DECA

Deca is a cooperative of award-winning journalists bringing deeply reported, global stories straight to your phone, tablet, or computer

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Should We See Everything a Cop Sees?

On his first day on the job in the Seattle Police Department, Mike Wagers was invited to an urgent meeting about transparency. It was July 28, 2014, little more than a week after Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island, less than two weeks before Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., and police departments…

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Bollywood Goes to War

The Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association is an industry group with no standing to speak for anyone but its members. Yet it made itself widely heard recently, and became headline news, when it banned Pakistanis from working in Bollywood films — “forever.” Its stated goal was to express solidarity for India’s armed forces, which conducted…

Read the rest of Bollywood Goes to War at Deca's main site.

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Colombia’s War Just Ended. A New Wave of Violence Is Beginning.

They killed him on this very road, Liney Maria recalls, pointing to the dusty, unpaved trail that passes her home and continues a quarter mile farther up the mountain. He was shot in broad daylight, right on the main avenue of the barrio de invasión, as informal settlements like this one are called. His death…

Read the rest of Colombia’s War Just Ended. A New Wave of Violence Is Beginning. at Deca's main site.

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The Exxon Investigation

At 9 a.m., ExxonMobil’s shareholders start to file into Dallas’ Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center for their annual meeting. Security personnel check IDs and confiscate phones. Uniformed police stand guard. Everyone passes through metal detectors. Outside is a crowd of protesters hoisting signs – “Exxon Lies, Seas Rise” – while standing beside a 13-foot ice…

Read the rest of The Exxon Investigation at Deca's main site.

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Life in Malemaland

1. Ch-ch-changes Hell is an unwanted bear hug. Let’s keep this maxim in mind as we wind our way through the EFF’s increasingly detailed municipal elections literature. (If their manifesto is a skeleton, their Radical Voice publication, a volume of which is released every week or so, serves as the internal organs.) Before we get…

Read the rest of Life in Malemaland at Deca's main site.

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Cairo’s Nerds Scrape Together an Egyptian Tech Scene

At a shared workspace in central Cairo, a 15-minute drive from the Nile, Mohammed Abuelhagag is working on a stem cell incubator. The bottom half, housing the motors, is made of laser-blackened wood. The top, where the stem cells will be grown, isn’t done yet. Sensors to track humidity, temperature, and air quality have yet…

Read the rest of Cairo’s Nerds Scrape Together an Egyptian Tech Scene at Deca's main site.

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The Capitalists of Chaos

The day we fly to Juba in an old DC-9, the sun is out and the clouds are distant puffs, and all we can see is green: the dirty green of the Nile, the dark green of the mango trees, the radiant green of the uncultivated savanna. The land is flat and muddy and empty,…

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The Calypso Killing

On the night of May 3, 2014, in the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, a federal prosecutor named Dana Seetahal sat before a slot machine. Gambling was her favorite form of relaxation and had become one of her only hobbies. Her days as a marathon runner had ended, and now the brainless churn of numbers on…

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The Wizard and the Volcano

I met the wizard of Mount Merapi in June 2006, six weeks into the eruption, at his home on the volcano’s slopes. The one-story structure, built of wood and cement, sat in a patch of bamboo in Kinahrejo, the highest village on the volcano. I had rented a motorbike to drive the hour from Yogyakarta,…

Read the rest of The Wizard and the Volcano at Deca's main site.

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The Wreck of the Kulluk

On December 30, 2012, a tugboat engineer named Craig Matthews threw a grappling hook and caught a runaway drill rig in the middle of a severe storm in the Gulf of Alaska. Late on New Year’s Eve, he was ordered to save his own life and that of his tug’s crew by cutting it loose.…

Read the rest of The Wreck of the Kulluk at Deca's main site.

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Refugees Welcome. Now What?

No one had expected candles. The rally, at a former train depot on the edge of Barcelona’s downtown, was planned as a campaign event for supporters of Spain’s insurgent leftist political party, Podemos. Eight mayors associated with the movement were in town to coordinate strategies, and they planned to meet supporters that evening at the…

Read the rest of Refugees Welcome. Now What? at Deca's main site.

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A tale of two shipwrecks: How NGOs are leading migration coverage

At two in the morning of October 29, an inflatable raft carrying 54 people broke up in heavy seas off Malaga, Spain, near the Straits of Gibraltar. The passengers, from Cameroon and Mali, had been attempting to cross to EU territory via a 50-mile route from Morocco. “I’ve lost my eight-month-old baby and my sister,”…

Read the rest of A tale of two shipwrecks: How NGOs are leading migration coverage at Deca's main site.

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Excerpt: Godfathers and Thieves: Syria’s Diaspora Crowd-Funded a Revolution

By Elizabeth Dickinson

One

It would take a revolution and nearly half a million dollars to undo the damage Mezyan Al Barazi suffered one night in 1977. That was the moment he discovered he was an enemy of the state — in the dark hours of the evening before his university exams. At the age of twenty-six, Al Barazi was a diligent student. He had spent the day poring over notes, preparing for his final paper for his agricultural engineering degree from the University of Damascus.

A firm knock rattled his door. He opened it to find a knot of uniformed men with Kalashnikovs, members of Syria’s intelligence services. The men pushed their way inside, telling Al Barazi they needed to search his apartment for illegal weapons. One of Al Barazi’s uncles was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political party banned in 1964 after the coup that had brought Syria’s secular Ba’ath party to power. But Al Barazi was not involved in politics — or religion. “They asked me, ‘Where do you pray?’” says Al Barazi. “I said, ‘I don’t pray.’”

The armed men scoured his bookshelf looking for religious texts, finding only his copy of War and Peace. “Why don’t you come with us,” said one of the men.

“But I have my final exams tomorrow,” protested Al Barazi.

“Don’t worry about that,” said another.

Al Barazi was brought to a nearby prison, where he spent a cold, sleepless night forced by the guards to sit and then stand, sit and then stand, until dawn came and he was served a breakfast of olives and bread. Later that morning, he was led to an interrogation room and asked a few innocuous questions before being finally allowed to leave. The government had kept him, Al Barazi realized, just long enough for him to miss his exams.

Al Barazi’s trouble with the authorities had begun a few months earlier, when he was taking inventory as part of his job as an inspector at a warehouse run by the Ministry of Agriculture. He had grown up in the lush countryside near the city of Hama, but he had come to Damascus to study. What he discovered there disturbed him. Behind the bustle of traders and hum of government, a deep rot was spreading. Some of his fellow students had paid for their grades. Others had run afoul of the government after their teachers reported their political leanings to the intelligence services.

The education ministry in central Damascus, where students sought test results that would determine their future. Circa 1998. ©Omar Al Bahra

At his job in the ministry, Al Barazi was witness to continuous low-level graft. Farmers bought all their supplies directly from the government, which limited stocks and set prices. His coworkers gamed the system; it was easy to order a little extra fertilizer or a few more nails and sell the excess on the black market. One day while examining the books, Al Barazi uncovered something more significant. Some 2,000 tons of iron were unaccounted for — twice as much as the warehouse was supposed to have in stock.

For Al Barazi, his job as inspector meant keeping the books honest. He investigated and linked the missing iron to a confidante of the Ministry of Agriculture. But when he presented his claims to his superiors, they brushed him aside. They were clearly unhappy to find him causing trouble where, in their eyes, there had been none. “I redid the stock taking and proved them wrong,” Al Barazi recalls. “That’s when they put me under the microscope.”

It was not long after he made his report that members of the intelligence services began dropping by Al Barazi’s apartment. He wasn’t arrested or explicitly threatened. The men would sit with him for casual conversations over tea and Arabic sweets, inquiring about his family, asking about his studies. Sometimes the questions were pointed. Perhaps he would like to work with them? Wouldn’t he like to carry a gun? Was he planning to run away from Syria after graduating?

He didn’t know it then, but Al Barazi was already on his way to exile. He came from a family well known to Syria’s intelligence services. One of his father’s cousins, a politician named Muhsin al-Barazi, had served two months as prime minister in 1949 before he was executed in a coup. The family had once owned large swathes of rural land between Hama and Homs, but much of it had been nationalized by the Ba’ath regime. By the time Al Barazi was a student in Damascus, all nine of his uncles had fled the country. Businessmen, artists, and dissidents, they were scattered across Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and the United States.

It took another two years after his arrest for Al Barazi to follow them abroad. In the Syrian university system, graduating students were all required to take their final exams on the same day. There was no way to make up a missed test, so Al Barazi had to wait another year before taking them again. But twelve months later, on the eve of the exams, he heard the same knock on the door. Once again, his house was searched. Once again, he was casually interrogated. And once again, he was held in prison overnight — just long enough to miss the tests.

The next year, on his third try, Al Barazi arranged to take the tests in an examination center outside of Damascus. He finished the exams as quickly as he could and then, paranoid that the police were waiting at the door, jumped out the classroom window, leaving Syria that day on a flight for Kuwait.

By the time Al Barazi believed in his country again, more than three decades had passed. No longer was he a naive young man fighting the system on his own. He had become the leader of one of the hundreds of networks of Syrian exiles, a diaspora of men and women hounded from their homes, but ready to use every means at their disposal to strike back at the regime that had stolen their country from them decades before.

A shipment of supplies for Syria in an Abu Dhabi backyard. September 2012. Courtesy of Mezyan Al Barazi.

Two

This is the story of the Syrian diaspora, of the exiled businessmen, housewives, students, and professionals who crowdfunded a rebellion-turned–civil war, then became the saviors of last resort for civilians caught in its aftermath. Between 1970 and 2011, President Hafez al-Assad and his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, chased hundreds of thousands of middle-class professionals into exile. They fled one by one, year by year, each with their own reasons for leaving, their own experiences of humiliation or obstruction at the hands of the government.

Exile was convenient for both sides. For those fleeing, it was a chance to start anew. For the Assads, it was an easy way to rid themselves of those they found undesirable. They looked on approvingly as troublemakers and critics departed. Each family that escaped Syria joined previous waves of emigrants. By the time the Arab Spring sent its first sparks across the region in 2011, an estimated ten million Syrians were living abroad, compared to twenty-three million still inside the country. Many of the exiles had done well for themselves. Some, like Al Barazi, who had founded a flourishing agricultural supply company in Abu Dhabi, had even accumulated fortunes. Together, they turned out to be one of the Syrian government’s biggest strategic blunders: a self-imposed brain drain that drove the country’s ambitious professionals abroad, where their resentment was free to grow and compound — along with their means to do something about it.

Since 2011, Al Barazi alone has spent more than $400,000 of his own money supporting the revolution. An official with the Syrian National Council, the most prominent opposition group, estimates that diaspora businessmen have sent between $1 billion and $2 billion just to the armed groups challenging the Assad regime. Another prominent businessman puts the figure of all aid — lethal and humanitarian — higher still, at $20 billion, the equivalent of 50 percent of the country’s prewar gross domestic product.

In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, and dozens of other Arab cities, donation plates are being passed in private homes. Dinners are being held to raise funds. The life savings of thousands are being poured into the revolution, and many are taking on debt to keep the cash flowing.

In the beginning, the money went to peaceful protesters. Trucks filled with Samsung phones and cameras enabled activists to document their demonstrations and publicize the government’s lethal crackdowns. As armed groups organized themselves against the regime, the diaspora sent money, cigarettes, flour, and sometimes guns. To civilians caught up in the fighting, the exiles delivered medical supplies. As millions of refugees fled the country, they bought diapers, wheat, and blankets and made sure they reached the camps.

It is unlikely we will ever know exactly how much money the Syrian diaspora poured into fighting the Assad regime. No accounting exists of its hundreds of decentralized networks spread across dozens of countries. But one thing is clear: four years into a bloody civil war, the only reason that many in the country are still fighting — and surviving — is because of money and assistance provided by those who fled long ago…

Continue reading Godfathers and Thieves

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Q&A: Godfathers and Thieves author Elizabeth Dickinson

In Godfathers and Thieves, book No. 7 from Deca, Elizabeth Dickinson, author of the acclaimed Who Shot Ahmed, describes how an underground network of exiles moved millions of dollars of medicine, clothes, and weapons from the high-rises of Dubai to the frontlines of Damascus. When the Arab Spring began, Syrian businessman Mezyan Al Barazi had been abroad for more than a decade, trying to forget his distant home. Corruption under the vicious Assad dictatorship had sabotaged his studies as a young man and bankrupted his business as an adult, sending him into self-imposed exile in Dubai. But then, after watching videos of protesters on the streets of Damascus, Mezyan saw his chance to win Syria back from a ruthless regime. Risking the comfortable life he had built abroad, he devoted himself to the revolution. This is the story of how members of the Syrian diaspora such as Mezyan crowdfunded a revolution — and were themselves imperiled and ultimately transformed. Deca’s Sonia Faleiro asked Dickinson about the experience of writing Godfathers and Thieves.

How did you first learn of the diaspora’s vital role in influencing the Syrian revolution?

It happened by accident. I was in Kuwait looking into private donors to the Syrian rebels when I learned that the Syrian diaspora was playing the role of intermediary between the donors and the groups within Syria. I quickly learned that the diaspora, which obviously had a big stake in the war, was very well connected and so I tried to meet diaspora members in all the Gulf countries I covered — the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. It was like unlocking a new room. I realized the community was huge, and doing tremendously interesting work.

How open were people to talking to you?

They were thrilled. Since the Arab Spring the diaspora has felt that if the world knew what was happening in Syria, they would try to help. That information would bring about change. So they believed that the more attention was brought to their work, the better it was for Syria.

Some of the expats were worried about their safety in the Gulf. From the very beginning the Gulf countries had terrorist financing fears, particularly when it came to Syria. In the UAE, for example, the community was allowed to gather goods, but not cash. So the diaspora has worked within the laws of the countries they’re living in.

How is the Syrian diaspora different from other diasporas that have contributed to the war effort in their home countries?

The main difference is the use of social media and the tools they used to organize. Previous diasporas had to organize themselves overseas before they sent money home. In the Syrian case, because of social media’s instantaneous network, they could have a more fragmented system in which groups of people or even individuals could become their own aid agencies without the hierarchal structure of the past. It made things happen more quickly and on a grander scale. It was also more transparent. For example, a shipment sent from Abu Dhabi to Syria could be tracked every step of the way on Instagram, Viber or WhatsApp. One middle man would send a picture of supplies crossing the border into Turkey, then the next middle man would send a picture of the goods being offloaded in Syria. In this way the diaspora was also confident that their aid was reaching the right people.

How would they have gone about their work without social media?

I’m not sure the diaspora would have got involved in the uprising in the first place. In the beginning of the conflict the Syrians overseas were absolutely terrified of one another. In Syria they’d lived under a regime that was so intrusive it had created a Stasi-like atmosphere in which everyone felt their friends were watching and monitoring them for dissent. They felt this way even once they were overseas. Social media made it far less risky for the diaspora to approach fellow Syrians. They could do so through an anonymous account, which was safer than it was to approach their neighbors even if it was someone they’d known for ten years. Social media broke down barriers, and it was only after weeks or even months of interacting on social media that Syrians abroad felt confident approaching each other in person.

You interviewed 50 people in half a dozen countries. What was it about Mezyan that made him the hero of this story for you?

The fact that he stood out to other Syrians I knew. On several occasions when I was with other members of the diaspora, someone would point him out to me, giving the impression that he was a grandfatherly figure within the movement and had a wise persona. His dignity and conviction seemed even more extraordinary given how many setbacks he’d suffered. He carried the ambition embodied by the diaspora.

So much has changed in Syria since you started interviewing members of the diaspora in January 2014. In the 18 months of reporting that followed what changes did you notice in Mezyan?

There was a darkness that began to descend over Syria, and thus over the diaspora in 2014, particularly as extremist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) began to gain a foothold. The diaspora felt that not only had they lost to the regime but also that what had come in the aftermath was possibly even worse. The first thing people would say to me when I walked into their offices was, ‘look how many people died today’, or ‘another village was bombed’. The conversation always began with the latest tragedy. On the other hand, even as things got darker, people like Mezyan and his colleagues managed to maintain a public profile of optimism. Despite their personal heartbreak and disappointment, when they were together they forced themselves to be optimistic, and that’s why their aid efforts continued to be successful.

The level of heartbreak was astounding. It wasn’t just heartbreak for individual losses, but the feeling that the idea of Syria, that of a multicultural land with so much history and vibrancy, is slowly being eroded. One of the most powerful attributes of the diaspora is that it maintains this idea of Syria, and what it is to be Syrian, and in many ways that could be the legacy of the diaspora. As conflict chips away at the country, there’s a repository of memory overseas that can be reanimated, if you will, after the conflict ends. I think that’s very much what people hope — that if they can keep this spirit alive, some day they can resurrect Syria.

The story of Syria’s civil war appears to have become the story of ISIS in Syria. Did the diaspora anticipate the rise of ISIS?

I think this is one of the greatest disappointments of the diaspora — that people seem to have forgotten that it was the Syrian regime that has consistently created the greatest human suffering. But given what had happened, many people I interviewed were not surprised that ISIS had emerged. One person told me that ‘ISIS is coming from the people,’ because they are so lost, helpless, and desperate. Anyone who is not from the regime is welcomed.

There’s a sense that ISIS is the result of a slow-motion avalanche, and that it was inevitable that the more destruction the regime caused, the more likely it was that an extremist and opportunistic group would take advantage of it. And, as many in the diaspora saw it, how could you blame people? So many Syrians have lost their entire families, or have nothing to eat, and have no other option but to join such groups. It’s not so much that they support the ideology, but rather that they’re stuck in a situation of last resort and this is their least bad option.

Having said that, the vast majority of the diaspora is adamantly opposed to ISIS and sees it as an abomination of everything it means to be Syrian. At the same time there’s a lot of resentment toward the outside world for letting Syria get to this point. They feel that while they were doing everything to improve the situation, the world just stood back and watched.

Can you explain US policy at the start of the civil war and whether it could have done anything to stop what is now happening?

In the early days of the Arab Spring there was momentum and we saw a series of fast regime changes; Syrians expected the same in their case. Six months into the uprising the US called for the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down. So there was a feeling that the US was on the side of the protestors, that they were ready for the regime change to happen. But as things grew more complicated on the ground in Syria, the US policy really shifted toward one that hasn’t changed to this day: They would like to see Assad removed, but they would also like to see the structures of the state remain in place. In other words, they wanted symbolic change at the top but they didn’t want to see the chaos that had been created in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. This attitude bred a conservative approach to the crisis.

In my opinion, one of the biggest blunders of the US and the international community was a failure of strategic calculation, a failure to see that if you left Syria, which is in the middle of the Middle East and on the footsteps of Europe, to devolve into a cauldron of human suffering, it would suck many forces and elements into it, and that narratives of extremism and sectarianism would inevitably emerge. It was a failure to see the stakes of the crisis. While Washington was thinking ‘it’s just Syria, it’s not such a big country,’ the crisis has contributed to enormous turmoil through the Middle East and beyond.

So now the Syrian civil war is at the root of Europe’s refugee crisis. Can you explain to readers what people are escaping from in Syria and why Europe should help them?

What stands out to me about this particular crisis is that the Syrians who are fleeing are exactly like me. They could be me. They are educated and middle class; they loved their country and had no desire to leave, and all of a sudden they were embroiled in civil conflict.

The situation on the ground in Syria today is indescribably bad. Syria is divided between dozens and dozens of armed groups, the borders separating these groups change almost on a daily basis. In most of the country there’s very little access to outside aid, there are fuel shortages, there’s no electricity, schools in most of the country have been closed for four years. If you’re lucky there’s one bakery that’s still open in your city, but you have to stand in line for bread everyday and it turns out that when people are standing in line at the bakery is when they’re most vulnerable to air strikes, because the regime has been so calculating about striking highly populated civilian areas. Bread lines in cities like Aleppo have been targeted.

So this daily horror is something you and I would surely flee from, and the people who are coming to Europe are exactly like you and me. Their country has been stolen from them, and they’re not seeking a better existence, they’re just seeking an existence. And they feel that anywhere around Syria is unsafe, because this conflict has repeatedly shown its ability to metastasize and move to new areas in Syria and frankly, the region. So to come to Europe is their final escape.

How should Europe respond?

I personally think that any country would be lucky to have Syrians coming in, working, and being entrepreneurial. Syria is a country of incredible history, culture, and enthusiasm. I’ve benefitted enormously from the Syrians I’ve known and they would bring energy to any country they would settle in. A refugee arriving in a place like Germany represents an opportunity for that country. I guarantee that in three or four years the same refugee would have set up his or her own business and would be contributing to society in a way that we cannot even imagine. So Europe must look at this as an investment in the future, rather than something that is going to tax the system. Because in the end the Syrians will contribute far more than any benefits they draw.

Tell me how reporting this story has impacted you.

It’s been a story of heartbreak for me. To watch so many wonderful people hurt by what is going on in Syria, to watch the callousness of much of the response… It’s easy to think that reporters are objective, that we separate ourselves from the story, but I certainly haven’t been able to separate myself from the heartbreak that my sources are going through. I think Syria will be a part of my life going forward, because I understand the tragedy that has befallen the lives of Syrians. I hope that I can continue covering the crisis, but I also hope that something changes for the better in Syria.

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Q&A: The Wizard and the Volcano author Marc Herman

In The Wizard and the Volcano, book No. 6 from Deca, Marc Herman lays bare the complex interplay between magic and modernity. When a volcano on the Indonesian island of Java erupts, the wizard of Mount Merapi refuses to obey orders to evacuate his threatened village. The danger, he says, lies below, in the plains by the sea. When the prediction comes true, the wizard becomes a celebrity and thousands follow his example, abandoning badly-run government camps to return to their homes under the smoking crater — until the mountain explodes, with stunning results. In the tradition of Into the Wild and Endurance, Herman’s story takes readers on a spectacular journey into the life of a man who chose to confront overwhelming natural forces — a mystic who ultimately proves to be more human, and more heroic, than anyone could have imagined. Deca’s Elizabeth Dickinson asked Herman about the experience of writing The Wizard and the Volcano.

In 2006, you found yourself in Indonesia to report on the eruption of the Mount Merapi volcano. How did you first learn about the wizard, Maridjan?

I had lived and worked in Indonesia some years before and came back to report on Mount Merapi, which was expected to erupt imminently. Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, and 3,000 miles long, yet kind of invisible in the world’s consciousness. That’s also how the wizard’s story was. Maridjan is quite well known in the area around the volcano, but not very well known off it. Once I got to the region where Merapi is, I learned of the wizard, and the next step was renting a minibike and going up there.

As you talk to people in the area of the volcano, they seem remarkably unpanicked. Was that the mood?

Unpanicked is a good way to put it. Mt. Merapi has been erupting almost continuously since 1992. Before that it did so in the 60s, 50s and 30s. The people who live on the top of the mountain work most often as subsistence farmers, tied to the land, and they have to manage their financial and physical risks. Just like earthquakes in San Francisco, this was something the people had to live with and adapt to. They took it as part of their environment.

Were villagers surprised when the wizard of Merapi decided he wouldn’t leave ahead of the eruption?

It made sense to them that the wizard didn’t want to leave. This was the first evacuation in the modern history of the volcano. It had erupted before and they had never evacuated, so people wondered, ‘why bother?’ Most people made their own decisions, but noted Maridjan’s stance as one factor in their thinking.

One man I spoke with told me simply, Merapi doesn’t throw garbage in its front yard. He thought the volcano would erupt, but it would do so away from villages and towns. That had almost always been true in the past.

What are some of the stories you heard about the mountain — experiences that had hardened the villagers to the volcano’s fury?

They had seen a very destructive eruption in 1994, when Merapi killed more than 60 people. A wedding had been underway near to where the wizard lived, but no one took the eruption seriously and they didn’t cancel the ceremony. Instead of seeking safety, the wedding party went outside to watch. Unexpectedly, a pyroclastic cloud rolled into town and they all died, including the bride and groom.

When I went to talk to people about the new eruption, my question was simply ‘why don’t you just leave this time?’ They said, you have to understand that the last incident was the exception to the rule. Merapi had sent clouds like this 20 times before and the 19 others weren’t so bad.

Were there other reasons that people didn’t want to evacuate?

There was a lot of distrust of the government, which had ordered the evacuation. The year before, authorities had built new dams on the top of the mountain that were supposed to slow down or stop mudslides called lahars, which happen when the mountain erupts and ash mixes with river water, creating a soupy toxic avalanche. Those could flow all the way to a nearby city, Yogyakarta, where a million people live. The government had built these dams with the idea that they could filter off the lahars before they left the mountain.

But as many as 50,000 people live near the top of the mountain too, and the dangerous material the dams diverted away from the city could be deflected toward their small villages. On top of that, many people feared that putting these dams up could change the spiritual balance and moods of the mountain. It could offend Merapi and cause eruptions.

The volcano did erupt, and it was destructive. Was there any sense of hurt or even heartbreak that this volcano — with which they had a long, coexisting history — had turned on them?

Like a lot of people in circumstances in which their beliefs collide with an unexpected reality, there was some rationalization when things didn’t go exactly according to plan. As people individually weighed whether to leave, some of their thinking was classically scientific, while some was more prosaic, like wondering how they had made the mountain angry. I think both ways of thinking helped people make appropriate decisions.

What the wizard was doing — refusing to evacuate — was understood on the mountain for what it really was: an act of civil disobedience against a badly managed evacuation. It’s not that he made an emotional choice, but rather that he responded rationally to an unreasonable situation. His neighbors saw him as a hero for standing up to the government.

Tell us more about what you mean by an act of civil disobedience. What exactly was the wizard fighting for by staying put?

We have the example from the United States of Mt St Helens, where a man named Harry Truman refused to comply with an evacuation order. He stayed on the mountain, which erupted, and he died of his injuries. As soon as Maridjan started saying he wouldn’t leave, similar narratives emerged about him being this grumpy old man who didn’t like to be told what to do. That’s not what was really going on in Maridjan’s case, in my view.

A recent series of disasters had struck Indonesia, which is a very seismically unstable place — the hottest part of the Pacific ring of fire. A lot of the response had gone poorly, similar to Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. The wizard put his foot down and said, without actually saying it, ‘you can’t force tens of thousands of people from their homes for an indeterminate amount of time and no plan to safeguard their livelihoods.’ He was right. You have to organize these sorts of things well, or people suffer almost as much from the evacuation as they would from the disaster. I saw that happening firsthand: the emergency camps weren’t well managed, water wasn’t always there, the food arrived sporadically, and people worried about their livestock starving uphill.

Eventually people started to agree with Maridjan preferring to risk the volcano over staying in the camps. The implication at the time was that the people who didn’t cooperate with the evacuation were ignorant country bumpkins listening to a misguided spiritual leader. In fact, people were responding rationally to a very poorly organized disaster plan.

What was it like to be around the wizard. Did you feel a mystical presence?

He lived in a very humble home, which was mostly undecorated, and dressed in simple clothes. I got the feeling that he took his position very seriously and thought of himself as a public servant. It would have been very easy for someone like him to play the New Age card and make a big deal out of himself. Like a lot of places, the business of belief is very profitable in Indonesia, and there are charlatans who charge money for spiritual services. He could have been the king of those guys if he wanted to, and he didn’t.

As for the mystical presence, well, I think he was a cool guy, but I didn’t expect anyone to start levitating around him. I spoke to one person who claimed to have seen him teleport, and I think he really believed it and saw something he considered paranormal. Personally, when we were done talking, I had to ride my motorcycle back down the mountain in the usual way.

What’s the wizard’s legacy in your mind?

In part because Maridjan drew attention to his people’s difficult position, the disaster plans changed. In 2010, when the next eruption happened, things went more smoothly if still not perfectly. The mountain has erupted every year since then so this will be an issue in the future, and not just in Indonesia.

What Maridjan really did is humanize the people who live on the volcano. He was telling the world, ‘My title may be sorcerer, but we’re not living in some fairytale and we’re not an anthropological case study. We’re a town that lives in a difficult geological circumstance and we have to live here because we graze cows for a living and this is where the grass grows best.” His legacy is that he used the celebrity his mystical identity afforded to argue for more humane, effective thinking about how to respond to natural disasters.

I think in the end he won. The mountain is safer today. If Maridjan had meekly come down the first time, and not made such a fuss, what incentive would there have been to fix the problems?

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Q&A: 13 Men author Sonia Faleiro

In 13 Men, book No. 5 from Deca, Sonia Faleiro takes readers deep inside a remote tribal community to the scene of one of India's murkiest crimes. On January 22, 2014 a twenty-year-old woman approached the police in a rural hamlet in West Bengal, to say that she had been gang-raped by thirteen men. The rape, she alleged, was ordered by the village council  as punishment for her relationship with a non-tribal man. The woman's complaint drew global condemnation—rape in India, according to some interpretations, now had official sanction. Just as Baby's case slipped out of the news, Faleiro traveled to West Bengal, where she conducted dozens of interviews with villagers, politicians, lawyers, activists, and the victim herself. What she discovered was beyond anything that had been reported in the press. As some people demanded justice, she learned that others were crying out for the truth. Deca's Elizabeth Dickinson asked Faleiro about the experience of writing 13 Men.

How did you come to this story and what made it stand out amid the cases of gang rape that we’ve seen in India in recent years?

Like many people in India, I had been trying to process the deluge of news reports on sexual assault. Twenty-year-old Baby’s case stood out because the details were very affecting—the young woman, a member of the indigenous Santhal tribe, had allegedly been gang-raped by 13 men on the orders of the village council for falling in love with an outsider. Once I started reporting the story, it became clear that some of the very details that had grabbed my attention and made Baby’s story a global headline had been misreported. The truth, as it turned out, was not what it seemed.

When I flew down to Kolkata, the first people I met were some Santhal activists, who now figure in the story, and they are incredibly sensitive, empathetic people – exactly the kind of people who you would expect to stand up for a victim of a sexual assault. But they were convinced that Baby was not telling the entire truth. I then traveled to Birbhum, where I received permission to meet Baby, and then on to Subalpur, where I met the family and friends of the thirteen men accused of gang-raping her. It took me months to begin to make sense of the very conflicting testimonies that I recorded.

You discuss some of the ways that the press gets the story wrong in its first telling. What does this tell us about reporting on these issues in the media?

Some of the inaccuracies arose from Baby’s police complaint, which she gave on January 22, 2014. Keep in mind that if Baby had been gang raped the previous morning, she couldn’t be expected to give a linear description of what had happened to her.

In her police statement, Baby said she had been gang raped on the orders of the village council. When she offered judicial testimony some days later, she clarified that the rape had taken place before the village council was held. But it was the police complaint that was shared with the press, which ran widely with that telling of events.

Subalpur is 117 miles outside of Kolkata. To get there you need to take a train, then hire a car, and then find someone who can show you where the village is because it isn’t on the map. This person must speak Santhali, and should preferably be a Santhal—and this person needs to trust you, but should also be trusted by the other Santhals. So it takes a lot of effort to report a story like this, and the inaccuracies we all read in the press were a combination of newspapers not having the time to report this story deeply, and later, not having the interest to clarify the misinformation they had unwittingly printed.

What impact did this misreporting have on the course of justice?

It was in part because of the inaccuracies of Baby’s police statement that the story became front-page news. So in that sense, the inaccuracies served Baby and perhaps the cause of justice.

But I do worry about the possible impact that the misreporting could have on the functioning of village councils as well as on mainstream attitudes toward the Santhal community.

We can all agree that some village councils, whether tribal- or caste-based, have done terrible things: They have encouraged mob justice, for one. The people who suffer most from these decisions are women. But some of these councils have also served their people well. They have kept the peace, resolved disputes, and delivered true justice in communities so poor and so marginalized that they are routinely dismissed by the police, and have no hope of ever seeing complaints investigated, never mind going to trial.

In this case, it wasn’t the village council that demanded the rape. The council fined Baby for breaking what they believed was one of their laws. Whether or not we agree with this decision, and their general treatment of Baby, we cannot deny that Santhals have been mistreated for centuries and are doing the best that they can to survive in this rapidly changing world. I don’t mean to say that they shouldn’t be asked to take responsibility for their actions, but rather that their behavior must be viewed in context of the abuse they have suffered.

How difficult was it to get in touch with Baby?

I asked the police if I could interview her and they said yes. I was told by many people that I wouldn’t get permission, because she was placed in a high security government facility for her own safety and no other reporter had been allowed to meet her. But I just followed the first rule of journalism school: ask.

With rape becoming such a high profile issue in India, are politicians getting involved to help – or to exploit – the issue?

In this particular case, the villagers believe that Baby concocted the story of rape on the behest of politicians. They argue that politicians want to take away the right to self-police from the villagers and from Santhals in general, as a first step to taking control of their mineral-rich land.

Elsewhere, there have been several rape cases that have benefited from political involvement. Politicians, under pressure from the media, have urged the police to investigate cases thoroughly. Some politicians have been a force for positive change, but too many others continue to speak of sexual assault, and women in general, in incredibly offensive ways that speak to their ignorant and misogynistic thinking.

What has been the initial reaction to your story from within India?

Readers do like a neat ending. They want to know, understandably so, that something either happened or it didn’t, that someone is either good or bad. But the fact is that real life isn’t that simple, that some things are not black and white. In this case, a young woman said she was gang raped, and why would she lie? On the other hand, there is no hard evidence to prove her claim. The question isn’t even who is lying (people do lie, after all), but whether the justice system succeeded in this case. The fact that we are debating this matter at all should tell you something.

You said you came to this story in part as a way to understand your own reaction to the wave of sexual assault. How did reporting this story affect you personally?

This isn’t a story with one villain, or even one victim. I met Baby and had great sympathy for her, and I admired the choices she had made to broaden her horizons – to work in Delhi, to be independent, to become a modern woman. I got a sense of her great love for the outsider, Khaleque Sheikh.

Then I went to the village, and heard people say that Baby is a liar - and I felt a sense of sympathy for them as well because a lot of them truly believe that this rape did not happen. Meanwhile, 13 able-bodied men have vanished from Subalpur leaving behind 13 families without a breadwinner. It’s going to be very hard for their wives and children to make ends meet.

The question of survival is really at the heart of this story. In the course of everyone seeking survival – Baby, the villagers, the tribe - something went terribly wrong.

As to how the case changed me. Well, let's just say, I now know better than to believe everything that I read in the newspapers!

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Deca #5: "13 MEN" by Sonia Faleiro will be published on February 26. Preorder your copy here: http://www.decastories.com/13men/