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Women’s Day Spurs Femicide Protests Across Turkey

In Turkey, International Women’s Day saw nationwide protests, with many focusing on the growing scourge of violence against women. According to rights groups, hundreds of women are slain yearly in Turkey.

In Istanbul’s Kadikoy district, the heart of the Asian side of the city, hundreds of women gathered, holding placards condemning violence against women.

“We are here to demand the police and judiciary take these endless murders of women seriously. I have had enough of these killings,” said Sibel, who wanted to give only her first name. 

Police presence

Despite a heavy police presence, the Kadikoy demonstration passed without incident. But thousands of women gathered in Istanbul’s main Istiklal Street area, where hundreds of riot police, backed by armored cars, used rubber bullets and tear gas to break up a procession. 

In Izmir, on Turkey’s western Aegean coast, police using clubs broke up a Women’s Day demonstration, arresting seven. However, most commemorations and protests, held in many towns and cities across Turkey, ended without incident.

The scale and extent of the protests, in the face of strict laws controlling demonstrations, reflect a growing assertiveness regarding women’s rights and violence against women. Last month saw nationwide outrage through social media and protests over the death of Sule Cet, 23.

Police initially treated Cet’s death as a suicide after she fell from the 20th floor of an office building, where she worked overnight. After intense pressure from an attorney representing Cet’s family, police finally treated her case as a homicide, with her boss and another man now standing trial for rape and murder.

Anger about the case was exacerbated when the defense attorney said Cet was not a virgin and that she should not have been drinking with her boss late at night. The case, which has engrossed millions, has become a focal point for women’s rights groups across Turkey and the source of growing anger about an increasing number of killings. Cet’s name has become a leading hashtag, while talk shows and social media have become platforms for people’s outrage about the way the case has been handled.

“Cet’s case raises so many issues that are wrong about the way cases of murdered women are handled,” said law professor Istar Gozaydin, who is also a presenter of a women’s rights television program.

“In the judicial process, we see the private lives of the victims being routinely mentioned or the character of the victim being impugned, like raising whether the victim is a virgin or not. Also, the figures of murdered women given by authorities are not very reliable. They are designated as accidents or considered as suicides, which we saw in Sule Cet’s case,” added Gozaydin, who is doing research on violence against women for the European Union.

This week, the Umut, a prominent nongovernmental organization, said that 477 women were slain and 232 were injured by men in 2018, and that Turkish media reported 1,760 femicide cases over the past four years.

In 2012, Turkey’s AK political party made the country the first signatory of the Council of Europe’s convention to protect women. The document is intended to prevent violence against women, provide victim protection and “end the impunity of perpetrators.” 

“On paper, the legal regulations and structures are very sufficient [in Turkey] to stop violence and murders against women,” said Gozaydin. “But the way the judiciary and police enforce these procedures and laws is very, very problematic. That’s why the judicial process should be monitored very closely to achieve a fair trial.”

Seen as major problem

Experts suggest there is a growing awareness within Turkish society about the scale of violence against women. A survey released this month by Istanbul’s Kadir Has University found that 60 percent of the participants viewed violence as “the biggest problem that women face in society.”

The issue appears to be crossing the deep political divide between religious and secular Turkey. “It [violence against women] has become the target issue of so many people to give their reaction,” said Gozaydin. “It is just not limited to the secular group or just women. It is much wider.”
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Activist Sees Key Role for Youth in Peace Efforts

The United Nations says 1.8 billion people in the world are below age 30. Most live in developing countries, with hundreds of millions in areas of conflict.

Actor Forest Whitaker, a U.N. goodwill ambassador, says young people too often are viewed in a negative light. He says they are seen as a problem rather than the solution to unresolved conflicts.  

Speaking to VOA on Friday on the sidelines of a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting, Whitaker said his foundation, the Whitaker Peace and Development Initiative, trains young people to become mediators in four systems of conflict resolution and education. He said young women and men also are trained in information and communication technologies, life skills and entrepreneurial skills.

Efforts in South Sudan

Whitaker said many are applying their skills within their own communities as part of a peace and reconciliation program his foundation is running in South Sudan.

“They are in the middle of mediating conflicts that have to deal with cattle issues,” he said. “They are in the middle of mediating conflicts that have to do with revenge killings, that have to do with territorial rights. … They go out into the communities as well, sometimes, and interpret in their native language or native tongue the peace agreements to the communities.”

Whitaker said young people apply their expertise on many fronts. He said they often are called upon by the countries themselves to act as mediators.

He said many of the people his foundation works with in South Sudan are decommissioned child soldiers. Similar programs exist in post-conflict situations for young people who were recruited as child soldiers by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, he said.

The foundation has projects in Mexico and the United States and soon will begin working with young people on peace and reconciliation issues in South Africa.
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British Army Vets May Face ‘Bloody Sunday’ Trial as Tensions Rise

Sectarian tensions are rising in Northern Ireland — and not only because of Brexit and the possibility that the island of Ireland will once again be divided by a so-called “hard border.”

The province is also on edge about whether former British paratroopers will face trial for the deaths of 14 unarmed protesters, who were shot 47 years ago in a massacre that became known as Bloody Sunday.

Prosecutors are expected to make their decision public next week, but the signs are that several of the ex-paratroopers, now in their 70s, are more likely to face murder charges for their roles in the shootings in 1972 than previously thought.

Justice campaigners have told the British media that they know soldiers will face prosecutions for the killings. Some of the army veterans themselves have said they expect to be charged.

Whatever the decision by the prosecutors, which comes after a seven-year police inquiry, it is bound to cause a political storm. The province’s Irish nationalist mainly-Catholic minority will be furious if there are no prosecutions; while pro-British mainly-Protestant Unionists are already up in arms at the very idea that the army veterans could stand trial.

The families of the dead will be told of the decision on March 14, the day after the British parliament votes on whether to leave the European Union, and if so how. That vote, already a source of mounting sectarian anxiety in the British-run province, could determine whether border checks are reinstated on the frontier separating the six counties of Northern Ireland from the 26 counties of the Irish Republic.

On Tuesday, the head of Northern Ireland’s civil service warned of risks in the event of a no-deal Brexit and the reimposition of customs and immigration checks along the border. In a letter to the province’s main political parties in Northern Ireland, David Sterling noted a no-deal scenario could impose “additional challenges for the police” because of heightened community tensions.

And the head of Northern Ireland’s police service, George Hamilton, has warned that if Brexit results in fixed-frontier customs and security posts on the island of Ireland, it could energize a new generation of violent Irish republicans.

Midweek, three letter bombs apparently posted from the Irish Republic and sent to transport hubs in London were intercepted, adding to concerns of the old sectarian conflicts being reignited over the issue of a hard border.

“Letter bombs posted to London this week were a stark reminder that the peace process is still fragile and the threat posed to it by Brexit cannot be ignored,” The Times newspaper warned.

‘Very unfortunate timing’

The Bloody Sunday massacre of civil rights protesters is one of the deepest wounds of the “Troubles,” the decades-long conflict that was brought to an end with the U.S.-brokered 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement. The conflict left more than 3,700 people dead as Irish Republican Army (IRA) gunmen battled the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, as well as Protestant paramilitaries with ties to British intelligence agencies, in their war for a united Ireland.

There are mounting concerns at the highest levels of the British government about how the prosecutors’ decision will play out against the backdrop of Brexit.

“It is an ill wind,” a senior British government official told VOA. “This is very unfortunate timing and we could have done without it, but it is beyond our control,” he added.

Fears of the reigniting of the “Troubles” have been fanned by a recent explosion in the British province and hijackings in Northern Ireland’s second largest city, Londonderry — which Catholics call Derry, and where the Bloody Sunday massacre took place.

The Bloody Sunday shootings came Jan. 30, 1972, when soldiers from the 1st Parachute Regiment opened fire on civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry’s Bogside district. The demonstrators were protesting internment — the mass arrest and imprisonment without trial of suspected IRA members.

Thirteen people were killed where they stood and a 14th person later died of his wounds. Fourteen other people were injured. The shootings attracted worldwide condemnation and fury in Irish-American communities.

Bloody Sunday investigation

The police inquiry was mounted after a 12-year-long investigation into the killings conducted by Mark Saville, a British judge, which was set up after years of pressure from the victims’ families and supporters in the United States, who dismissed an initial British probe as a whitewash.

Saville concluded that the British soldiers had “lost control” and he detailed a break down in the chain of command, saying the paratroopers fatally shot fleeing civilians and those who tried to aid wounded civilians. The report said the soldiers had concocted lies to defend their actions and, contrary to their claims, none of them had fired in response to attacks by petrol bombers or stone throwers or gunmen. The civilians were not posing any threat, according to the Saville report.

Eighteen ex-paratroopers have been under investigation, and four are thought likely to be charged. Under British regulations, they cannot be named, as yet. One of them, a partly paralyzed 77-year-old, told Britain’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper that it was a “scandalous betrayal” by successive British governments for allowing the cases to proceed.

“I think it is utter rubbish. But I think we will be charged,” he added.

British army veterans are also criticizing the investigation, saying it is unfair to charge people so long after the event. Former British foreign minister Boris Johnson has said any prosecutions against the veterans will be about politics, not justice.

But relatives of the Bloody Sunday victims have welcomed the possible prosecutions, saying that justice should be done.

“If these soldiers aren’t prosecuted, then the families will be angry, and for good reason,” according to Leo Young, one of the protesters, whose younger brother was killed.
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International Women’s Day

Women around the world marked International Women’s Day with celebrations, protests, and demands for equality and an end to gender violence.
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Pope: Anti-Semitism Part of Wave of `Depraved Hatred’

Pope Francis on Friday branded anti-Semitism part of a wave of “depraved hatred” sweeping some countries and urged everyone to be vigilant against it.

In comments to members of the American Jewish Committee during a visit to the Vatican, he also reiterated that it was sinful for Christians to hold anti-Semitic sentiments because they shared a heritage with Jews.

“A source of great concern to me is the spread, in many places, of a climate of wickedness and fury, in which an excessive and depraved hatred is taking root,” Francis said. “I think especially of the outbreak of anti-Semitic attacks in various countries.”

Francis did not name any of those countries, but government statistics released last month showed more than 500 anti-Semitic attacks occurred last year in France, which has Europe’s biggest Jewish community. That was a 74 percent increase from 2017.

“I stress that for a Christian any form of anti-Semitism is a rejection of one’s own origins, a complete contradiction,” Francis said.

A European Union study last month showed that more than one in three European Jews have considered emigrating in the past five years because they no longer feel safe.

Episodes of anti-Semitism have coincided with the rise of populist or nationalist parties in predominantly Christian countries such as Italy, Germany, Poland and Hungary. In Britain, nine lawmakers quit the Labour party last month, citing the leadership’s handling of anti-Semitism in the party as a reason for leaving.

In December, 20 cobblestones commemorating members of two Italian Jewish families who were deported to Auschwitz or killed in Rome were dug up and stolen in what the Jewish community said was an anti-Semitic attack.

On Monday, Pope Francis announced that he has decided to open fully the Vatican’s secret archives on Pope Pius XII, something which Jews have been seeking for decades.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War Two by not speaking out forcefully. The Vatican has said Pius worked quietly behind the scenes to save Jews and avoid worsening the situation for many.
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Russia Telecoms Giant MTS to Pay $850 Million in US Corruption Case

Russia’s leading telecoms firm said Thursday it had agreed to pay $850 million to settle a U.S. corruption case over huge bribes paid to the family of Uzbekistan’s former president.

The case shed light on massive corruption in Uzbekistan under former president Islam Karimov, who ruled the ex-Soviet republic from 1990 until his death in 2016.

MTS, based in Moscow and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, said the settlement had been agreed with the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The deals “mark the closure of the investigations into the company’s acquisition and operation of its former subsidiary in Uzbekistan,” MTS said in a statement.

MTS complies 

In agreeing to the fine “MTS affirmed its commitment” to complying with anti-corruption legislation, it said.

MTS was in a long-running dispute with the Uzbek authorities, which seized the company’s local subsidiary in 2012 after cancelling its operating licenses for alleged tax evasion.

The Uzbek subsidiary, which had 9.5 million subscribers by the end of 2011, filed for bankruptcy in 2013.

The SEC said that MTS had “bribed an Uzbek official” related to Karimov to obtain and retain business operations in Uzbekistan, a Central Asian nation of more than 32 million people.

“The company engaged in egregious misconduct for nearly a decade, secretly funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to a corrupt official,” the SEC said in a statement. 

‘$1 billion worth of payments’

An investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project previously said that the subsidiary, which was known as Uzdunrobita before it was acquired by MTS, had paid hundreds of millions of dollars to companies owned by Karimov’s daughter Gulnara.

The OCCRP, an NGO that works with investigative reporters mainly in Eastern Europe, alleged that MTS made payments in 2004 and 2007 to purchase stakes in the company. 

MTS was not the only telecoms company involved. “Karimova squeezed more than $1 billion worth of payments… out of international telecom-related companies,” OCCRP said.

Some commentators in Russia expressed dismay that the U.S. was fining Russian companies for operations in third countries.

“What concern does the U.S. have about the faraway Uzbekistan and Russian operators?” said a journalist on BFM business radio, pointing out that “the money will go to the American budget, not the Uzbek one.”

End to economic isolation

Uzbekistan is led by Karimov’s former prime minister Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who has moved to end the country’s economic isolation and removed visa restrictions for travelers from European Union countries and the United States.

Gulnara Karimova, once a high-profile diplomat and pop singer, was being held under house arrest after being convicted on fraud and money laundering charges in 2017 and sentenced to five years.

Uzbek authorities this week said she had violated the terms of her house arrest and had been sent to prison where she would remain until the end of her sentence.
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More Women Winning Seats in World Parliaments

The Inter-Parliamentary Union finds more women around the world are winning seats in their national parliaments, with the best gains being made in countries that have well-designed quota systems.

The report finds women’s representation in national parliaments rose by nearly 1 percentage point last year to 24.3 percent. This may seem a modest increase, but this figure indicates an ongoing upward trend of women’s participation in politics since the 1995 World Women’s Conference in Beijing. At that time, only 11 percent of women were in parliament. Their share has now more than doubled.

IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong says he also is heartened by the greater diversity in the makeup of women’s representation in parliament.

“We are seeing more women of native origin,” he said. “We are seeing more women of color coming into parliaments around the world. And if we take the United States, for instance, we saw a noticeable improvement in parliamentary diversity, with Native Americans making inroads into parliament, women of color increasing their share of parliamentary representation. And we even see the entry into parliament of two Muslim women.”

Chungong notes the United States shot up in the global rankings of women parliamentarians from 137th position in 2017 to 79th place last year. The survey finds women now occupy about one-quarter of all seats in both houses of Congress.

As in previous years, Rwanda continues to hold the top spot in the rankings with more than 61 percent of women parliamentarians. Two other African countries, Namibia and South Africa, are in the top 10.

The IPU finds 65th-ranked Djibouti made the most dramatic gains regionally and globally among lower and single chambers. It says the share of women in parliament rose from nearly 11 percent to more than 26 percent.

The report says the Americas continue to lead all regions in terms of the average share of women in parliament with 30.6 percent. This contrasts with the Middle East and North Africa, with the lowest regional average of slightly more than 18 percent female parliamentarians.
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Brussels Court Convicts Frenchman of Murder in Jewish Museum Attack

French citizen Mehdi Nemmouche was convicted of “terrorist murder” on Thursday for shooting dead four people in a Jewish museum in Brussels after coming back from Syria in 2014, the federal prosecutor’s spokesman said.

Sentencing after the two-month-long, Brussels jury court trial, which underlined the threat posed by European jihadists returning home after fighting in Syria’s war, will be announced at a later date.

Nemmouche, 33, remained silent in the dock as former hostages of Islamic State militants as well as victims of the May 2014 museum attack testified against him, though he took the stand briefly on Tuesday to allege he had been “tricked.”

Lawyers for the victims praised Belgian prosecutors for building a rigorous case against Nemmouche that stood up against accusations by the defense that he had been framed in a plot to kill two agents of Israel’s Mossad spy service.

“It’s a victory for justice,” said David Ramet, a lawyer for the two daughters of an Israeli tourist couple, Myriam and Emmanuel Riva, killed in the shooting. The eldest of the two, Shiva, earlier testified in court that the “tragedy would pursue them all their lives”, state broadcaster RTBF reported.

Two men employed at the museum, Dominique Sabrier and Alexandre Strens, also died in the shooting attack.

During the trial, assertions by Nemmouche’s lawyer that video footage of the shooting was faked and that his client never pulled the trigger, outraged the victims’ families and survivors.

European Jewish Congress chief Moshe Kantor on Thursday condemned as a disgrace “the use of reprehensible tactics and conspiracy theories of the defense lawyers.”

The attack in May 2014 was the first staged by a Western European who had fought in the ranks of Islamist militant factions in Syria’s civil war, prosecutors said.

A lawyer for Nemmouche said he would respect the 12-person jury’s decision and not appeal against the verdict.

Another French citizen, Nacer Bendrer, was found guilty of providing the weapon used in the shooting. The two met and were radicalized in jail, according to investigators.

Prosecutors told the court that Nemmouche was arrested in the southern French city of Marseille less than a week after the shooting carrying a Kalashnikov of the kind used in the crime.

The jury also heard testimony last month from two French journalists who were held hostage by Islamic State in Syria and identified Nemmouche as one of their captors.

The journalists described him as deeply anti-Semitic, sadistic and full of hatred. Nemmouche faces separate charges in France for his role in keeping the reporters in captivity.
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Police Link Scotland University Device to London Mail Bombs 

British police said a suspicious package destroyed by bomb-disposal experts at the University of Glasgow on Wednesday contained an explosive device and was linked to three letter bombs sent to two London airports and a railway station.  

The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command said the item sent to the Scottish university had “similarities in the package, its markings and the type of device” to the three small improvised bombs received by the London transportation hubs on Tuesday.  

The mailing envelope sent to London’s Heathrow Airport with one of the bombs inside partly caught fire when someone opened it, but no one was injured.  

The force said it had not identified the sender and urged transportation operators, mail sorting companies and schools “to be vigilant” about watching for suspicious packages. 

Precautionary evacuation

The University of Glasgow said several buildings on its campus, including the mailroom, were evacuated “as a precautionary measure” after the package was found in the mailroom on Wednesday morning. 

Assistant Chief Constable Steve Johnson of Police Scotland said “the package was not opened and no one was injured.” 

He said bomb-disposal experts later performed a controlled explosion on the item.  

Another package sparked an evacuation Wednesday at the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters in Edinburgh. It was found to contain “promotional goods” and deemed no threat to the public, police said. 

The envelopes received in London appeared to carry Irish stamps, and Jarrett said one line of inquiry “is the possibility that the packages have come from Ireland.” 

There has been speculation the devices could be connected to Irish Republican Army dissidents. But Dean Haydon, Britain’s senior national coordinator for counterterrorism policing, said no sender had been identified and no group had claimed responsibility. 

“We are talking to our Irish counterparts but at the moment there’s nothing to indicate motivation of the sender or ideology, so I cannot confirm at the moment if it’s connected to any Ireland-related terrorist groups,” he said.
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Pope Opens Lent With Call to Avoid ‘Clutches of Consumerism’

Pope Francis has urged Roman Catholic faithful to free themselves from the “clutches of consumerism and the snares of selfishness” as he marked the start of Lent, the period of prayer and fasting before Easter.

Francis led a procession and then celebrated Ash Wednesday Mass at the basilica of Santa Sabina, one of Rome’s most beautiful.

In his homily, Francis said the 40-day period of Lent is a “wakeup call for the soul” to rediscover the direction of life.

He said: “We need to free ourselves from the clutches of consumerism and the snares of selfishness, from always wanting more, from never being satisfied, and from a heart closed to the needs of the poor.”

At the end of Lent, Christians commemorate the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
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US Ups Pressure on Turkey Over Russian Missile System Purchase

Washington is ratcheting up pressure on Ankara over its decision to buy a Russian missile system, which was confirmed last month by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Senior U.S. diplomats held talks this week in the Turkish capital to lobby against the sale as Washington warns of “grave consequences.”

Deputy Assistant Secretary Matthew Palmer met Wednesday with senior Turkish officials in the latest diplomatic effort to block Ankara’s procurement of Russia’s S-400 missile system.

However Erdogan reiterated his commitment to buy the Russian system. In a television interview Wednesday, he indicated interest in expanding the purchase to Russia’s more advanced S-500 system.

“I would hope that they [Ankara] reconsider this one decision on S-400,” U.S. General Curtis Scaparrotti told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

Scaparrotti warned that the sale poses a threat to American systems used by Turkey, “it’s a problem for all of our aircraft, but specifically the F-35, I believe.”

The F-35 is America’s newest and most technologically advanced plane. Turkey is a co-producer of the aircraft and is due to buy a 100, of which the first two are due to be delivered later this year.

Washington fears the sophisticated radar of the S-400 system could compromise the F-35 technology, which was developed to elude Russian-made systems.

Turkey’s purchase of the F-35 is now under threat.

“Turkey’s acquisition of the Russian S-400 air-defense system will have grave consequences for the U.S. defense relationship with Turkey,” U.S. Pentagon spokesman Nick Pahon said Monday in a statement.

Ankara insists the S-400 offers the best value for its needs and poses no threat to NATO systems. Washington is offering an alternative to the S-400, its more expensive Patriot missile system, but negotiations with Ankara remain stalled over pricing and technology-transfer issues.

Analysts warn the consequences for Ankara, however, could be far-reaching. “If this purchase would go through, even beyond these military aspects, the escalation in Turkish-U.S. tensions would be significant in terms of affecting Turkey’s political risk, for the economy,” said Sinan Ulgen head of the Istanbul based think tank Edam.

Warning to Turkey

The decision by U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday to include Turkey along with India in ending a preferential trade agreement is widely interpreted as a warning to Ankara. While the move affects just one percent of Turkey’s total exports, the Turkish currency fell sharply on the news.

“It is clear that the general tendency in Washington, D.C., is to punish Turkey for perceived misconduct, which remains a significant threat to the Turkish economy,” said Atilla Yesilada of Global Securities.

Turkey’s economy is still reeling from a 2018 spat with Washington. Last year, the Turkish currency collapsed after Trump hit Ankara with sanctions over the detention by Turkey of American pastor Andrew Brunson, who has since been released. Although the sanctions lasted only a few weeks, Turkey’s economy now faces a recession.

Washington has various means to inflict further pain on the Turkish economy. U.S. Treasury authorities are still considering imposing a potential multibillion-dollar fine on Turkish State lender Halk Bank after the conviction of one of its senior employees by a New York court for violating the United States’ Iranian sanctions.

Ankara is not expected to make any concessions, though, before crucial local elections on March 31. Analysts say taking a hardline against Washington plays well among Erdogan’s supporters.

Upcoming meeting

Erdogan said last month that Trump had agreed to meet in April. Ankara officials claim the two presidents maintain a strong working relationship, and they blame current bilateral tensions on ministers and advisers around the U.S. president.

Analysts point out that Erdogan probably will be buoyed by Trump’s silence on the controversy of the S-400 deal. “Ankara only cares about what Trump says for Ankara as only Trump is its interlocutor,” said former senior Turkish diplomat Aydin Selcen, who served in Washington.

Erdogan is widely seen as being unlikely to give up on the Russian missile purchase before meeting Trump. “This could be seen as essentially a negotiating position,” Ulgen said.

But the S-400 purchase also is a powerful symbol of Ankara’s deepening relationship with Moscow. The two countries increasingly are cooperating in efforts to end the Syrian civil war, despite backing rival sides in the conflict.

The current thaw followed painful economic sanctions by Moscow on Ankara after a Turkish jet downed a Russian bomber attacking Syrian rebel forces. Analysts suggest Erdogan will be wary of again provoking Russia. Before the downing of the Russian jet, Turks enjoyed visa-free travel.

“Turkey once betrayed the Russians, shooting down their fighter, and the Russians have not forgotten this,” said international relations professor Huseyin Bagci of Ankara’s Middle East Technical University. “If Russia really trusted Turkey, they would lift their visa requirement, but they still have it. It means Turkey doesn’t deserve the Russians’ trust.”

Observers warn the S-400 missile sale poses Ankara with a diplomatic conundrum: how to avoid drawing the ire of either Washington or Moscow.
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Body Language: The Russian Science Keeping N. Korea’s Dead Leaders Looking Fresh

Perhaps none of the communist legacies shared by Vietnam and North Korea highlighted during Kim Jong Un’s “goodwill visit” to Hanoi is stranger than the embalmed leaders on display in their capital cities, and the secretive team of Russian technicians that keeps the aging bodies looking ageless.

Kim laid a wreath outside Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum in the Vietnamese capital on Saturday, after the conclusion of his shortened summit with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Inside the dark interior of the mausoleum, the embalmed corpse of Vietnam’s founding father lies displayed in a glass coffin for a steady stream of tourists who silently shuffle by.

In Pyongyang, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather and father are on similar display in the loftily named Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, a monument to the cult of personality that surrounds North Korea’s ruling family.

All three leaders were originally preserved by a team of specialists from the so-called “Lenin Lab” in Moscow, which first embalmed and displayed Vladimir Lenin’s body in 1924.

The Soviet Union may have collapsed, and socialism in both Vietnam and North Korea has taken on forms barely recognizable to the ideology’s first thinkers, but that same lab still performs annual maintenance on Ho, and according to at least one researcher, still helps North Korea keep the Kims looking fresh.

“The original embalming and the regular re-embalmings have always been conducted by the scientists of the Moscow lab,” said Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, who is writing a book about the embalmed communist leaders. “Over the years they trained local scientists in some techniques, but not all, maintaining the core of the know-how secret.”

Body work

Unlike earlier preservation processes such as mummification, the permanent embalming pioneered by Soviet scientists kept the bodies flexible, with unblemished skin and a lifelike, if rather waxy, pallor.

With North Vietnam under regular attack by American warplanes at the time of Ho’s death in 1969, the Soviet Union airlifted chemicals and equipment to a cave outside Hanoi, which the Soviet experts turned into a sterile lab, Yurchak said.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, the government lab faced a funding crisis, leading it to rely more heavily on offering services to foreign clients, Yurchak said.

Among those customers was North Korea, where Russian specialists embalmed both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il at a laboratory built into the mausoleum in Pyongyang.

The original embalming takes several months, and the bodies need regular upkeep.

“Every one-and-a-half to two years, these bodies are re-embalmed by the Moscow scientists,” Yurchak said, citing interviews he conducted with lab scientists and his own field research.

The website for the committee that manages Ho’s mausoleum says Russia started charging for the chemicals after the Soviet Union collapsed, prompting Hanoi to ask that the supplies be produced in Vietnam. Vietnam has also sent technicians to study in Russia and can now handle the operations of the mausoleum by itself, the website says.

A source with committee, however confirmed the monument is closed every year for two months and that Russian technicians help with annual maintenance of the body.

When contacted by Reuters, the mausoleum lab in Moscow, which since 1992 has been known as the Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies, declined to comment on any aspect of its work.

The North Korean delegation at the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment.

Researcher Tom Fowdy, who founded a group promoting tourism and cultural engagements in North Korea, said he has seen the Kumsusan Palace closed for unexplained “renovations,” but maintenance of the bodies is a mystery.

“While it is obvious the methodology was derived from Russia, it will be a closely kept secret,” he said.

Some experts say China, which relied on its own scientists to embalmed Mao Zedong because of tension between Beijing and Moscow at the time, may have taught or helped North Korea.

Changing symbols

Visitors to Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Palace pass displays that include Kim Jong Il’s personal yacht and an Apple computer the dictator had once owned, before being required to bow three times to the bodies.

“The personality politics of the Kims exceeds all others,” Fowdy said, noting that maintaining the memorial will continue to “receive overwhelming priority” in North Korea’s government budgeting.

It’s not clear how much impoverished North Korea spends on maintaining the Kims’ bodies. When Moscow released preservation costs for the first time in 2016, it reported spending nearly $200,000 that year to maintain Lenin.

Originally the embalming was seen as a way of joining the various countries to international communism, as embodied in Lenin.

But as Vietnam and North Korea developed in their different political ways, so has the meaning attached to preserving the leaders’ bodies.

“Today this original meaning of these bodies has changed — in Vietnam the body of Ho today stands for anti-colonial struggles for independence and even for new nationalism, much more than for communism,” Yurchak said. “In North Korea the two Kims’ bodies stand for a self-sufficient country organized around one leader and existing in the face of the ‘imperialist surroundings.'”
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