian service also tracked overland routes of stolen grain. Working undercover and pretending to be an owner of the grain carriers, journalists phoned the carrier companies, which admitted that Ukrainian grain went to the occupied ports of Sevastopol and Berdyansk with Russian military escort.
Evidence of Russian War Crimes in a Stolen Cellphone, Slidstvo.Info (Ukraine), IStories (Russia)


This investigation started when Slidstvo.info obtained a cell phone stolen from a resident in the Ukrainian village of Andriyivka. Employing social media search, facial recognition software, interviews with eyewitnesses, and official documents, the Slidstvo team used images left on the phone by a Russian soldier to identify military personnel possibly involved in the looting and shooting of civilians in the village. Journalists from the Russian site IStories conducted their own investigation of the events in Andriyivka as well and, in a telephone interview, got a suspect from the Russian military to confess to his role in the murder of a civilian and accuse his commander of issuing illegal orders. The methods and tools applied in these investigations were shared by the journalists from Slidstvo and IStories during this GIJN webinar.

The Monaco Battalion: Tracking Down Elite Refugees on the Cote d’Azur, Ukrainska Pravda (Ukraine)


Image: Screenshot, Ukrainska Pravda (YouTube)

Based on a tip, journalists from online newspaper Ukrainska Pravda went to the Cote d’Azur (the French Riviera) and discovered numerous wealthy Ukrainians, who had been prohibited by martial law from leaving the country during the war, living a luxurious life in exile. Searching via the MarineTraffic app and visiting the marina, the team also discovered luxury yachts of wealthy “refugees” waiting out the war. Shortly after release of the story and a companion documentary, the State Bureau of Investigation opened criminal cases to clarify the circumstances under which each of the figures in the story went abroad. One of them has already been sought for extradition. Since then, Ukrayinska Pravda has continued digging into VIP refugees with follow-up reports Monaco Battalion-2, Vienna Battalion, and Vienna Battalion-2 (on YouTube with English subtitles).

The Remote Control Killers Behind Russia’s Cruise Missile Strikes on Ukraine, The Insider, Bellingcat, and Der Spiegel (Russia)


Russia’s Ministry of Defense building in Moscow. Image: Shutterstock

In this joint investigation, journalists from three outlets found a secret unit within the Main Computing Center of the Russian Armed Forces, and identified 30 military engineers who are responsible for targeting missiles at Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. This group was discovered through an open source analysis of thousands of graduates of Russian military universities, as well as phone call billing and other information obtained from the Russian data black market. The details behind this investigation are described on Bellingcat’s website. And here you can read more about the methods, as well as the ethical and legal nuances of journalists using data acquired from the black markets.

Russian FSB’s Role in Moldovan Politics and Russian Money for Moldovan Politicians, RISE Moldova (Moldova) and Dossier Center (Russia)

Image: Screenshot, RISE Moldova

In a joint investigation, journalists from RISE Moldova and the Dossier Center looked into the influence of Russian special services on Moldovan politicians. After studying document metadata, mobile phone bills, and flight information, the team reported finding that the election strategy of the Party of Socialists of Moldova, speeches by Moldovan ex-President Igor Dodon, and official domestic and foreign policies were all coordinated through Russian government officials. Going even further, the journalists named the identities of Russian FSB officers they said were meddling in Moldovan politics. In a follow-up, the team reported specific amounts of bribes that Moldovan politicians were alleged to receive for taking a pro-Russian stance.

Forest Brothers: How Wood from Belarus and Russia Gets to Europe Bypassing Sanctions, Kloop (Kyrgyzstan), BRC (Belarus), Siena (Lithuania), Vlast.kz (Kazakhstan), Re:Baltica (Latvia), Fundacja Reporterów (Poland), OCCRP

Image: Screenshot, OCCRP

An international team collaborated to find out how Central Asia, which has no forests of its own, suddenly became a major wood exporter to Europe. The journalists found several Kyrgyz and Belarusian companies that provided traders with false documents to export sanctioned lumber and other products to the European Union, in particular, to Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Denmark and Latvia. According to the Belarusian Investigative Center, schemes for the indirect re-export of Belarusian timber to the EU through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan brought about 16 million euros to their organizers. After release of the story, one of the Lithuanian politicians was expelled from the party because of his role in a sanction evasion scheme.

Additional Resources

Lessons Learned from Syrian Journalists Investigating Russian War Crimes

Investigating Russia and the War in Ukraine

Editor’s Pick: 2021’s Best Investigative Journalism from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus

Olga Simanovych, a native of Ukraine, is GIJN’s regional editor for Eastern Europe. She has more than 13 years of television experience as a journalist, screenwriter, and managing editor. Seven of those years were spent as a TV news reporter for the Vikna-Novyny program on STB, where she specialized in politics, environment, human rights, and medicine. She is bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, and fluent in English and Greek.

 

Gazans Risk Death at Sea Dreaming of Life in Europe

Tuesday, 3 January, 2023 - 

The family of Yunis al-Shaer said he dreamed of opening a business and insisted on fleeing 

poverty-stricken Gaza for Europe. SAID KHATIB / AFP

Asharq Al-Awsat

Younis al-Shaer left Gaza dreaming of a better life in Europe, only to return to the Palestinian enclave in a coffin.

The 21-year-old was one of scores of Palestinians risking the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.

He drowned alongside seven other Gazans, whose bodies were returned home in December, adding to a toll of nearly 2,000 people recorded as dead or missing last year in the Mediterranean by the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).

The death hit his mother Samira al-Shaer like an "earthquake", she told AFP at the family home in Rafah, southern Gaza.

"I knew the dangers of emigrating, but at some point I gave up because of his insistence on leaving. Every day I waited for news of his death," she said.

Kissing a photo of her late son, she said it was a "lack of work and the poverty that pushed Younis to leave".

As many as two-thirds of the Gaza Strip's 2.3 million residents live in poverty, according to figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Shaer studied accountancy for two years before deciding to leave the Palestinian enclave, along with a group of relatives.

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since the militant group Hamas took power in 2007, meaning residents cannot leave by air or sea.

Shaer took the land crossing to Egypt last February, before traveling onwards to Libya which is a hub for unauthorized Mediterranean crossings.

He ultimately hoped to reach Belgium, and along the arduous route would call his mother.

"He said to me: 'Don't worry, God willing, we will arrive'," she said, adding that other relatives had previously made the journey successfully.

- 'Cruel and humiliating' -

Yet the plan soon began to unravel, his brother Mohammed al-Shaer told AFP.

Upon reaching Libya, the group had their money and belongings stolen.

They had to sleep in places "unfit even for animals", said his brother, 34.

The group were detained by one of Libya's many people trafficking gangs, which often kidnap migrants for ransom. His brother said the gang forced his family to pay $1,500.

Separately, the group initially paid to cross the Mediterranean but were tricked and there was "no boat, no shelter, no food," Shaer said.

"The trip was cruel and humiliating... all this was only torture and humiliation," he added.

They eventually boarded a rubber dinghy in October, but it encountered trouble and the boat never reached the Italian shore.

Younis al-Shaer's body and those of seven other Gazans were later recovered from the Tunisian coast, west of Libya.

- 'They lied to me' -

From Gaza, migrants now tread a dangerous path through Egypt and Libya before trying their luck at sea, along with fellow migrants fleeing poverty and violence in North Africa, Syria, sub-Saharan Africa and even further afield.

The number of people reaching Europe by the Mediterranean Sea has been on the rise over the past three years, UNHCR data show, reaching more than 146,000 in 2022.

For Samir Zaqout, deputy director of the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based NGO, "unemployment, poverty and frustration are the most important drivers of youth migration from Gaza".

There are no official statistics on the number of people who have fled in recent years from the territory ruled by Hamas, which has been designated a "terrorist" entity by the United States, the European Union and Israel.

According to Masarat, a research institute based in Gaza, around 36,000 people have left the Strip in the past five years attempting to emigrate.

The journey can cost vast sums. Shaer estimated his brother's trip cost around $9,000 of which two-thirds went to smugglers.

The family went 20 days without hearing from him, before his brother contacted the smugglers on Facebook.

“They told me that everything was fine... but they lied to me," he said.

A desperate Shaer then reached out to some Tunisian activists, and partnered with them in trying to find Younis and the other Gazans.

"They found his passport wrapped in nylon among corpses washed up by the sea on the coast," sighed Shaer.

Younis's dreams cost him his life, said his family.

"Younis only wanted to ensure his future. He dreamed of being himself, of owning a house and a motorbike, and of opening a business from which he could live," said Shaer.

Natural Disasters Increase Displacement Rates to 34% in Yemen

Wednesday, 4 January, 2023 - 

Aid worker helps build camps for the displaced in Marib, Yemen (United Nations)

Aden - Mohammed Nasser

A majority of Yemen's internally displaced wish to return to their areas of origin, contrary to previous data from last year's beginning, according to recent data by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

According to data in the second half of 2022, 41 percent of the families interviewed planned to remain in their current displacement sites despite widespread concerns about a lack of essential services, while 28 percent had yet to decide.

According to the data, plans to stay in the sites are often linked to security concerns, less than third of the families reported plans to return (31 percent), compared to seven percent in previous data.

-Livelihood concerns

Marib, Hodeidah, and Taiz recorded the highest levels of new displacement, showing that around 41 percent of all respondent households planned to stay in their current locations at the assessment time.

The families most commonly cited insecurity in places of origin (42 percent), followed by concerns about livelihood opportunities (35 percent).

As a secondary reason for staying, the questionnaire revealed that livelihood concerns ranked highest on the list (48 percent), followed by worries about shelter in places of origin (11 percent) and security concerns (11 percent).

In response to a request to identify three potential risks while staying in displacement sites, almost all households cited a lack of essential services, such as food, health, water, and education (98 percent).

About 15 percent cited insecurity as a risk in their current locations. Only 4 percent reported a risk of hostility from host communities outside the IDP sites.

The list of highest priority needs expected during the extended stay in the current IDP sites was mainly identified as food (95 percent), water (60 percent), shelter (57 percent), and health care (53 percent).

In addition, 12 percent of families indicated the need for security in IDP sites. More than two-thirds of respondents who intend to stay reported having plans to make a living in their current displacement sites (68 percent) in agriculture, construction, and other daily work activities.

- Disasters increased displacement

According to another UNFPA report, the six months truce led to a decrease fighting, which led to an 18 percent drop in the displacement rate over the past year, but warns that natural disasters, such as severe seasonal floods and drought, disrupted livelihoods, rescue missions, and services.

According to the UN response mechanism led by the Population Fund, 447,000 individuals were assisted during 2022. Among the newly displaced, 62 percent were displaced due to the conflict, while 38 percent were displaced due to heavy rains and floods.

In turn, IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix assessed current intentions for the return of IDPs in 20 IDP sites in Aden.

New displacements to and within Aden were relatively uncommon in 2022, constituting two percent of all registered new removals.

Most families arrived from Hodeidah (75 percent), and 19 percent arrived from Taiz, which indicates that most migrated families from the west coast came to Aden.