Pulitzer Center

TAKING ON THE WORLD

Twenty-two of our student fellows came to Washington, DC, for two days last week to share their reporting projects and meet with professional journalists. It was a jam-packed, fun and stimulating weekend—the second annual event that brings together Campus Consortium students who have received reporting fellowships from the Pulitzer Center. We heard from students who had reported in 19 countries, from Mexico to Australia, and discussed everything from ethics and cultural sensitivity to best practices for pitching stories. More to come on the weekend’s events–student presentations, speakers and panelists–in the next newsletter.

Several student fellow stories were published last week: Dan Black from Davidson College took us behind the scenes to see where displaced Angolans from Luanda now live. In “Mother Tongue First, German Second,” by Austin Davis from the University of Michigan, Turkish immigrant mothers in Berlin work to overcome disparities in the educational system.

Farzana Shah from the University of Pennsylvania traveled to Iran with a medical non-profit and reported on the cardiac care given to children. Olivia Conti from Loyola University Chicago launched her project “Ghana: Walking Without Shoes.” And “Uganda’s Understaffed and Underfunded ‘Free’ Health Centers” by Jae Lee from Washington University in St. Louis appeared in Global Health NOW. Please check our website in the weeks ahead for more stories by our 2015 student fellows.

BUILDING A NEW UKRAINE

To have any chance of resisting the predations of Vladimir Putin, Ukraine must rebuild Soviet-era national institutions long-plagued by corruption and ineptitude. Where to start? The government in Kiev has wisely decided to start with the police, the institution that is the everyday face of authority in the country.

“The Ukraine government looked to remake the section of the police force that had the most contact with its citizens, the traffic police, and to show that this new institution, with uniforms and training provided by the United States, would usher in a new government that was built on trust,” says Pulitzer Center grantee Misha Friedman, whose photography project documents the birth of the new department.

Misha told ABC News, which published a photo gallery of his work, that he was drawn to this story because it gave him a rare chance to document positive change in post-Soviet countries. “When I photographed Russia and Ukraine [in the past] it was hard to be optimistic, but this [story] was the one I really felt had a chance. I knew this was going to be important to Ukraine.”    

SMART FARMING IN RURAL INDIA

Developing countries will be the most vulnerable to changes in the climate. A recent government study in India warned that the anticipated rise in global temperatures over the next three decades could reduce wheat yields in the country by as much as 23 percent. Related environmental problems—depleted groundwater, delayed monsoons and intense rainfall—will also hurt productivity.

Pulitzer Center grantee Lisa Palmer was in India to look at new strategies designed to help small farmers adapt to climate change. She visited one of the country’s “climate smart” villages where farmers use solar panels to drive the water pumps that irrigate their fields of rice and wheat.

“In addition to energy, [solar panels] provide a financial incentive for farmers to conserve water because they can sell energy back to the grid,” writes Lisa in The Guardian. She spoke with another farmer who uses a mobile phone app to help calculate how much fertilizer to apply throughout the growing season.

Until next week,

Kem Knapp Sawyer
Contributing Editor

Tom Hundley
Senior Editor

ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

The United States is host this week to the leader of the world’s largest Christian religion and the head of its most populous country. Each of them presents a set of a wide-ranging issues, as daunting for themselves as for the world. None is as fundamental or far-reaching as the challenge of reconciling economic growth and opportunity with the requirements of long-term environmental sustainability. New projects from the Pulitzer Center tackle that challenge head on.

“Ecological Civilization,” our latest e-book, addresses the connections between the environment and religious and cultural traditions—connections that resonate as much in China as within the Catholic Church. It is a compendium of the talks and proceedings of the International Conference on Ecological Environment, a day-long meeting this past June in Beijing that was co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Center, the Communication University of China, and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. This e-book features presentations and reporting by Pulitzer Center grantees Sean Gallagher, Gary Marcuse, Shi Lihong, Fred de Sam Lazaro and Sim Chi Yin.

In a timely front-page story for The News & Observer in Raleigh, Pulitzer Center grantee Justin Catanoso reports from Peru on reconciling the pope’s call for wealthy nations to protect the environment while aiding the poor. Justin visits La Orora, a mining community degraded by 77 years of smelting heavy metals but where the poor simply want to work, no matter the damage to the environment or their own health. As one unemployed miner, a devout Catholic, told Justin, “We are well aware of the pollution. But the pope is not going to hire me.”

Justin is director of journalism at Wake Forest University, one of our Campus Consortium partners. He is among the speakers at a conference Sept. 28 at American University, another Campus Consortium partner, that addresses the question of religion and climate change in the public sphere, with special emphasis on the role of journalists and the media. Religion and environment also figure in our latest Lesson Builder lesson—a way for high schools and colleges and others to engage in these issues that directly affect us all.

NO MAN’S LAND: POVERTY ON THE PLAINS

We also have a Lesson Builder lesson on The Geography of Poverty, the stunning survey of persistent poverty across America that has been featured all summer on MSNBC. The final chapter of the series includes photography by Pulitzer Center grantee Matt Black and reporting by MSNBC journalist Trymaine Lee, in a damning indictment of how Native Americans have benefited so little from the massive hydroelectric projects and fracking booms that have transformed their land.

AFTER THE QUAKE

Disease linked to dirty water has long been a chronic problem in Nepal. After the devastating earthquake in Kathmandu last April, there were fears of major epidemics. In his mini-doc for The New York Times, Pulitzer Center grantee Pierre Kattar looks at a deadly outbreak of hepatitis that occurred a few months before the earthquake and follows the story into the tent camps that housed thousands after the devastation. Our Lesson Builder lesson ties Pierre’s reporting to other Pulitzer Center projects on water and sanitation.

WHAT THE KURDS HAVE BUILT

Amid the chaos of Syria there is an island of what seems like sanity. Pulitzer Center grantee Jenna Krajeski visits Rojava, the Kurdish enclave in eastern Syria where a society built on the teachings of the Vermont-based anarchist and ecological philosopher Murray Bookchin serves as an unlikely antidote to the dystopian “caliphate” of the ISIS jihadists.

“Rojava, according to its champions, will be a new grassroots democracy where law and security is entrusted to local councils; where women and minorities are guaranteed equal participation; and where wealth—once belonging to Assad’s Baathists—is distributed according to need among citizens. Supporters claim that their efforts will not only liberate Kurds, but serve as a model for better governance in a crumbling, sectarian Middle East,“ writes Jenna in this deeply reported account for Virginia Quarterly Review.

Despite some genuine achievements, not everyone is thrilled with the Rojava experiment. "Revolutions, no matter how popular, never speak for an entire population, and Rojava…is no different,” writes Jenna. “But in the context of the Syrian civil war, these dissenting voices come across as more than just anti-revolutionary; they join a chorus of Syrians whose displacement has come to define the cost of the war and, now, the cost of the Kurdish experiment.”

Until next week,

Tom Hundley
Senior Editor

Ukraine: The Cops Who Would Save a Country

On the eve of her first day on the job, Oksana Kapitanska, 28, was as ready as she could possibly be. Her kit was laid out on her single bed, watched over by a dozen stuffed animals: black pants and a black shirt, a black cap, a belt, a pair of handcuffs, pepper spray, a phone charger, a pad of paper, a pen, a street map of Kiev, a first-aid kit, and a knee brace.

The American approach is too tender,” explained Kapitanska, who was once trained to be an officer in the militsiya, as the police was called in the Soviet Union and, later, in Ukraine. “Everything is based on respect for personal freedom. Maybe that sort of thing works in the U.S.”

The government, brought to power by the protests of 2013-2014, known to most of the world as the Maidan (Ukrainian for “square”) and called the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, is scrambling to create a state out of the mess of transition and corruption that has ruled Europe’s largest country since the Soviet Union broke up nearly 24 years ago. And no institution of the state is closer to the people and more riddled with corruption than the militsiya.

See more of Misha Friedman’s photography and Masha Gessen’s writing from their project “Ukraine: Reforming a Police Force,” here. 

Residents of Simferopol. Image by Boryana Katsarova. Ukraine, 2014.

Putin Won His War in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has slipped off the front pages. Eighteen months ago, when Russian President Vladimir Putin seized Crimea and then instigated a pro-Russian rebellion in the Donbas region, Ukraine was hot news. Putin was roundly denounced, and Russia was hit with damaging economic sanctions. East-West relations soured badly, and diplomats wondered whether they were witnessing the beginnings of another cold war.

Now Ukraine, as a European crisis, has lost its urgency. One reason is the rush of other news, from global economic jitters and the flood of desperate Arab and African migrants to Europe to the preoccupying nuttiness of the U.S. presidential campaign. But there is another equally important reason. Putin seems to have won his little war in Ukraine, and his Western critics watch from the sidelines, sputtering with helpless rage.

Read more of Pulitzer Center Senior Adviser Marvin Kalb’s analysis of Russia’s war in Ukraine here. 

Part of the Vinnytsia chicken farm, a controversial project to build Europe’s largest industrial poultry farm in central Ukraine. Image by Claire Provost. Ukraine, 2015.

Ukraine Agribusiness Firms in ‘Quiet Land Grab’ with Development Finance

Hundreds of millions of dollars in development finance from the World Bank’s investment arm have helped to fund the controversial expansion of a billionaire’s agribusiness empire in Ukraine, amid growing concern that land and farming in the country are increasingly falling into the hands of a few wealthy individuals.

Controlled by one of Ukraine’s wealthiest men, Yuriy Kosiuk, the agribusiness company Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP) dominates the country’s domestic poultry market and exports chicken and luxuries such as foie gras across Europe. Since 2010, it has received at least $200m (£128m) in long-term loans from the bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Much of this funding has gone to support the building of Europe’s largest industrial chicken farm in the middle of Ukraine’s rural heartland. Almost 300km south of Kiev, the Vinnytsia poultry farm is part of an audacious effort to transform the country once known as “Europe’s breadbasket” into its “meatbasket.“

Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantees Claire Provost and Matt Kennard for The Guardian.

The hundred and six people who died in the Maidan in the winter of 2013-2014 have been called the Heavenly Hundred, and the center of Kiev is dotted with memorials to them.

The Story of Ukraine Through Its Many Monuments

People, and countries, put up monuments to display what they think of history and of themselves. They tear down monuments for the same reason. A torn-down monument is, therefore, itself a monument.

At the corner of Taras Shevchenko Boulevard and Khreshchatyk, Kiev’s central avenue, stands Lenin, or at least what remains of him. The statue was toppled in December, 2013, the first of about a hundred Lenin monuments removed by Ukrainians all over the country in the past year and a half. Remarkably, Moscow, which is very sensitive to the removal or alteration of Soviet-era monuments in parts of its former empire, took the topplings exactly as they were intended to be taken: as insults, and as a sign that it had lost Ukraine. The day that Russia annexed Crimea, authorities in the Crimean town of Zuya resolved to restore the local Lenin monument, which had been deposed the night before.

Read the full article by Pulitzer Center grantee Masha Gessen, for the New Yorker.

WHOSE UKRAINE?

Over the past century, various bits and pieces of Ukraine have been claimed by the Hapsburgs, the Poles, the Russians, the Nazis, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Given this untidy history, it’s little wonder that Ukrainians have struggled to come up with an authentic national identity.

Pulitzer Center grantee Sarah Topol, in a nuanced and richly detailed feature story for Harper’s, explores the historical forces that are shaping the current conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and pro-Russian factions. For Sarah, it is also a personal journey; she wryly notes that her mother, who was born in Kiev, “speaks English with the thick accent of a villain in a Cold War-era film.”

In the West, Ukraine’s current predicament is somewhat simplistically blamed on the evil ambitions of Vladimir Putin. Not so simple, says Sarah. “Even if you took the Western narrative at face value–that Putin was the big bad wolf who blew Ukraine’s house down–why was it so easy? The foundations must have been rotten, cobbled together after decades of woozy, cynical, agitated speculation about Ukrainian identity.”  

THE BIGGEST DIG OF ALL

Its magnitude can be measured in terms of the dirt that will have to be moved—more than 5 billion cubic meters. That’s enough to bury all of Disney World (43 square miles) to a depth of 147 feet, leaving only the tallest spire of Cinderella’s Castle exposed. But the proposed new canal that a Chinese entrepreneur named Wang Jing has started to build across Nicaragua—a supersized, 170-mile long competitor to the Panama Canal—is much more than an ambitious feat of civil engineering.

As Pulitzer Center grantees Tim Johnson and Brittany Peterson explain in a four-part multimedia story for McClatchy Newspapers, work has already begun: “Land has been surveyed, routes identified, negotiations begun with landholders. Yet secrecy still cloaks the project, whose ramifications are vast. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans would be displaced and hundreds of square miles of land would be given over to the Chinese company that holds the concession to build the canal.”

Tim notes that other ramifications can only be guessed at. “The impact the canal would have on Nicaragua’s environment has yet to be made public. Also uncalculated: the ramifications on world trade that would come from the inter-ocean passage of ships so large that most U.S. ports can’t handle them. Another looming unknown: how the global balance might change with a Chinese-built and -financed canal dug across an isthmus that has been a nearly exclusive American zone for 200 years.”

DUMPING IN A SACRED RIVER

It is the holiest of rivers; it is the foulest of rivers. When the sacred Ganges makes news, “it is typically to report how the Yamuna, a major tributary to the Ganges, is buried under a layer of industrial foam or contains faecal coliform bacteria at half-a-million times the Indian recommended bathing limit; about how the untreated sewage of 118 towns is discharged into the Ganges; or about how it is becoming less of a river and more of a toxic waterway.”

In his dispatch for The Guardian, Pulitzer Center grantee Cameron Conaway takes a look at Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent campaign promises to clean up the Ganges.

Key to Modi’s strategy is bridging the gap between science and religion when it comes to environmental activism. As one activist tells Cameron, “Governments can lay sewer lines, install world-class treatment plants and issue the harshest sanctions, but unless we engage faith groups we will still have an enormous number of individuals who are carrying their trash to (the Ganges).“


Until next week,

Tom Hundley
Senior Editor

A monument in Savur-Mogila, in eastern Ukraine. Image by Larry Towell/Magnum Photos. Ukraine, 2014.

Ukraine’s history of foreign conquest, most recently Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, precludes any clear sense of Ukrainian identity. Antisemitism is only part of the problem. Could nationalism help mend Ukraine’s current sectarian violence?

Fugue State: The Struggle for National Identity in Wartime Ukraine

“….On June 23, 1941, with the Nazis on their doorstep again, Soviet prison officials received an order to execute all the inmates, who might well fight for the Germans should they be liberated. One at a time, the prisoners were brought into special cells with sloping floors and shot at close range. A bucket of water washed the blood down the drain, and then the next victim was marched in. Their first names, patronymics, last names, and birthdays were methodically ticked off in red pencil. Over five days, at least 1,680 prisoners were slaughtered, and when the Soviets retreated, on June 29, they left the bodies in the basement for the Germans to find.

After the Nazis discovered the bodies, they ordered local Jews to carry the corpses outside the prison for identification, while spreading the word that the Jews themselves had committed the slaughter. A pogrom erupted on Lontskoho Street and spread throughout the city, leaving thousands of Jews dead.

My guide led me to an exhibit that showed photographs of people carrying the corpses. She made no mention of the Jews. ‘Who took the bodies outside?’ I asked her.

‘We are not sure, because of different sources, so I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the director will answer this question.’

…

But I was less concerned with the specific specter of anti-Semitism than with what this omission suggested about Ukraine’s approach to its fractured past. I asked Zissels the same question I asked nearly everybody I encountered in Ukraine. Why can’t there be one museum, one place of memory, where the nation considers its entire history — victims and perpetrators alike, with all the corresponding shades of gray? 

‘Give us three hundred years,’ he said.”

Read the full article by Pulitzer Center grantee Sarah Topol for Harper’s Magazine.

The Ukrainian Serengeti

ASKANIA-NOVA, Ukraine. Viktor Gavrilenko charges across the Ukrainian steppe at nearly 60 miles an hour. His rickety, dark green Lada bounces wildly over the parched grass and kicks up clouds of dust as we overtake terrified herds of buffaloes, zebras, wildebeests, and antelopes. About two dozen cranes pass somewhere above us in a perfect wedge formation, dark shades against the pale blue sky, like a bomber squadron going to war.

When we finally spot a band of Przewalski’s horses, Gavrilenko steps on the brake abruptly, as if pulling on imaginary reins. With the engine still running, he jumps out of the car and glues an enormous pair of binoculars to his face.

“Good morning, ladies,” he calls out to the mares in the distance, squat brown figures with bristling black manes. “Such beauty, such beauty!”

Read the full story by Pulitzer Center grantee Dimiter Kenarov for Roads & Kingdoms and Slate. 

BUYER’S REMORSE IN CRIMEA

It’s not just the Russian flags fluttering from atop public buildings. Everything has changed in Crimea, writes Pulitzer Center grantee Dimiter Kenarov.

“Nearly a year after Putin’s annexation, the Crimean Peninsula—unrecognized as Russian by the vast majority of U.N. countries, and facing severe international isolation—is virtually an island. The place feels sad and forlorn—like an abandoned amusement park. Gone are the bustling days of tourism, of boisterous vacationers. Foreigners have become as rare a sight here as they were during the Soviet era.”

Crimean residents had legitimate complaints about Ukrainian rule when they voted overwhelmingly last March to rejoin Russia, but Moscow, with its supposedly more dynamic economy, has hardly offered a better alternative, reports Dimiter in this dispatch for Foreign Policy.

“Most understood that moving from one country to another would not be easy, but the real hardships still appeared distant and abstract back then, obscured by a patriotic carnival of flags and songs. But with the holidays over, the reality of the new Crimea has reasserted itself. For better or worse, Crimea is Russian now and there is no turning back.”

“I have called you together, gentlemen, to communicate to you a most unpleasant piece of news: an Inspector is coming to visit us,” says the corrupt mayor in Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector, one of Russia’s most beloved plays. “I’ll tell you what it means,” replies another of Gogol’s characters. “Russia…is meaning to go to war, and the ministers, you see, have sent an official to find out whether there is any treason here.”

There are knowing chuckles from the audience at the Russian Drama Theater in the Crimean capital of Simferopol. It’s not so much a case of life imitating art, observes Pulitzer Center grantee Dimiter Kenarov, it’s “as if art and life were indistinguishable from each other.”

In a perceptive feature for the Virginia Quarterly Review, Dimiter and photographer Boryana Katsarova capture the moment in Crimea this spring when clumsily disguised Russian troops made their first appearance: “Two performances seem to be taking place in parallel: one inside the theater and another one in the streets outside, where soldiers in green balaclavas and no recognizable insignia—incognito, so to speak—have just arrived.” 

Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist prime minister, is no fan of liberal democracy. “I don’t think that our European Union membership precludes us from building an illiberal new state based on national foundations,” he told a gathering of students last July. He went on to cite Russia, Turkey and China as the rising “stars” of the new world order, noting that none of these “is liberal and some…aren’t even democracies.”

Pulitzer Center grantee Yigal Schleifer, in an in-depth feature for Moment, looks at Hungary’s retreat from democracy and its implications for the rest of Europe: “This shift is a setback not only for Hungary, but for the wider post-Cold War project of spreading the European Union’s democratic principles of good governance, rule of law, and human and civil rights to countries that had precious little experience with those ideals during the Soviet years.”

Yigal’s reporting from Hungary is part of larger project that will also look at Ukraine and Turkey, two other countries that also tell an important story about the hard road to democratization. 

Pulitzer Center grantees Dimiter Kenarov and Boryana Katsrova discuss their reporting project on the crisis in Crimea. They explain the historical background of this unique region and the complex current situation that led to the recent referendum on secession. They also talk about the unusual challenges they have faced as journalists covering the fast-moving events.

View their project: Ukraine: Crimea Under Siege

Pulitzer Center grantees Dimiter Kenarov and Boryana Katsrova discuss their reporting project on the crisis in Crimea. They explain the historical background of this unique region and the complex current situation that led to the recent referendum on secession. They also talk about the unusual challenges they have faced as journalists covering the fast-moving events.

View Dimiter and Boryana’s whole project: “Ukraine: Crimea Under Siege”

Photojournalist and Pulitzer Center grantee Boryana Katsarova documented the events leading up to Crimea’s secession from Ukraine. She discusses those turbulent days in this video.