Triumphs and Turmoil in a Month of International Gay Rights Advocacy

This month Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States, would have celebrated his 83rd birthday. Assassinated in his City Hall office 11 months after his historic election to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, Milk’s birthday commemorates both his legacy and the pivotal achievements of the gay community thereafter.

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Despite the celebration, May has been particularly tumultuous month for gay rights and activism. Analogous to Milk’s own life, the story of gay rights around the world has been riddled with victories and violence. Here are a few from around the world:

• On May 9th, Minnesota lawmakers voted to make the state the 12th in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Couples can begin marrying as early as August. Fellow mid-western state Illinois will also be anticipating a vote on an equal marriage bill by the end of the month. Amid the celebrations of marriage equality around the nation are questions whether such high-profile victories are either provoking (or eliciting more reporting of) biased-related hate crimes. For instance, after the shooting and killing of a young gay man in Greenwich Village this month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a press conference releasing statistics about hate crimes in the city – in May of last year, there were 14. This year there are 29.

• On May 21st, during a Senate Judiciary Committee’s meeting over the Immigration Reform Bill, an amendment allowing same-sex couples to sponsor foreign partners was dropped. With questions over the amendment’s scope, timing, and legality as well as concerns that it could stalemate the Immigration Reform Bill, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy dropped the amendment “with a heavy heart.”

• As the New York Times reports, the President of France, Francois Hollande, signed the “marriage of all” act, making France the 14th country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. The law’s passage came amid widespread protests attracting thousands of conservative and religious leaders, however. In a symbolic act of violence presumably against the law’s passage, Dominique Veneer, a prolific, right-wing French historian, committed suicide in front of 1,500 tourists in Notre Dame Cathedral, shooting himself in the head at the church’s alter.

• In Georgia, a small group of 50 gay rights demonstrators was swarmed by thousands of people,including priests and religious leaders. The crowd, organized in part by the Georgian Orthodox Church, threw rocks, eggs, trash, and metal at the demonstrators and police officers assisting in evacuation efforts, injuring a dozen people. The demonstrators were celebrating “International Day Against Homophobia” in the country’s capital, Tblisi.

• In Jamaica, sodomy is punishable by ten years imprisonment and hard labor, a law that is upheld by the nearly 85 percent of Jamaicans who believe that homosexuality should be illegal. The Jamaican LGBT community endures violence, public anti-gay sentiment and institutionalized discrimination that leads to a denial of social services. Pushed underground and fearing the stigma of the HIV test as a “gay test,” the LGBT community in Jamaica has been hard hit by HIV/AIDS – the HIV prevalence of men who have sex with men in Jamaica is 32 percent, compared to 1.6 percent in the general population. Men like Maurice, a leading human-rights activist who filed a lawsuit against the anti-sodomy law, are forced to choose between death threats and danger or being exiled from the country they call home.

Pulitzer Center grantee Micah Fink captures the tribulations and triumphs of the Jamaica’s LGBT community in his film The Abominable Crime. The film follows Maurice and others in a tale of resilience, exile, and often-violent discrimination, spanning four years and five countries. The Abominable Crime will be screened at Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival on June 25. Tickets can be purchased here.

Image: Some of Harvey Milk’s belongings at the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco. Image by Gerard Koskovich via Wikimedia Commons.

- Jennifer Nguyen 

Interactive E-book on Statelessness

The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s e-book In Search of Home was recently named one of the best Tablet/Mobile Delivery projects of the year by the National Press Photographers Association. In Search of Home depicts the nuanced lives of the stateless in Kenya, Burma, and the Dominican Republic.

The e-book features the photography of Greg Constantine, the reporting of Stephanie Hanes, and was designed and produced by Jake Naughton using Apple’s iBooks Author program. Interactive components were created by Maura Youngman.

Click here to download a free Educators’ Guide for how to use the e-book in the classroom.

Photographer Greg Constantine has focused on the stateless–people without nationality or citizenship, often within the country they consider to be home–for seven years. Constantine noted that e-books likeIn Search of Home provide an interactive way to dive deeper into a story, which is especially important given the complexity of global issues like statelessness.

“Stateless people are some of the most neglected, vulnerable and invisible people in the world today and statelessness is one of the most complex, politically sensitive and devastating human rights issues most people don’t know about,” Constantine said. “It is a story and an issue that demands attention. Exposing how this condition impacts individuals, families and entire communities has been my primary motivation these past seven years.”

“Because I believe so much in the importance of the stories I work on, I refuse to accept the limitations of traditional publishing these days, which is why we have to explore as many creative and strategic ways for getting the work out there as possible. I think the possibilities to tell robust, multidimensional stories through e-books are endless.”

Jon Sawyer, Pulitzer Center Executive Director, noted that this is the second Pulitzer Center e-book to receive national recognition this year. Voices of Haiti was named one of the best e-books of the year by Pictures of the Year International Awards (POYi). Both interactive e-books are available in theiBookstore.

“We’re thrilled by the awards for these exceptional projects,” Sawyer said, “E-books represent an exciting new platform for innovative journalism, one that we hope reaches new audiences and that will also generate the income our journalists need to cover the stories that affect us all.”

The proceeds from the book support the important work of Stephanie Hanes and Greg Constantine. Purchase your copy today.

- Caroline D’Angelo and Jen Nguyen

Five Things Worth Knowing about the Caucasus | Pulitzer Center

(Editor’s note: Author James V. Wertsch, vice chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, is a specialist on the Caucasus. Washington University is a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Campus Consortium.) 

The Tsarnaev brothers, the alleged bombers of the Boston Marathon, are ethnic Chechens. One of them spent several months in Dagestan. Those connections have thrust those obscure places into the news (although confusion on social media sites between “Chechnya” and “Czech Republic” suggests that for most Americans these remain unfamiliar places). As we struggle to understand the violence in Boston it’s worth noting some things we do know, about the places and history associated with the Tsarnaevs. Keep reading here.

Charanya Krishnaswami, a Yale Law School student and member of the Transnational Development Clinic, and Muneer I. Ahmad, Yale Law School professor and director of the Transnational Development Clinic, discussed the UN’s failure to acknowledge its responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti following the 2010 earthquake in “UN Hypocrisy In Haiti,” a column in the Washington Post (22 March 2013). Haitians became infected after cholera-infected waste was introduced into a tributary of the Artibonite river by UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Krishnaswami and Ahmad report that cholera continues to infect 1500 people every week. The UN is refusing to hold itself accountable and has not yet established a commission to hear the Haitians’ claims even though it has agreed to do so. Two former Pulitzer Center student fellows, Meghan Dhaliwal and Jason Hayes, traveled to Haiti in July 2012 to report on the situation and interview Haitians who have filed legal complaints – as well as the lawyers who represent them. See their stories and photos here. Photo: A man holds a picture of himself taken when he was incapacitated by cholera. Image by Meghan Dhaliwal. Haiti, 2012.
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Charanya Krishnaswami, a Yale Law School student and member of the Transnational Development Clinic, and Muneer I. Ahmad, Yale Law School professor and director of the Transnational Development Clinic, discussed the UN’s failure to acknowledge its responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti following the 2010 earthquake in “UN Hypocrisy In Haiti,” a column in the Washington Post (22 March 2013).

Haitians became infected after cholera-infected waste was introduced into a tributary of the Artibonite river by UN peacekeepers from Nepal. Krishnaswami and Ahmad report that cholera continues to infect 1500 people every week. The UN is refusing to hold itself accountable and has not yet established a commission to hear the Haitians’ claims even though it has agreed to do so.

Two former Pulitzer Center student fellows, Meghan Dhaliwal and Jason Hayes, traveled to Haiti in July 2012 to report on the situation and interview Haitians who have filed legal complaints – as well as the lawyers who represent them. See their stories and photos here.

Photo: A man holds a picture of himself taken when he was incapacitated by cholera. Image by Meghan Dhaliwal. Haiti, 2012.

Photojournalist Sean Gallagher discusses his recent work photographing on the Tibetan Plateau. He shares his thoughts in how he conceptualised his project, its evolution and how he executed it whilst in the field, discussing some of the challenges he faced. His final project, titled ‘Meltdown: Climate Change and Environmental Degradation on the Tibetan Plateau’, looks at issues such as melting glaciers, grassland degradation, desertification, mining and the disappearance of Tibetan culture.

We’re featuring our water-related reporting all week for World Water Day.

Can India and Pakistan Share Water?

In a wide-ranging essay, Pulitzer Center grantee William Wheeler reflects on his global water reporting. An excerpt: 

“In Pakistan, I saw how water crises are not self-contained. Several analysts and historians I talked to that summer believe the initial spark of the region’s most enduring conflict – the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan over the Muslim region – was perhaps less about religious differences and more about control of the region’s vital water resources.

Kashmir is home to the headwaters of the Indus River, Pakistan’s primary water lifeline. India also harnesses some of the river’s flow for hydropower. But the fragile status quo that governs sharing of the river is under threat from booming population demands and the impacts of climate change. Both nations are racing to complete hydroelectric dams along the Kashmir rivers, elevating tensions. India’s projects are of such size and scope to worry Pakistan about water shortages at critical times and massive deluges at other times.”

Read the rest of William Wheeler’s piece here.

We’re featuring our water-related reporting for World Water Day.

A Deadly Struggle for Water

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“With a vast, empty desert as a backdrop, the militants recorded the execution of Khan Wali on video. As someone held a camera, the others encircled the condemned man to read out his sentence. “This is not brutality — this is justice,” declared one of the executioners, who sported a black turban and a shaggy beard. “I swear to God that killing him with an 82-mm mortar is not enough. But the rest of our mujahedin would not agree on my recommendation — to kill him in a way that all can take part in the act.”

And so it was decided to shoot Khan Wali with the 82-mm mortar. They forced him to kneel 36 m away from the portable cannon, a type often used in small battles in the war-torn country. A militant positioned behind the weapon then set it off; a massive thumping sound was followed by celebratory cries of Allahu akbar — God is great. “Be careful, don’t get any blood on your clothes,” said one voice as the other men, after jubilantly hugging one another, rushed to poke at Khan Wali’s flesh splattered on the ground. “I enjoyed this very much,” said one.

What was Khan Wali’s crime? He was protecting one of Afghanistan’s most important resources: water. Khan Wali led a 60-man semiofficial militia tasked with defending the Machalgho dam in eastern Paktia province. Already two years behind schedule because of security concerns, the dam would irrigate about 16,000 hectares of land and produce 800 KW of electricity once completed. The government had pledged that if Khan Wali held his ground for two months, he and his men would receive weapons and cash. But Khan Wali lasted only 20 days into the mission.”

Read the rest of grantee Mujib Mashal’s story on Afghanistan’s looming water crisis here. Image by Mujib Mashal. Afghanistan, 2012.

We’re featuring our water-related reporting all week for World Water Day.