Dispatch #14
Read about the political crisis in Turkey, the challenges of investigative journalism in North Africa, the consequences of military meddling in science in 1960s Brazil and the urban history of Saigon.
Welcome to Translator’s 14th weekly Dispatch, bringing you summaries of four compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.
The day after World Press Freedom Day (3 May), we read about the dire situation facing investigative journalists in North Africa. Elsewhere in this week’s Dispatch: on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Saigon’s former chief architect reflects on the successes and failures of the city’s reconstruction and headlong growth, a political scientist ponders Turkey’s political future after the detention of the country’s main opposition leader last month, and a Brazilian article describes how the last military junta’s witch hunt set back the country’s scientific research ecosystem for decades.
We hope you enjoy the read.
P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.
Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.
Truth Under Fire
Investigative journalists in North Africa are being hunted, hacked and harassed, but they haven’t stopped telling the truth
A troubling wind is blowing across the world. From Europe to the Middle East, authoritarian governments are tightening their grip on power, cracking down on dissent and diversity of opinion. In North Africa, this has translated into a menacing war on investigative journalists. But even under surveillance, threats and prison sentences, some still find the courage to write.
In Morocco, editor Soulaimane Raissouni was dragged from his home and jailed for five years on widely condemned charges. His crime? Investigating state corruption. He wasn’t alone. Fellow journalist Omar Radi was also targeted, both by police and Pegasus spyware. “They go after your private life to break you,” Raissouni said before his sentencing. He’s now out of prison, but his words remain a warning, as reported in this article by Imran Al Fasi (a pseudonym) for Global Investigative Journalism Network.
In Tunisia, once a post-Arab Spring beacon of hope, democracy is slipping fast. (The Committee to Protect Journalists has a database of attacks on journalists going back decades – for Tunisia, 2024 and 2025 are peak years over the entire dataset). A vague law against “false information” is being used to muzzle reporters. Walid Mejri, who leads the newsroom at Alqatiba, says people are now too afraid to talk. “Even speaking off the record is dangerous,” he told Al Fasi. Women journalists face an extra layer of threat of online harassment, professional exclusion and physical intimidation.
In Algeria, the message is clear: publish and perish. Reporters like Rabah Karèche and Belkacem Houam have been jailed for covering protests and food safety like reporting on land-use protests by members of the Tuareg tribe and Houam was jailed for reporting that 3,000 tonnes of exported Algerian dates were returned from France because they contained harmful chemicals.
“There is no space left for investigative journalism inside Algeria,” says Ali Boukhlef. “The only option is exile.”
In Libya, where militias run the streets, being a journalist is a matter of survival. Ahmed Al-Senussi was arrested after his outlet exposed COVID-19 vaccine corruption. He’s now in hiding. Other reporters use encrypted apps, aliases and foreign partners just to stay alive. “Every investigation is a calculated risk,” says one journalist. Still, they press on, exposing arms trafficking, financial crimes and state violence.
Despite the repression, these journalists are not backing down. Teams at Alqatiba and Inkyfada continue to publish major exposés from secret Dubai properties owned by Tunisian elites to EU-backed deportations of migrants. Their work has led to arrests, government investigations and public pressure.
North Africa’s investigative journalists are working in one of the world’s most hostile regions for press freedom but they are adapting, resisting and showing that the region’s truth tellers are still in pursuit of accountability.
Original article (“Unearthing Truths in Turbulent Times: The High Cost of Investigative Journalism in North Africa” by Imran Al Fasi (a pseudonym)) was published on 8 April 2025 on the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) website. It’s available in multiple languages (English, Arabic and French).
It is available here.
The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) is an international association of nonprofit organisations that support, promote and produce investigative journalism. GIJN provides resources, training and a network for journalists worldwide, particularly in environments where press freedom is under threat.
Summary by ZN.
Autocrats Against the Academy
How Brazil’s last military junta set scientific progress back by targeting top scientists and systematically destroying the country’s research ecosystem
The last few weeks have seen Donald Trump lambast and bully American elite universities – guilty, according to a highly tendentious narrative spun by the administration, of being hotbeds of sedition, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The attack should be worrying to anyone who holds academic freedom and the independence of its institutions at heart. But there’s an additional self-defeating element to it. After all – besides being viewed by the administration, often phantasmagorically, as incubators of extreme wokeness and pervasive anti-Semitism – institutions such as Harvard, Columbia, Stanford and UPenn are also, in reality, central to the kind of global supremacy, technological or otherwise, that Trump and his hawks are desperate to maintain.
As Brazilian journalist Sérgio Barbo writes in a long investigative piece that appeared on platform A Pública a year ago but seems highly relevant today, it is not the first time a cabal of right-wingers, in attempting to stifle dissent and subordinate free academic activity to the interests of capitalist enterprise, saw off the branch the country is sitting on.
As he explains in O Que a Ciência Brasileira Perdeu com a Repressão Durante a Ditadura (What Brazilian Science Lost As a Result of State Repression During the Dictatorship), the military junta that ruled Brazil from 1964 and 1985 systematically targeted high-profile scientists and research institutions to fight off the perceived threat of communism. They simultaneously tried to clumsily redirect scientific research towards the interests of businesses and entrepreneurs. Brazil has been living with the unintended consequences of these policies for decades since.
The article spends a good chunk dwelling on the best-known episode in the story in which ten senior researchers from the Oswald Cruz Institute for scientific research in Rio de Janeiro were forcibly retired in 1970 – what later came to be known as “O massacre de Manguinhos” (The Massacre of Manguinhos) thanks to a 1978 memoir by one of scientists impacted, Herman Lent (1911-2004). The article relates also how the department of parasitology at University of São Paulo –dubbed as “red” because of the high proportion of left-wingers amongst its staff as well as its social mission to fight off widespread diseases such as malaria – incurred a similar fate not long after.
However, the investigation makes clear how these two episodes – which were carried out under the AI-5, a special law which gave the executive additional powers – were just the endpoint of a much longer campaign of systematic state repression that indeed begun the very moment the military deposed left-wing president João Goulart (1919-1976). The article states that between 1968 and 1973, the time period during which AI-5 was active, at least 168 professors, researchers and intellectuals had their jobs terminated and subjected to a regime in which they couldn’t be contracted by any institution of higher education receiving public funding, and were consequently forced into exile. In fact the purges and harassment started as soon as 1964, when a government decree established special commissions to look for dissidents and subversives were installed in universities and research institutions.
It was all part of a strategy, also affecting trade unions and farmers’ organisations, to cement regime control across the country. The article notes that between 800 and 1,000 researchers were the victims of repression during military rule. Of the 434 reported dead or disappeared by the dictatorship, 47 were connected in some way with the University of São Paulo).
As the article makes clear, this wasn’t an obscurantist crusade against science per se. It was rather a campaign against the culture and spirit of the academy, against particular scientists, and an attempt to yoke Brazilian science to particular economic interests and to a narrow notion of how economic growth is achieved. Anything deemed economically useless (or potentially politically seditious) was abandoned. The result, however, wasn’t an economic boom, but rather a lag in fundamental scientific research in key sectors such as medicine and electronics that continues to haunt Brazil to this very day.
It’s difficult to know what the fate of higher education will be under Trump. But if Barbo’s investigation offers any indication at all, we are heading down not only a dangerous but also a self-defeating path.
Original article (“O Que a Ciência Brasileira Perdeu com a Repressão Durante a Ditadura” by Sérgio Barbo) was written in Brazilian Portuguese and published in Agência Pública on 7 April 2024. It’s available here.
Agência Pública is the first non-profit for investigative journalism in Brazil. Founded in 2011 by women reporters, it marries in-depth, independent journalism with a preoccupation for social justice.
Summary by BS.
Last exit before autocracy
As Turkey reels from the detention of leading opposition figure Ekrem İmamoğlu, a Turkish political scientist analyses why this is truly the last exit before autocracy
Ok. Imagine a game of football – soccer, if you are American – that isn’t played on a nice flat surface, but rather on a hill, with the pitch sloping one way. (Maybe, over time, the slope is getting steeper too.)
There are two teams: let’s call one ‘Regime’ and the other ‘Opposition’. Team Regime has the high ground. Their goal – the thing you have to kick the ball through to get a point – is at the top of the hill, hard but not impossible to reach. Whenever the ball is kicked up towards their goal the force of gravity makes it roll back towards Team Opposition’s naturally far more vulnerable goal.
The referees are supposed to be neutral. And I mean, they really do look like referees, with whistles and earpieces for getting advice from the other refs off the pitch. But actually, they’re in the pocket of Team Regime. And if the game gets too close, the refs start handing out red cards to their opponent’s star players. It goes from being a game of 15 against 15, to 15 against 12, to 15 against 10. There’s always a pretext for sending someone off.
Now, one could still call this a game of football. But is it fair? Of course not.
This is the analogy political scientist Şebnem Gümüşçü uses to describe “competitive authoritarianism,” the political system she says has been operating in Turkey since 2015, if not before. It looks competitive – there are political parties, rallies, elections – but the whole thing is skewed. (Gümüşçü has written a book on the subject).
Competitive authoritarianism might seem bad enough. But in an interview with Fayn, Gümüşçü is asked to use political science to analyse what’s going on now. What happens when Team Regime simply starts rewriting the rulebook, eliminating Team Opposition or threatening their interests off the pitch (tyres slashed, business busted, that kind of thing)? When does the game change from managed democracy to outright autocracy?
After the detention in March of Turkey’s main opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu – and a widening crackdown since – Turkey has now reached a point of no return, Gümüşçü says. It either becomes a full-blown autocracy or somehow it becomes a genuine democracy. Which will it be?
It’s not that everything happening now is new. Selahattin Demirtaş, a Kurdish political leader who threatened to upend things, has been locked up since 2016. But to continue the football analogy, he was a right-back, not a goal scorer. He couldn’t win power by himself. Taking him off the pitch, Gümüşçü suggests, is not the same as locking up İmamoğlu and his whole team.
Before, she says, the opposition had to work harder to get into the game of power, yes. It had to go door-to-door drumming up support, it had to be more creative. But what the government’s actions indicate now is that it intends to decide everything alone: “I’ll run for a third term, maybe a fourth. I’ll stay in power until I die”. The opposition might be allowed to compete with the ruling coalition at a local level, but they shouldn’t ask for too much: “they shouldn’t make a nuisance of themselves”.
Gümüşçü identifies several factors shaping what happens next: how the masses respond, whether the opposition can channel “mass energy” into an ongoing political dynamic – bringing forward national elections slated for 2028, for example – and whether this splits the ruling coalition, either between its two parties (the AKP – President Erdoğan’s party – and the nationalist MHP) or within them. At some point, some in the coalition might feel they are losing, worry about the cost, and seek a transition: “one of the most important and reasonable ways to exit authoritarianism”.
How about external actors, from beyond the sphere of domestic party politics? What about Turkish business, or the EU and the US?
“I don’t think it was a coincidence that it happened [İmamoğlu being locked up] after Trump was elected”, Gümüşçü says: “But would he have done it if Trump hadn't been elected? Yes.” Maybe not so quickly, and in a different way – but ultimately it would have happened. Foreign criticism of domestic politics is a double-edged sword in any case, Gümüşçü notes. It can always be viewed as ‘interference’.
As for Turkish business, it’s tricky to know what it thinks. There have long been tensions. Gümüşçü recalls a 2013 tax audit against a major conglomerate viewed as backing anti-government protests: Koç Holdings. Before that, multi-billion-dollar fines against a media mogul ultimately led to the transfer of news titles to government sympathisers.
More recently, a government financial regulator, the TMSF, has been given fresh powers widely seen as being a new political front for the regime in the economy. The opposition tried to get TMSF’s new powers ruled unconstitutional. Business leaders who criticised the powers found themselves facing a ban against going abroad.
In liberal theory, Fayn points out, authoritarianism and foreign investment don’t mix. China and the UAE still attract foreign investment, Gümüşçü notes. But there’s a different dynamic here. China and UAE have long been understood as authoritarian. With Turkey: “we are sliding from democracy to authoritarianism, with constant instability”.
There were off-ramps on this slide towards authoritarianism: the 2007 election, and the 2010 constitutional changes (when a whole set of ‘reforms’, some which Gümüşçü supports, others with unexpectedly dire consequences, were bundled up together to “confuse” people – political scientists included, she admits).
At this point, after 23 years in power, there is a significant time factor at play in changing direction, or getting people off the AKP. Gümüşçü’s fieldwork points to the nature of these sunk costs. It’s not just about economics. (“Makarna kömür değil o hikâye” – it’s not a story just about macaroni and coal, Translator’s favourite line of the interview). “There are emotional ties”, she says: “if they received support even once in 23 years, for example, when an infant was ill, when a disabled child needed help, you are now talking about a giant debt of gratitude”. Housewives have a particularly strong bond to the AKP, Gümüşçü notes, and after 23 years, it won’t be easily broken.
There’s a process of selective memory too. After all, Erdoğan’s first terms in power were considered successful. And even if people are doing badly economically now, they remember the past. “There are two times in my life when I was rich”, electors tell Gümüşçü, “with Özal [a Turkish leader in the 1990s] and with Tayyip Erdoğan”. These are personal memories: when someone got the deeds to their first house, when they bought a car. They matter.
And then there’s the fear, the worry that if people gave up on the AKP Turkey would turn into Syria. The AKP has been rhetorically eliding the CHP opposition party with Kurdish PKK terrorism for years as ‘CHPKK’. (Though more recently the AKP has been trying to conduct a U-turn on the Kurds (if not the PKK): “so fast that they will go off the road and almost fall off a cliff”, Gümüşçü notes).
Despite this, she remains optimistic as to the future. The public outcry since March 19 has changed her sense of where things are going: from a 3/10 likelihood democracy will win out to 6-7/10. But the opposition mustn’t lose momentum. “This is not about being on the streets all the time” – at least not only that. They need to demonstrate there is still hope, not to despair. The regime will try to derail the popular movement: “putting provocateurs inside, starting fights within the opposition, creating chaos among the masses”. The opposition must remain calm, determined, rational.
That way, perhaps Turkey can exit authoritarianism now – (just) before it’s too late.
Original interview conducted by Ayşe Karabat and Semin Gümüşel, published in Turkish under the title ‘Siyaset bilimci Şebnem Gümüşçü: “Ya tam otokrasi ya demokrasi, geri dönüşü olmayan bir yol ayrımındayız”’, on 3 April 2025.
It’s available here.
Fayn studio is an independent Turkish media outlet.
Summary by CEM.
Between Slums and Skylines: A Former Chief Architect Reflects on Hồ Chí Minh City’s Urban Renaissance
A planner reflects on a half a century of urban change from post-war reconstruction to headlong development
Since even before the turn of the 21st Century, Southeast Asia has shaken the world with its rapid urban development. Hồ Chí Minh City is often cited as one of the prime examples of this transformation projected to become a global megacity by 2035. When you consider Vietnam’s very recent history of devastating war, it is an extraordinary feat.
30 April 2025 marked half a century since the end of the Second Indo-China War (often referred to from a US perspective as the Vietnam War). While media outlets across Vietnam have rushed to report on the lavish celebrations of 50 years national reunification taking place across the country, in an article for VN Express journalists Lê Tuyết and Quang Tuệ have decided rather to reflect on the changes in Saigon’s urban structure in a remarkable exposition charting Saigon’s reconstruction and then rapid expansion after the war.
“Many people criticize the development of Hồ Chí Minh City by comparing it with countries like Singapore, but they forget the starting point and circumstances that this city was founded upon,” says Mr. Võ Kim Cương, the former chief Architect of Hồ Chí Minh City. Mr. Võ joined the Department of Construction in 1989. After the war ended in 1975, he points out the city still faced numerous challenges, from a lack of capital to the US embargo, lasting until 1994. The nation’s leaders had enough to worry about with keeping the masses from starving than thinking through urban reconstruction. Survival was key – even apartments in the centre would be surrounded by chicken and livestock, as the people fought to stay alive. In the first 5 years after the war, the city had no significant construction projects, no long-term strategy, but only what Mr. Võ describes as “partial firefighting.”
Formerly known as Saigon, the city had earned a reputation during the colonial era for being the most developed in Indochina, known to the world as the “Pearl of the Far East”. However, when Mr. Võ moved to Saigon from Hanoi in the 80s, he realised this really only applied to the wealthiest Districts: 1, 3, and 10. Outside of the centre, along the canals of Thị Nghè, Tàu Hủ, and Lò Gốm, towards the urban districts Bình Thạnh, Tân Bình, and Phú Nhuận, there were incredibly deprived areas, what the old government described as “slums”. After the war, the city’s borders were redrawn, merging the old colonially demarcated Saigon with the much poorer outlying district of Gia Định and the small city of Chợ Lớn, established by the Chinese-speaking minority Hoa community. It was this massively expanded urban and semi-urban area that was given the name Hồ Chí Minh City in 1976, commonly referred to as HCMC.
The merging of different localities which had different governance structures and different historic levels of investment presented new challenges. The Saigon Capital was classified as a “first-class city” by the French, and had benefited from systematic urban planning and symbolic constructions such as the Independence Palace, Notre Dame Cathedral, and the Opera House. On the other end of the spectrum was Gia Định, a large semi-rural area with a network of canals that had become a shelter for those fleeing wartime violence.
“At that time, Saigon was already zoned according to urban planning and standards, while many other places developed spontaneously with many distortions,” Mr. Võ says. The result was a radical asymmetry. Mr. Võ describes the new city as being “deformed”. From a planning perspective, “HCMC at that time was like a slice of a boiled egg. The yolk in the middle was District 1 and 3, surrounded by the white with many slums and poor slums.”
Architect Khương Văn Mười, former Vice Chairman of Vietnam’s Association of Architects, notes that while many parts of the country were heavily devastated by war, Saigon was almost intact: “This safety had attracted people from everywhere to avoid military service, avoid bombs, and seek business opportunities.” A 1972 report by USAID shows that Saigon’s population quadrupled from just over 1 million in 1945, to nearly 3.5 million in 1975. But during this period, immigrants could not enter the inner city. New houses were self-constructed without proper regulation or planning, forming slums along the canals, paddyfields and suburbs of Gia Định.
“The urban imbalance has haunted the city for the past 50 years, when it has to simultaneously build, repair, and renovate,” says Mr. Võ: “it has become a huge challenge in the development process.” He uses the comparison of building a house on an empty lot versus an old piece of land, it’s always easier to build something when starting new.
There is a gulf between the state’s ambition to build anew and the existing urban reality. “Looking back, I think the plan at that time was probably a bit idealistic, because it was almost like imagining drawing the city on empty land, while the reality of Hồ Chí Minh City is very complicated. Later, I realized that some of the plan was not feasible,” he says. The biggest limitation of this plan was the lack of resources. “There are a lot of drawings, but no one knew how much money was in the pocket. The plan was just slogans without a specific implementation plan,” he commented. The material conditions would only improve after the country opened up in 1995, but then major construction was strongly influenced by the pull from the private sector.
Despite all these challenges, urban reconstruction has had its fair share of successes, such as the revitalisation of the city’s most polluted canal Nhiêu Lộc – Thị Nghè, into a clean river running through the heart of the city. Nonetheless, reflecting on decades of hard work, Mr. Võ looks back on reconstruction with some regret. “There are places where if the planning was well implemented, the urban appearance and people's lives would be much better,” he says.
Original article (“Cuộc Tái Thiết Đô Thị Sái Gón Sau Chiến Tranh” by Lê Tuyết and Quang Tuệ) was written in Vietnamese and published in VnExpress on 22 April 2025. It’s available here.
VnExpress is a Vietnamese online newspaper, run by FPT Group. It was the first newspaper in Vietnam that was not produced in paper format. It is one of the most popular websites in Vietnam.
Summary by TMH.
That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!
The Translator team