The politics and recent history of Ukraine are suddenly quite central to the politics and history of the United States.

In this episode of the Global Dispatches podcast we examine what the US impeachment inquiry looks like from Ukraine. Veteran journalist Steven Erlanger, who is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe for the New York Times explains the recent history of Ukraine, including the 2004 Orange Revolution which brought Viktor Yushenko to power; and later, how Yushenko was replaced by a more pro-Russian president named Victor Yonukovich, who subsequently fled to Russia during what was known as the Euromaidan revolution in 2014.

We then discuss the improbable rise of a comedian turned politician, Volodymyr Zelensky who became president in April 2019 — and how Zelensky has reacted to being thrust into the middle of a domestic political scandal in the United States.

My intention with this episode is to give you a brief and accessible introduction to Ukrainian politics — which are suddenly very central to the politics of the United States.

If you have 20 minutes and want to learn both the recent history of Ukraine and also better understand how events in DC are being interpreted in Kyiv, have a listen.

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What began last week as a protest against a fare hike in for the Santiago, Chile metro system has morphed into a broad social movement against increasing economic inequality in the country. And it has been violent. So far, at least 18 people have been killed.

From an international perspective, these protests are coming at an inopportune time. Santiago is hosting the next major global climate change conference, COP25, in early December. And prior to that, in mid November, the city is playing host for the APEC summit on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

Needless to say, the government of Sebastian Pinera is coming under increased pressure to address the concerns of the protesters. But as my guest today explains, so far the actions taken by his government have really only exacerbated this ongoing crisis.

Estafania Labrin Cortes is a Chilean reporter for the newspaper The Clinic. When I caught up with her from Santiago on Wednesday October 23, protests were still ongoing.

We kick off this conversation discussing the series of events that lead to the spontaneous eruption of nationwide protests. We then have a longer conversation about what is driving increasing inequality in Chile — indeed it has one of the highest degrees of wealth inequality among the world’s major democracies. As Estafia Labrin Cortes explains, this is partly due to legacies from the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.

If you have 25 minutes and want to learn what caused these protests, how they spread so quickly and learn some of the broader international implications of this crisis in Chile, have a listen

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On October 4th, the General Manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team shared a message on Twitter. It was which was an image with the words: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

The post was almost immediately deleted, but not before it caught the attention of Chinese authorities who began threatening huge sanctions on the Houston Rockets and on the NBA. The NBA quickly went into damage control mode with various officials profusely apologizing for this one tweet; and even the world’s biggest NBA star, LeBron James suggested Morey was uniformed and uneducated about the situation in Hong Kong.

What has unfolded between China and the NBA is to my mind one of the biggest stories of the last several years because it is such a blatant demonstration of the power that both the Chinese communist party and middle class consumers in China have over large western companies — and that they are willing to use that power to punish and deter free speech outside of China.

On the line with me to talk discuss what this incident with the NBA says about China’s global reach, the future of freedom of expression, and the future of capitalism is Derek Thompson. He is a staff Writer at the Atlantic and host of the CRAZY/GENIUS podcast.

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Dionne Searcey travelled to the Central African Republic to report on a story that has previously lead to the murder of foreign journalists.

In July 2018 three Russian journalists were killed in the Central African Republic while investigating Russia’s growing presence in the country. Their murder last year, however, has only increased international attention on Russia’s shadowy aims in the Central African Republic. This includes both a scramble for the country’s natural resources and a soft power campaign intended to increase Russia’s reach in Africa.

Dionne Searcey is a reporter for the New York Times.  Her story published in late September exposed evidence of Russian involvement in illicit diamond mining. More broadly, though, her story explains and identifies the contours of Russia’s growing political interests in the Central African Republic.

And at the center of this story is a man named Yevgeny Prighozin. He is a Russian oligarch and close ally of Vladimir Putin, and has been indicted in the United States for his role in interfering in the 2016 Presidential election. He is also the owner of a mining company that has extracted millions of dollars worth of diamonds from the Central African Republic. This was done through legal mining operations  — but also likely through illegal mines operated by armed rebel groups.

We kick off discussing Yevgeny Prighozin before having a broader discussion of Russian involvement in the Central African Republic and what this signals about Russian-African relations more broadly.

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The battle of Mosul began exactly three years ago this month. Iraqi government forces and allied Kurdish militias with backing from the United States and other key international partners sought to re-take Mosul from ISIS, which captured the city two years earlier.

Mosul is the second most populous city in Iraq. The fighting that ensued was the most intense urban warfare since World War Two. tThe liberating forces went neighborhood to neighborhood, house to house, to recapture territory.

It took nearly a year, but eventually ISIS was evicted from Mosul in the summer of 2017.

In a new book, the journalist James Verini embedded himself with the liberating forces and the civilians displaced by the fighting. He witnessed the fighting and its impact first-hand which he masterfully recounts in his new book: They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate.

On the podcast James Verini discusses the significance of this battle to both the fight against ISIS and the overall politics of the region. We kick off discussing the long history of Mosul and events leading up to its capture by ISIS and eventual liberation by Iraqi and allied forces.

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In the summer of 2014, ISIS forces swept through parts of Iraq that were home to the Yazidi people. This is an ethnic minority that has lived in northwestern Iraq for centuries — and suddenly they were under attack.  What transpired was a genocide. Men and boys were murdered for being Yazidi; women and girls were kidnapped and taken as sex slaves for ISIS fighters.

At the time, Emma Beals was reporting from Erbil, a city in the Kurdish region of Iraq near to where these atrocities were taking place. She was reeling from the news that a fellow journalist, James Foley, had been brutally murdered when she received a call from a human rights organization asking her to investigate rumors of a massacre in the Yazidi town of Kocho.

Emma Beals describes whats next in a series of powerful essays, titled Kocho’s Living Ghosts. There were 19 surviving men from the town’s original population of 1,888. In our conversation Emma Beals recounts the massacre through the testimony of the survivors she interviewed.

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What’s up first?

So when I first heard about the massacre, I was already in Iraq. I was living on the Turkish border at the time. As ISIS had moved towards Sinjar at the beginning of August, I was with VICE journalists and we were covering the breaking news. So we had spent two weeks at that point in Northern Iraq covering those scenes of flows of people through the dessert as they came from Sinjar Mountain, through Syria, into Iraq. We were covering the U.S. airstrikes and then that assignment came to an end and it was two days after the murder of journalist, James Foley. So the end of that assignment was very difficult, everyone in the press core was upset, and I was personally affected. It was a really hard time and I did not know what to do with myself or where to go. I was alone in this hotel room when the phone rang. It was a human rights NGO calling about a particular massacre, among all of the Yazidi massacres, in Kocho. When ISIS comes into a town, a lot of people just flee into the mountains and those that do not are killed. But in Kocho, they were surrounded. This NGO asked me to go as a temp until they could get someone to the region. The survivors were starting to find their way to Duhok and the NGO wanted me to debrief them before the people were overly influenced or had a chance to compare their stories, so their statements could be used in court later on.

We are speaking around the five year anniversary of this massacre. Can you describe what led up to this assault on Sinjar?

It is kind of a “how long is a piece of string” question. The conflict in Syria had been going on for a number of years and during that what was known as ISI became ISIS, and in 2014 they had sort of increased their reach across the border back into Iraq. They shocked the world by taking Mosul City in Iraq in the space of a weekend. It was like they came out of nowhere but their history was extensive. In terms of their impact in Iraq and the world’s understanding of ISIS, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from the city and countryside. Nobody expected they had that kind of military power or that the Iraqi forces did not have enough to resist them. They had taken this large chunk of territory, a lot of which was not strategically valuable. Fast forward a couple of months to August, ISIS swept across the Yazidi territory and into the Mosul dam. They started to push on some of the other adjacent towns. It had been building for a couple months but it took everyone by surprise with its intensity.

This was a genocide made up of a number of massacres and individual atrocities. Can you describe what unfolded and how that massacre transpired?

So, in Kocho ISIS arrived in the morning of August 3^rd. They surrounded the town and engaged in some kind of conversation with the chief. He tried to implore them to let the people go to the Sinjar Mountain. He called on the village leaders who he thought might have some influence with the ISIS fighters. There were about 1200 people in Kocho on this day. The fighters told them to give up their weapons, stay in their houses, raise their white flags, and then they besieged the town. That went on for 12 days until August 15^th. Abu Hamza, a local ISIS Emir, announced that everyone had to gather in the school. He separated everyone in the school by women, men, and children. He asked them one final time if they would convert to Islam and they said no. Then a Kurdish speaking ISIS fighter came in and this made the people a little more trusting since he spoke their language. But, the ISIS fighters took all of their valuables – earrings, gold, mobile phones. Then they started with the men and loaded them onto trucks, promising they would see the women and children again. The trucks went to the edge of the village. The ISIS fighters ordered the men onto their knees and shot all of them. Then they would go off, take another load of men, take them to another location, and repeat this. Those that were injured and couldn’t move were buried alive. Some of them crawled out from piles of their loved ones and managed to escape.

Do we know how many people were killed that way?

They have exhumed around 160 bodies, but that is not a definitive number.

You told two stories of Kichi Amo and Saed Murad. How did Kichi Amo survive this ordeal?

Rather miraculously, he was not injured at all. He was shot alongside his family and managed to crawl out from under the bodies. He ran off and waited until the sun went down. Saed was hit several times and his cousins were killed next to him. He stayed very still until the fighters had gone away. Then he crawled out, in his words, “like a snake”. He found an abandoned farmhouse where he met up with a guy named Ali. They told me the story of how they escaped from there. They waited until the sun went down, watched ISIS bury the men, and watched them take the women and children in cars as hostages. Then they set off to walk to Sinjar. Saed had six bullet wounds and Ali had been shot as well. They went off and found a village where they knew someone. They knocked on his door in the middle of the night asking for help. The man had been threatened against helping any of the Yazidis, but he got them medical help and then made them leave. They tried to leave the village again and a few more individuals tried to help. Some of the villagers were very kind. They tried to sell their crops in order to pay a smuggler to get them all the way to the mountain. Eventually, they cobbled their way there in six days. They were brought to the hospitals in Duhok which is where I met them.

And Saed is the brother of Nadia Murad, the Nobel Peace Laureate?

Right, so they are an exceptional family. Nadia has done this incredible advocacy work and Saed joined the militias that helped to fight ISIS out of the town and was given awards for his bravery in combat.

Can you further describe your visit to Kocho?

Kocho was held by ISIS for three years. In 2017, they were beaten out. I had been wanting to go back, because I had my own trauma from that summer that got mixed up with what happened in Kocho.

Your referring to journalists that you cared for who were murdered by ISIS?

That’s right. They were murdered that summer of 2014. I had so much empathy for the survivors I met during that time. I went back to Iraq in the summer of 2017 and I tracked down Kichi, Saed, and Ali. We talked about everything and how they were moving on. I realized in the course of talking to them that I could not ask them to come to the town with me. Nobody was living there and it was still insecure. There were varied opinions whether it was somewhere people wanted to return. So, I went by myself. The school is now a memorial, but at the time it still had debris on the floor. You could still feel the enormity of what happened in that space. There was a sense of everyone who had been lost. I went to the mass graves and at that time they had not started exhuming them. Everything was exactly as it was, so you could identify the bullet casings next to the mounds of dirt where the bodies were buried. It really pictured the banality of evil.

You don’t have to answer this, but you went seeking some catharsis and healing, did you find that?

It was more about compulsion than a sense of healing. I kind of did. The graves of my friends were never found, but that gave me a sense of what they might be like. It helped me situate some of the other atrocities as well that I could not visit. It was helpful to talk to the survivors. We had some philosophical discussions about forgiveness and healing.

What is Kichi Amo up to now?

Him and his cousin were rescuing some of the women from Kocho. He produced lists of the women they had freed. His own family was saved and they were in Germany getting assistance.

Finally, the crimes you described cry out for justice. Is there any sense of a local judicial process or justice initiative?

Justice comes in many forms. There are broader conversations that are being helped by the likes of Nadia Marad. You have the graves being exhumed through a proper process up to international standards, which helps with accountability. It is complicated with Iraqi law because in Iraq, those associated with ISIS are being tried just for being a member. So, those trials are not saying, this man was involved in this massacre, which is how you would get that real sense of healing. There is a crisis of psychological assistance. While there are organisations doing wonderful work, there isn’t enough help. For some folks, like Kitchi told me he never wants to go back to Kocho, so he needs somewhere he can go. Others want to go back, but there are political issues. So there is a more practical form of justice, which is to provide the conditions for survivors live a dignified life. But, this is moving quite slowly and prohibiting people from healing.

Shownotes by Lydia DeFelice