28 December 21
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27 December 21
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Tutu was an amazingly courageous voice against the white nationalist Apartheid system in South Africa, which segregated Blacks and deprived them of a good education and economic opportunities, and which attempted to create reservations for them in which the state stripped them of their citizenship.
Tutu spoke out against South African systematic racial exclusion, making bold demands, given the Apartheid police state’s repressive apparatus. The Nobel Prize committee wrote in 1984:
‘Desmond Tutu has formulated his objective as “a democratic and just society without racial divisions”, and has set forward the following points as minimum demands:
1. equal civil rights for all
2. the abolition of South Africa’s passport laws
3. a common system of education
4. the cessation of forced deportation from South Africa to the so-called “homelands” ‘
The last point referred to the government’s carving out of “Bantustans” or statelets it declared to be not South Africa, the residents of which would not have citizenship. The white Afrikaners behind this policy hoped to decrease the demographic weight of Blacks in South Africa over time, making it a white country, by expelling Blacks to these Bantustans.
For these reasons (and American television will strictly not tell you this), Tutu spoke out equally courageously and eloquently about Palestinian rights. In a 2002 op-ed for The Guardian, Tutu wrote,
“In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.
What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.”
He spoke of the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes by Israelis, who took their land. He continued,
“Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured.”
Tutu called for a peaceful resolution of Apartheid in Occupied Palestine, such as occurred in South Africa.
He also complained that in the United States to bring up the Israeli colonial project in the Palestinian territories was immediately to attract charges of anti-Semitism. With his gentle humor, he riposted that to voice such criticism of Israeli policy “is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?”
In 2014 he wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about a pro-Palestinian rally he attended:
‘I asked the crowd to chant with me: “We are opposed to the injustice of the illegal occupation of Palestine. We are opposed to the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. We are opposed to the indignity meted out to Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. We are opposed to violence perpetrated by all parties. But we are not opposed to Jews.’
He added,
“Over the past few weeks, more than 1.6 million people across the world have signed onto this movement by joining an Avaaz campaign calling on corporations profiting from the Israeli occupation and/or implicated in the abuse and repression of Palestinians to pull out. The campaign specifically targets Dutch pension fund ABP; Barclays Bank; security systems supplier G4S; French transport company Veolia; computer company Hewlett-Packard; and bulldozer supplier Caterpillar. Last month, 17 EU governments urged their citizens to avoid doing business in or investing in illegal Israeli settlements.’
He urged that the movement be nonviolent, and condemned Hamas’s rockets. But he wasn’t afraid to be called a terrorist (the Apartheid regime branded all its opponents ‘terrorists’ as well). His goal here, as elsewhere in his rich life, was peace, love and forgiveness. Especially forgiveness.
There is no point in celebrating Archbishop Tutu’s brave stand against Apartheid in South Africa if you are afraid to bring up his brave stand against Israeli Apartheid practices against Occupied, stateless Palestinians.
His life was epic, and full of love of others (including many dear Jewish friends who also worked against Apartheid alongside him).
In 1986, Tutu had become the first Black archbishop of the Anglican Church in Cape Town.
Tutu was born in Kerksdorp, a Gold Rush town in the North West Province. His father became an elementary school principal and his mother cooked and cleaned at a school for the blind. Already in 1913, the newly independent South African government began making Blacks live on reservations and usurping their property. After World War II, in 1948, the white nationalist National Party came to power. Starting in 1949, when he was 19, the Afrikaner-dominated government began passing Apartheid laws forbidding inter-racial marriage and imposing an even stricter segregation, which resembled the Jim Crow laws passed by Southern white legislators in the late nineteenth century to deprive African-Americans of the vote and to segregate them from whites.
Tutu was initially a high school teacher, but gained a sense that religious leaders were best placed to challenge racial inequality. In 1953, an Apartheid law lowered the standards for the education of Black children, trying to ensure that they learned only enough to be docile laborers. Tutu became an ordained Anglican priest (Americans would say Episcopalian) and studied theology in Johannesburg. Then he went off to London for an MA in theology, which he received from King’s College in 1966. On his return he rose quickly through the Anglican church hierarchy. In 1976 he became bishop of Lesotho, a former British colony that had become an independent kingdom in 1966. It is completely surrounded by South Africa.
From there, Tutu began speaking out against Apartheid, and continued even when he returned to South Africa, as an official of the Council of Churches. These were liberal Protestant denominations and the Council was the South African national sub-group of the World Council of Churches. The Afrikaner Calvinist churches withdrew from it because of its opposition to Apartheid.
After the Apartheid government collapsed and Nelson Mandela became president in the early 1990s, he appointed Archbishop Tutu to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the crimes of the Apartheid regime. These included torture, unlawful imprisonment and unlawful killing, among others.
Tutu’s commission adopted the rule that a public and detailed confession of wrongdoing was sufficient punishment, and so elicited from some former Afrikaner war criminals a full picture of their activities, but then pardoned them. Many South Africans were angry about this leniency, but Tutu’s philosophy was that unless the country, including the Afrikaaners, fully faced the history and documented it, they would never be able to get past it. The war criminals after all would hardly have confessed at such length if they had simply been tried and imprisoned, where a conviction could even have been gotten.
The Israeli press is churlishly lambasting Tutu as an “enemy” of Israel, which I think I’ve shown he was not. Indeed, Israel’s continued and blatant war crimes are destroying the country, and its true friends owe it frankness and tough love. Tutu didn’t hate anyone, but he loved justice.
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
Committee to request contents of the call seeking to stop Biden’s certification and may subpoena Rudy Giuliani
The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.
“That’s right,” Thompson said when asked by the Guardian whether the select committee would look into Trump’s phone call, and suggested House investigators had already started to consider ways to investigate Trump’s demand that Biden not be certified as president on 6 January.
Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”
The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.
Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.
The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.
House investigators in recent months have pursued an initial investigation into Trump’s contacts with lieutenants at the Willard, issuing a flurry of subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to crucial witnesses, including Bannon and Eastman.
But Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.
“If we get the information that we requested,” Thompson said of the select committee’s demands for records from the Trump White House and Trump aides, “those calls potentially will be reflected to the Willard hotel and whomever.”
A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment about what else such a line of inquiry might involve. But a subpoena to Giuliani, the lead Trump lawyer at the Willard, is understood to be in the offing, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The Guardian reported that the night before the Capitol attack, Trump called the lawyers and non-lawyers at the Willard separately, because Giuliani did not want to have non-lawyers participate on sensitive calls and jeopardize claims to attorney-client privilege.
It was not clear whether Giulaini might invoke attorney-client privilege as a way to escape cooperating with the investigation in the event of a subpoena, but Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, noted the protection does not confer broad immunity.
“The attorney-client privilege does not operate to shield participants in a crime from an investigation into a crime,” Raskin said. “If it did, then all you would have to do to rob a bank is bring a lawyer with you, and be asking for advice along the way.”
The Guardian also reported Trump made several calls the day before the Capitol attack from both the White House residence, his preferred place to work, as well as the West Wing, but it was not certain from which location he phoned his top lieutenants at the Willard.
The distinction is significant as phone calls placed from the White House residence, even from a landline desk phone, are not automatically memorialized in records sent to the National Archives after the end of an administration.
That means even if the select committee succeeds in its litigation to pry free Trump’s call detail records from the National Archives, without testimony from people with knowledge of what was said, House investigators might only learn the target and time of the calls.
Joe Biden. (photo: Michael Stravato/The Texas Tribune)
Earlier this month, the Senate and the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly for the defense bill with strong support from both Democrats and Republicans for the annual legislation setting policy for the Department of Defense. read more
The NDAA is closely watched by a broad swath of industry and other interests because it is one of the only major pieces of legislation that becomes law every year and because it addresses a wide range of issues. The NDAA has become law every year for six decades. read more
Authorizing about 5% more military spending than last year, the fiscal 2022 NDAA is a compromise after intense negotiations between House and Senate Democrats and Republicans after being stalled by disputes over China and Russia policy.
It includes a 2.7% pay increase for the troops, and more aircraft and Navy ship purchases, in addition to strategies for dealing with geopolitical threats, especially Russia and China.
The NDAA includes $300 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which provides support to Ukraine's armed forces, $4 billion for the European Defense Initiative and $150 million for Baltic security cooperation.
On China, the bill includes $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and a statement of congressional support for the defense of Taiwan, as well as a ban on the Department of Defense procuring products produced with forced labor from China's Xinjiang region.
It creates a 16-member commission to study the war in Afghanistan. Biden ended the conflict - by far the country's longest war - in August.
Paul Robeson and other members of the Civil Rights Congress submit a report on police brutality and systemic racism against Black people, accusing the U.S. of genocide, to the United Nations. (photo: Daily Worker & Daily World Photo Collection, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives/NYU)
The charges, while provocative, offer a framework to reckon with systemic racial injustice — past and present.
The group was accusing the United States of genocide — specifically, genocide against Black people.
The word “genocide” was only seven years old. It had been coined during World War II in a book about Nazi atrocities, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, though no nation had yet been formally convicted of perpetrating a genocide.
The 240-page petition, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People,” was meant to be sensational. America had been instrumental in prosecuting the Nazis at Nuremberg, and now its own citizens were turning the lens back on the U.S. in the most horrifying, accusatory terms.
Instead, mainstream media largely ignored it. The New York Times and Washington Post mentioned the petition in brief stories buried in the back pages. The Chicago Tribune condemned it for “shameful lies.” Raphael Lemkin, the Polish jurist who had coined the term “genocide,” publicly disagreed with the whole basis of the petition, saying it confused genocide with discrimination.
The drafters of the document hadn’t expected it to go anywhere; they knew the U.S. had too much power at the U.N. for the petition to be taken up. They had written it less as a formal charge than as a presentation of an allegation, loosely written in the model of a legal brief. They hoped, though didn’t expect, that the General Assembly, Commission on Human Rights or another party at the U.N. might take up the issue for deliberation. That never happened.
But today, 70 years later, the document has a new resonance amid the patent injustices of police brutality that continue to occur and racial inequities in health care on display especially throughout the pandemic. “We Charge Genocide” explored these kinds of issues at length, making a compelling case for thinking about structural racism as genocide, which demands not only condemnation but also redress and repair. To consider the arguments in “We Charge Genocide,” drafted by some of the most notable figures in the midcentury civil rights movement, offers important insights into the current moment and how to move forward.
Two events set the stage for the Black genocide charge in 1951 — one international, and one domestic.
The first was close to a miracle. After two years of political haggling following Nazi atrocities, U.N. member states each agreed to relinquish a small piece of their sacrosanct sovereignty when the body passed the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This codified a legal definition of genocide, criminalizing group destruction and opening the door to try perpetrators in an international court of law. Since then, the convention has been used both to hold perpetrators of genocide accountable in places like Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia and, importantly, to set up or pave the way for remediation mechanisms after it’s been established that genocide occurred.
The Convention defined genocide as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” It also specified that these acts include not just killing but also attempted group destruction through “bodily or mental harm,” impeding reproduction, harsh living conditions and child removal.
Second, the Black civil rights movement gained momentum after World War II. Freedom struggles and racism became a focus of worldwide attention, and the newly established U.N., which included a Commission on Human Rights, provided a new, global platform for protest against racism in the U.S. Black activists used it to internationalize and broaden their movement, in part by reframing it in terms of human rights.
Two prior petitions preceded “We Charge Genocide.” In 1946, the National Negro Congress delivered an eight-page petition to the U.N. Secretary-General asking him to take action on the subjugation of Black Americans, particularly in the South, where 10 million Black people lived in deplorable conditions. The U.N., mired in politics, failed to act. But the petition had some success, particularly abroad, in drawing attention to the plight of Black Americans.
Seeing the potential of such petitions, the NAACP, frustrated by the U.S. government’s slow pace of racial reform, undertook a much more ambitious initiative. On Oct. 23, 1947, it presented an extensive, 95-page “Appeal to the World!” petition to the U.N. The statement, which garnered much more attention, lambasted the U.S. for denying a host of human rights to its Black minority population.
“We Charge Genocide,” a project of the Civil Rights Congress, followed in this tradition, but it was even more ambitious and inflammatory, explicitly situating its documentation of U.S. racism within the framework of genocide — a new kind of crime, freshly outlined by the U.N.
“We Charge Genocide” starts with killing: The petition documents hundreds of killings and other abuses, some involving police, which took place from 1945, when the U.N. was established, to 1951. It asserts that more than 10,000 Black people had been lynched or killed, often for something as small as “failure to say ‘sir’ or tip their hats.” Many more, it adds, suffered from “serious bodily and mental harm” from beatings, assaults and the terror caused by the constant threat of such attacks.
Direct violence was only one part of the charge. Another part was the systematic treatment of Black people within society. The petitioners were taking the minimalist language of the U.N. convention on genocide, about things like conditions of life, and giving it shape and form with real-world examples. The petition outline the harsh living conditions to which Black Americans were subject: lives diminished in terms of housing, medical care, education, segregation, job opportunities, sharecropping, incarceration, housing, poverty and voter suppression. As a result, the petition states, 30,000 extra Black people were dying each year, and Black Americans were living eight years less than white people. Officials from all three branches of the U.S. government, the petition alleges, were guilty of inciting, conspiring to commit or being complicit in such genocidal acts, with examples ranging from police violence to racist laws promulgated by members of Congress.
Proof of Black genocide, the petition concludes, “is everywhere in American life,” and as “the conscience of mankind,” the U.N. General Assembly should not stand by silently but should instead both condemn the U.S. and demand that the country take steps to stop the genocide and prevent its persistence.
The petition had 94 signatories, including family of victims. Some were with Robeson when he presented the petition to the U.N. in New York, including the widow of one of the “Martinsville Seven,” executed after being falsely accused of raping a white woman.
The petition was received by U.N. officials in Paris and New York. Patterson even discussed it with a handful of delegates from countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India and Liberia. But no one agreed to take it forward.
Cold War politics were a large part of the reason why. The U.S. government — worried about bad PR during the Cold War — mounted a campaign to blunt any domestic and international impact it might have.
In 1951, the Red Scare was in full swing. The Soviet Union was nuclear; Mao had taken over China; war was raging in Korea; and Senator Joseph McCarthy was leading now-infamous hearings on the communist infiltration of U.S. Black nationalists. “We Charge Genocide” petitioners were among the targets. The government had already confiscated Robeson’s passport, which is why he presented the document in New York. It seized Patterson’s after he presented the petition in Paris.
The U.S. government launched a campaign to discredit the petition, fearing it would inflame tensions at home and impugn the country’s reputation abroad. The sometimes bombastic, communist overtones of the petition, as well as the communist associations of some of the petitioners, made it easy even for sympathetic Americans to see it in an anti-American, ideological light.
Eleanor Roosevelt gave a U.N. address defending the U.S in response to the document. In an interview, she emphasized Black progress while calling the genocide accusation “ridiculous.” The U.S. also enlisted more moderate Black luminaries to condemn the petition. Some, like NAACP leader Walter White, agreed to do so since they were wary of Patterson and wanted to distance the Black civil rights movement from communism.
America’s immense international clout also helped bury the issue. The architect of the idea of genocide, Lemkin, was still working tirelessly to achieve U.S. ratification of the U.N. Genocide Convention — which faced resistance, especially from Southern Democrats, precisely because they feared the U.S. would be accused of genocide against its Black population — and couldn’t afford to alienate the U.S.
Lemkin responded to the petition by publicly supporting the official U.S. view, emphasizing the improving situation of Black Americans while claiming the petition was a maneuver by “communist sympathizers” to divert attention from the genocide of “Soviet-subjugated people.” And so, in a moral failing of his otherwise distinguished career, Lemkin downplayed the long history of violence committed against Black Americans. “Genocide means annihilation and destruction,” he stated, “not merely discrimination.”
In fact, the arguments in the document — especially with the benefit of some distance from the Cold War anxieties of the time — look very compelling. While many may think that genocidal annihilation only looks like Nazi mass murder, the U.N. Genocide Convention clearly incorporates more nuanced forms of destruction than that. Lemkin dismissed the lynchings and other killings detailed in “We Charge Genocide” as “actions against individuals — not intended to destroy a race.” But the petition detailed how such violence was not just individual but deeply intertwined in the fabric of American society.
Perhaps most importantly, it made the case that the systemic and structural nature of racism against Black people in the U.S. was what made it genocide, a novel legal argument to expand the understanding of genocide that turned out to be ahead of its time.
In recent years, some genocide scholars have begun to think in terms of “structural genocide.” This sort of understanding could also be applied to, for example, the Uyghur people in China, where the group faces a sort of social death.
Ironically, Lemkin’s own early scholarship provided an important foundation for this view of genocide. When he coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin defined it as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups.” This process, Lemkin stated, had two phases: “one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed groups; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.” Such group destruction was carried out not just by killing but by political, social, cultural, economic, biological, religious, moral and physical means that crushed the “spirit” of the victim group. This is exactly the sort of interwoven tapestry of group diminishment “We Charge Genocide” sought to establish as constituting the genocide of Black Americans.
“Genocide” seems — and is — hugely divisive, and it’s unlikely that the U.N. would formally accuse its wealthiest member of the crime, even in the past. But the petitioners weren’t wrong to situate Black American history in that bleak context, and doing so gives us — maybe surprisingly — some routes forward.
The U.N. remediation guidelines for mass human rights violations like genocide have some clear goals. These include safeguarding basic human rights of the offended group, investigating abuses and providing redress.
What might such remedy look like? Monetary payment is an obvious form of compensation, and an establishment of genocide can help advance current discussions around such reparations. Efforts to remedy historical injustices in other parts of the world offer other examples — education, health services, criminal trials, structural reforms — that have also been implemented in response to genocide. And even in the face of only accusations, let alone convictions, of genocide, truth-seeking commissions have been held to take seriously the charge and determine and acknowledge the extent of abuse.
As the U.S. reckons with how to address its racial injustices, past and present, such examples of remedy for mass human rights violations give us a framework to think about how to do it justly and with full acknowledgment of the wrongs committed.
Wanda Olson poses for a photo in Villa Rica, Ga., on Dec. 17. When Olson's son-in-law died in March after contracting COVID-19, she and her daughter had to grapple with more than just their sudden grief. They had to come up with money for a cremation. Even without a funeral, the bill came to nearly $2,000, a hefty sum that Olson initially covered. (photo: Mike Stewart/AP)
Even without a funeral, the bill came to nearly $2,000, a hefty sum that Olson initially covered. She and her daughter then learned of a federal program that reimburses families up to $9,000 for funeral costs for loved ones who died of COVID-19.
Olson's daughter submitted an application to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, received a deposit by June and was able to reimburse her mother the $1,974.
"Had this not been available, we would have been paying the money ourselves," said Olson, 80, of Villa Rica, Georgia. "There wasn't any red tape. This was a very easy, well-handled process."
As of Dec. 6, about 226,000 people had shared in the nearly $1.5 billion that FEMA has spent on funeral costs that occurred after Jan. 20, 2020, the date of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. With the nation's coronavirus death toll topping 800,000, it's clear that many families who are eligible for reimbursement have yet to take advantage of the funeral benefit.
Olson's son-in-law was traveling a lot, working on air conditioning systems in theaters, restaurants and businesses, when he began feeling ill, she said. After a few days at home, he went to the hospital and was put on a ventilator. He died several weeks later.
"He could never overcome it," Olson said.
To be eligible for reimbursement, death certificates for those who died after May 16, 2020, must indicate that the death was attributed to COVID-19.
For deaths that occurred in the early months of the pandemic — from Jan. 20 to May 16, 2020 — death certificates must be accompanied with a signed statement from a medical examiner, coroner or the certifying official listed on the certificate indicating that COVID-19 was the cause or a contributing cause of death.
The percentage of individuals who have been reimbursed varies dramatically from state to state — from nearly 40% in North Carolina and Maryland to fewer than 15% in Idaho and Oregon, according to state-by-state data compiled by FEMA.
While the reimbursement must go directly to individuals, some funeral directors have taken on the task of informing grieving families of the benefit.
After the benefit was first announced, David Shipper, owner of the Sunset Funeral Home, Cremation Center … Cemetery in Evansville, Ind., took out ads to let people know that help was available if they qualified.
"Nine thousand dollars — that's a lot of money. We wanted to find a way to tell people about it," he said. "We stopped advertising some time ago, but when we have a new family with a death from COVID, we tell them about the program."
Workers at the home will sit down with families, gather the needed paperwork, contact FEMA on the phone and help walk them through the process if they ask, he said.
Many families may simply be unaware of the benefit, but others may opt against seeking the cash out of reluctance to revisit the pain of the death, Shipper said. He said the better time to seek the help is when planning the funeral.
"They're much more likely to take advantage right then than if they've already spent the money and don't want to open it up again," Shipper said.
The largest states account for some of the biggest shares of the FEMA reimbursement money.
The program has paid out more than 21,000 reimbursements in California and Texas, which have both reported more than 74,000 COVID-19 deaths. Residents applied for more than $141 million in each state.
The fewest number of reimbursements have occurred in Vermont, where 123 people were awarded a total of about $704,000.
Expenses covered under the FEMA program include funeral services, cremation and interment, as well as the costs for caskets or urns, burial plots or cremation niches, markers or headstones, transportation or transfer of remains, clergy or officiant services, and the use of funeral home equipment or staff.
The program has been funded using federal stimulus funds, and money remains available. No online applications are allowed.
After all required documents are received and verified, it typically takes fewer than 30 days to determine if an individual is eligible, according to FEMA. Once eligibility is confirmed, applicants who request direct deposit may receive the money in a matter of days. It may take longer for applicants who request a check.
The reimbursement is one way of helping ease the emotional and financial burden that the pandemic has wreaked on communities across the country according to Ellen Wynn McBrayer, president of Jones-Wynn Funeral Homes … Crematory in Villa Rica.
She recalled one woman who lost her mother, husband and one of her children to the disease in the span of six months. One of the workers at the funeral home also succumbed to the virus.
"To have to help a grieving family is hard on a normal day, but to see so many deaths," she said. "COVID has just broken a lot of hearts and taken a lot of lives."
A man scans a QR code for the government's 'Leave Home Safe' app, used for contact tracing, to enter a government office in Hong Kong on Dec. 9. (photo: Bertha Wang/AFP/Getty Images)
Paden, who runs a side business selling scented candles, found herself isolated by extreme quarantine rules that require anyone returning from abroad to spend weeks in confinement at a cost of thousands of dollars, irrespective of vaccination status. She missed her grandfather’s funeral and the birth of her niece, but she hoped that as vaccination rates rose, Hong Kong might open up.
It wasn’t to be. Paden is now selling her stock of candles and heading back to the United Kingdom before relocating to Canada, joining the swelling ranks of expatriates leaving Hong Kong over its approach to the pandemic.
“No other country takes it as far as three weeks,” Paden said. “It is kind of insane.”
With China exercising ever-tighter control over Hong Kong, the city is hewing to the country’s strict “zero covid” policy extolled by Beijing as evidence of a superior political system. Yet the approach has largely cut off Hong Kong from both China and the world — a severe blow for a place that built its success on global connections. Even more than recent political changes, the authorities’ refusal to adapt to living with the virus is eroding Hong Kong’s viability as an international city, according to almost two dozen diplomats, chambers of commerce, recruiters, pilots and other expatriates.
The resultant brain drain is altering the face of the financial hub, which some Western companies now consider a hardship post, as fewer people are willing to take the places of those leaving. The number of overseas professionals and investors admitted to Hong Kong under its general employment program dropped from about 41,000 in 2019 to 15,000 last year and 10,000 through the third quarter of 2021, immigration data shows. With quarantine rules unlikely to be lifted within the next year, departures of foreign businesspeople and other expatriates are set to accelerate.
“The long-term damage has already been done to Hong Kong’s viability,” said one senior Western diplomat. “There is an absolute lack of predictability that businesses don’t like.”
Authorities have defended the approach, insisting on the need to keep the virus out — a goal health experts say is unsustainable — as they prioritize reopening to mainland China. The strict measures already included collecting stool samples from young children in hotel quarantine. This month, the omicron variant’s spread led Hong Kong to further tighten rules, lengthening quarantines for most arrivals and threatening holiday travel plans with sudden flight bans for airlines that unwittingly bring in even a few infected passengers.
In a survey released this month, the British Chamber of Commerce found that 70 percent of respondents hoping to add staff in Hong Kong had encountered difficulties, with many citing quarantine restrictions.
“As the rest of the world opens up to international travel, there is a risk that Hong Kong will become increasingly isolated as an international business center,” an overview of the results said, adding that senior executives were relocating to Singapore or Dubai, where borders are more open.
Jan Willem Moller, chairman of the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, said that about a quarter of Dutch businesspeople have left this year, and that the departures would “increase significantly” if the quarantine rules stay in place. “Inflow has pretty much dried up, as well,” he said, adding that colleagues at other chambers reported similar patterns.
Pilots take flight
On the front line of quarantine restrictions are pilots, especially at Hong Kong carrier Cathay Pacific. Some have been on “closed loop” rotations, alternating between working and isolating for extended periods before they can reenter the community. On layovers, pilots and aircrews are forbidden to leave their hotel rooms, keeping them in a hermetically sealed bubble.
Cathay has occasionally tried to force hotels overseas to provide its pilots and aircrews with single-use card keys to stop them from leaving their rooms, two pilots said. Eight pilots spoke to The Washington Post for this report on the condition of anonymity, fearing repercussions from their employers.
“A lot of colleagues are at breaking point,” said one pilot who resigned recently after more than 15 years flying for Cathay. “I’m tired, and I can’t see the future.”
At least 240 Cathay pilots have quit since May, according to employees who reviewed internal numbers. The carrier is reeling, with staff morale at “rock bottom” after hefty pay cuts last year and more departures imminent, several pilots said. In a statement, Cathay Pacific acknowledged that the regulations were a burden on aircrews, and said it plans to employ “several hundred pilots in the coming year.”
“Our goal was to protect as many jobs as possible, whilst meeting our responsibilities to the Hong Kong aviation hub and our customers,” the airline said.
Resentment spilled over last month when more than 120 students were ordered to a government quarantine camp known as Penny’s Bay after they were deemed to be contacts of a pilot who was among three who tested positive on return from Germany. In a statement this month, the Oneworld Cockpit Crew Coalition, a federation of pilot unions from the Oneworld network, which includes Cathay, said the airline’s pilots faced “untenable” working conditions.
One pilot who has flown with Cathay for more than 20 years said the exodus “is only just beginning.”
“Another year, two years, three years or more of quarantine in Hong Kong and there will be almost nobody left. Some pilots haven’t seen their wife and children for two years,” the person added.
Tightened quarantine measures have led other carriers, including British Airways and Swiss International Air Lines, to suspend Hong Kong flights. Cargo operator FedEx said last month that it would shut its crew base in the city and relocate pilots over the next 16 months.
One FedEx pilot decided he could not wait that long and will leave permanently early next year.
“With pretty much every expert agreeing that unfortunately covid-19 is here to stay, what exactly is China or Hong Kong’s end game?” he said.
Separation anxiety
On top of the quarantine rules, Hong Kong temporarily bans flights by airlines found to be carrying at least four passengers who test positive for the virus on arrival. Qatar Airways, Nepal Airlines, Air India, Korean Air and Cathay Pacific routes from some cities are currently subject to bans, which are often announced with little warning, throwing travel plans into disarray. Three of these routes, including Cathay Pacific flights from London to Hong Kong, were banned just before Christmas.
Flight changes have prevented people from seeing dying relatives and complicated travelers’ efforts to return to Hong Kong. A shortage of rooms at quarantine hotels has added to the frustration. Meanwhile, businesses including banks, media and restaurant groups have begun to pay staff thousands of dollars to offset the costs of quarantine, adding to the burden of operating in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
“We understand that it doesn’t make a lot of business sense,” said Syed Asim Hussain, co-founder of Black Sheep Restaurants, which is shelling out about $650,000 to help employees with quarantine fees. “But we heard murmurs that the rules will stay in place for most of next year, and so we knew we had to act.”
The Hong Kong government has acknowledged the disruptions, but maintains that the regulations are essential from a public health standpoint and to allow the city to reopen to the mainland. China appears to have put those plans on hold because of the omicron variant.
Officials have tried to offer sweeteners in the interim. In an interview with local media, Eddie Yue, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the de facto central bank, said that it had put together a team to deliver “wine and gourmet food” to quarantined finance workers in hopes of making them “less angry with Hong Kong.”
Polar bears. (photo: USFWS)
The 88 Energy’s Peregrine Exploration Program, a five-year oil and gas exploration project that would run almost year-round and cause “near constant air and vehicle traffic, and other drilling-related activity” was approved by the outgoing Trump administration, the press release said. The company still needs approval from the Biden administration before drilling any new wells. Located in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve along the Colville River, the project would include the construction of roads and aircraft runways and cause disruptive noise pollution in polar bear habitats.
“Every new oil well in the Arctic is another step toward the polar bear’s extinction,” Kristen Monsell, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in the press release. “Biden should be phasing out oil and gas activity in the Arctic, not flouting key environmental laws to let oil companies search and drill for more oil in this beautiful, increasingly fragile ecosystem.”
The population of polar bears in the Southern Beaufort Sea area is the most fragile population in the world, with only around 900 bears. Studies predict unless greenhouse gas pollution is immediately and drastically reduced, most subpopulations of polar bears in the world, including that of the Southern Beaufort Sea, will become extinct this century, and perhaps even as early as mid-century, the Center for Biological Diversity stated in the notice.
The excessive noise caused by the drilling-related activities can cause the polar bears to stop feeding, interfere with their movements or even frighten mothers and cubs so that they leave their dens, according to the press release.
“At the very least, before allowing any additional activity under the Peregrine Exploration Plan to occur, BLM must engage in formal [Endangered Species Act] consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) to carefully analyze the impacts of such activities on polar bears and must ensure that the proper take authorizations are in place,” stated the notice of intent, as The Hill reported. “Failure to do so would constitute a gross dereliction of the agency’s legal obligations and deprive polar bears of vitally important protections.”
The project’s dangerous greenhouse gas emissions would also exacerbate the melting of sea ice, further affecting the polar bears’ habitat, according to The Hill. A recent study cited in the notice indicated that for every metric ton of carbon dioxide emitted there was a sustained loss of three square meters of September Arctic sea ice. The notice stated that, as greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing, it is projected that during the summer there will be almost no ice in the Arctic by 2040.
“Polar bears shouldn’t have to suffer from yet more noisy, harmful oil drilling. Letting the oil industry ramp up drilling is also fundamentally inconsistent with addressing the climate crisis. Arctic drilling has got to go,” Monsell stated in the press release.
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