It takes two to tango but only one, it turns out, to cause a political stalemate. As President Barack Obama put it before the US congressional debate that ultimately failed to agree a new federal budget: “One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government.”
A far more heroic, but equally intractable “one” is currently incarcerated in Penal Colony No 14 in the Russian republic of Mordovia. Complaining of slavery-like conditions, Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova wrote an open letter to rail against the inhumanity of sewing police uniforms for 16 to 17 hours per day with only four hours sleep per night and one day off every six weeks. Sentenced to two years in prison for a 25-second punk protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the 23-year-old Russian has used her letter to announce a hunger strike. “I will do this until the administration starts obeying the law and stops treating incarcerated women like cattle … until they start treating us like humans.”
Tolokonnikova’s powerful protest draws on a long Russian literary tradition that originates in Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment; the epistolary form has recently also been used by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former billionaire with a dubious reputation turned saintly political activist. The response to Tolokonnikova’s plea for the human rights of others (as well as herself) has won support from unexpected quarters including a member of the Orthodox clergy and a pro-Kremlin newspaper.
But why have one woman’s carefully chosen words caused such a stir? Tolokonnikova’s good looks have played a part; it’s eternally helpful to be attractive, even if you’re the poster girl for anarchy. Nostalgia for “mother Russia” has also helped the cause; women, even in today’s Russia, are meant to be protected and nurtured, not abused en masse. As Kirill Kobrin, the editor of the history and sociology magazine Neprikosnovenniye Zapas put it in a Radio Free Europe debate: “It is a very strange sort of society … in which all moral authorities are in prison at the same time.”
Elsewhere, headline numbers have made grim reading: 13 car bombs detonated by Al Qaeda in Shiite areas across Baghdad; 50 killed by the Islamist militant group, Boko Haram, as students slept in their dorm in a college in north-east Nigeria; almost 1 million Syrian refugees threatening to overwhelm Lebanon. According to the World Bank, Syria’s diaspora will make up 37 per cent of Lebanon’s population by the end of 2014 if the chaos continues.
Finally, new research from the Netherlands shows that failure to read the stories behind such headline-grabbing statistics can be disastrous. Researchers at the Rotterdam School of Management examined 10 years of humanitarian relief data for natural disasters and found that the number of fatalities, not the number of people affected, determined the amount donated. When Iran’s Bam earthquake killed 26,796 people and affected 267,628 in 2003, US$10.7 million (Dh59.5m) was raised from donations. But in 2000 when the Yunnan earthquake in China affected 1.8 million people but killed only seven, the donations amounted to a pitiful $94,586. When it comes to numbers, it’s important to know how it all adds up.
cdight@thenational.ae