Dispatch #18

Read about a political fixer caught in a Franco-Algerian intelligence war, failures of justice for rape survivors in Iceland, Thailand’s enduring protest movement and trans desire in Argentine cinema.

Jun 01, 2025

Welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of four compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.

In Algeria and France, the rise and fall of media provocateur Mehdi Ghezzar offers a window into the collapse of soft diplomacy and the new age of claim and counterclaim now reshaping Franco-Algerian politics. In Thailand, activist Jatupat “Pai” Boonpattararaksa reflects on the aftermath of the 2020 protest movement and the endurance organising he sees as the path forward.

In Iceland, an unflinching exposé asks how a country lauded for its feminism continues to fail rape survivors in court. And in Argentina, Camilla Sosa Villada’s latest film reimagines trans representation, offering a protagonist who lives, desires and struggles on her own terms.

These pieces explore what happens when power is contested and what becomes possible when the narrative begins to shift.

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.

The Garage Owner and the Spies

A once-celebrated media personality and political fixer, Mehdi Ghezzar now finds himself sidelined as Franco-Algerian tensions have taken on a new, harder edge

In an article for the French quarterly Revue XXI, Clément Fayol and Antoine Izambard discuss how, for years, Mehdi Ghezzar played many roles: talk show firebrand in France, presidential campaign manager for the winning candidate in the 2024 elections in Algeria, wealthy entrepreneur – the article begins in Ghezzar’s car repair shop on the outskirts of Paris, one of several businesses he owns – and self-declared emissary between the two deeply historically intertwined Mediterranean nations, former coloniser and former colonised, France and Algeria.

Born into Algeria’s elite and raised in proximity to power, Ghezzar fashioned himself as a cultural intermediary. But as the fault lines between Paris and Algiers hardened into espionage battles and the world changed, so did the stakes. Today, Ghezzar finds himself overwhelmed by a game far larger than his ambitions, caught between suspicion and irrelevance.

At the height of his visibility, Ghezzar was a household name on RMC’s talk show Les Grandes Gueules, crowned “Big Mouth of the Year” twice by popular vote. But his tenure on French airwaves ended abruptly in August 2024 after an inflammatory anti-Morocco remark on Algerian radio, at a time when France was courting Rabat. The fallout was swift: he lost his platform, just as the already fraught relationship between France and Algeria deteriorated into open hostility.

Still, Ghezzar sought to retain influence, recasting himself not only as a political player, but as a kind of freelance diplomat. He boasted ties to President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, whose 2024 re-election he had helped secure. Draped in the Algerian flag and bolstered by a multi-million euro business portfolio in France, Ghezzar began mobilising what he called the “DZ lobby” (short for “dzayer”, the Arabic word for Algeria) – a media-savvy network of Algerian-French influencers he wished to create, made up of rappers, and reality TV stars. His goal was to shape Algeria’s international image, projecting a new kind of “soft power” far from the musty corridors of the FLN or the generals of the War of Independence.

But the geopolitical context shifted beneath his feet. In July 2024, France recognised Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara – once a Spanish colony, long disputed between Morocco and the Sahrawi Polisario movement backed by Algeria. For Algiers, Paris had crossed a red line. Algeria recalled its security officers from the multinational team in Paris responsible for preventing a terrorist attack on the Paris Olympic Games, diplomatic expulsions began, and a tit-for-tat war of accusation and counter-accusation began to take shape. Suddenly, Ghezzar’s influencer dinners and TikTok livestreams, once taken as kitschy symbols of diaspora pride, found themselves in the crosshairs of a full-blown trans-Mediterranean diplomatic crisis.

In the new political and geopolitical climate highlighted by the article, French counterintelligence began watching more closely. Reports surfaced that Ghezzar had become a “conduit” for Algerian influence, helping promote pro-regime narratives among the diaspora, even though officials also dismissed him as a “non-serious agitator” with no confirmed ties to state intelligence. For his part, Ghezzar denied all accusations, calling them “a pack of lies” and insisting he was simply a patriot “who loves both Algeria and France.”

But the soft diplomacy he hoped to revive, modelled on the informal negotiations once carried out by businessmen like Ali Haddad, a long-time backer of former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, has become impossible. Haddad himself was arrested on the Algerian-Tunisian border in 2019 and remains a cautionary tale for Algerian elites who once dared to straddle politics and business too freely. Meanwhile, the Algerian government has hardened and is cracking down on dissidents abroad.

Though he continues to speak of “media and political war” against the homeland, demanding the unity of the Algerian community in France in its defence, his audience has evaporated. Once poised to be a modern-day go-between, Ghezzar instead finds himself lost in a new age of digital surveillance, counterespionage and hardline nationalism on both shores.

The era of informal influencers and middlemen is fading fast. In its place is a much more perilous terrain, where patriotic rhetoric risks being weaponised and where even well-connected figures like Ghezzar are being sidelined. In the end, his story reveals more than personal ambition, it exposes the collapse of a once-flexible Franco-Algerian relationship into mistrust and manipulation.

Original article (“Entre Paris et Alger, le garagiste-diplomate dépassé par les espions”) by Clément Fayol and Antoine Izambard was published in French on 12 May 2025.

It is available here.

Revue XXI is a French quarterly magazine dedicated to long-form investigative journalism, blending reportage, narrative nonfiction and illustrated storytelling to explore global and local issues with depth and nuance.

Summary by ZN.

Today, Hope Lies with the People

A Thai political activist reflects on the movement’s highs and lows since the 2020 protests, and why he believes that change – however slowly – is coming

In the fading afternoon light of Bangkok, Jatupat “Pai” Boonpattararaksa speaks not with the fire of a dissident on the run, but with the quiet conviction of someone who has lived too long inside the machinery of Thai repression to be surprised by its turns. “Going to prison is bad,” he tells the Editor of The101.world. “But I can survive it.”

Pai is no stranger to captivity. In a political landscape where symbols are sometimes punished more harshly than acts, he has become both: an act and a symbol. In this interview, Wachana Woralyangkun probes Pai to recount the past decade of his activism, which has seen him be arrested more than 10 times, jailed for Facebook posts, protest speeches and defying the lèse-majesté law: Thailand’s infamous Article 112, which criminalises criticism of the monarchy.

Yet Pai does not call himself brave. What he has, instead, is a practiced clarity forged in the tear gas of the 2020 protests and sharpened by the slow, exhausting grind of activist life in a country that often mistakes order for peace. “I think I’m more careful now,” he says. “I may have more strategies. I’m still left; but maybe not as sharp as before.”

In the summer of 2020, Bangkok’s streets erupted in protest. Like in many other countries, the pandemic exposed cracks in Thailand’s governance. The restlessness of a younger generation and the long-standing frustration over military dominance in politics converged in one of the most sweeping protest movements in modern Thai history. Students called for a reform of the monarchy, an unthinkable demand just a few years before. The ceiling was raised, as Pai puts it. And then, it came crashing down.

Today, many of those student leaders are either in exile or prison. The movement’s momentum has stalled. The political atmosphere, Pai says, has grown “gloomy.” The 2023 election saw the progressive Move Forward Party win the most seats, only to be locked out of forming a government by an entrenched conservative bloc. For Pai, it was confirmation of what he already suspected: the rules of Thai politics are written not by the people, but by those determined to keep them silent.

Still, silence is not something Pai has ever worn comfortably. At 33, he is still organising, no longer only in the streets, but in classrooms, rural communities, and youth gatherings through his organisation, IPAM. “The country’s hope lies in the new generation,” he says. “Some children grow up in a closed Thai education system and thus do not see the wider world. We help them see.”

A stark contrast to the explosive improvised rebellion seen on the streets of 2020, today’s organising is slower, less visible, but essential. Pai’s strategy now is not just resistance, but endurance. “We used to do things just to do them,” he says. “Now we do them to get results.” He talks about how the movement has matured, learning from its failures. In 2020, the protests were spontaneous, hopeful, defiant, but, in his words, “not enough.” They lacked coordination, legal preparedness and broad-based support. “The question now,” Pai says, “is how much patience can the people have?”

His answer is both sobering and oddly hopeful. He knows that history does not change at the speed of a viral tweet. He cites the 1997 “People’s Constitution”, born in the aftermath of mass mobilisation, as a blueprint. Real change, he insists, will not come from parliament alone. “Parliament will not change for the people unless people force it to.”

In Pai’s telling, Thailand is a nation locked in a tug-of-war between an increasingly sophisticated elite and a citizenry becoming more politically literate by the day. The Move Forward Party’s electoral success, and the backlash it provoked, revealed a deeper conflict: not between parties, but between two visions of Thai society – one hierarchical, the other participatory.

Even among those divided by colour-coded politics – yellow-shirts, red-shirts – Pai sees possibility. “No one joins because they want the country to go to ruin,” he says. “We have to look for common ground.” For him, that includes rethinking military conscription, expanding decentralisation and confronting monopolistic capitalism.

These days, Pai spends less time behind megaphones and more behind whiteboards. His strength, he jokes, is that he’s “still on the path.” His weakness? “I haven’t won yet.”

But then again, he isn’t sure what winning even looks like anymore. “We don’t fight just to fight,” he says. “We fight to live. And if we can’t fight now, we endure. Until we can fight again.”

Original article (“สปิริต 2563: ‘ไผ่ จตุภัทร์’ เมื่อการต่อสู้ไม่ใช่แค่อดีตและความหวังวันนี้อยู่ที่ประชาชน”) by Wachana Woralyangkun first appeared in Thai on The101.world on 29 April 2025.

It’s available here.

The101.world is a Thai creative media outlet working towards social change. They use a multidisciplinary approach, their team consists of academics, researchers, editors, writers, directors, creatives and graphic designers, aiming to connect the “world of knowledge” with the “world of creativity”.

Summary by TMH.

The Girl Who Was Called “Everybody’s Property”

Iceland, despite its feminist reputation, systematically fails rape victims, shielding perpetrators and disbelieving survivors

Widely praised as a global leader in gender equality, Iceland consistently tops rankings of the world’s most feminist countries. But an exposé by the Icelandic newspaper Heimildin reveals a grim shadow reality: the nation has long failed its women in confronting sexual violence.

Following a series of Icelandic rape cases over decades, journalist Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir reveals a bleak pattern: while victims are scrutinised, disbelieved and dismissed, perpetrators are handled with conspicuous leniency. The story she reveals, culled from her analysis of court records, police reports and public discourse, is disturbing: one where a girl’s reputation can be more relevant than her trauma, and a man’s “spotless past” outweighs the brutality of his actions.

In 1972, a 15-year-old girl, repeatedly raped by a group of boys since she was 13, was the one placed under a moral microscope. Despite detailed accounts of her being stripped, violated and passed around like contraband, the court chose to dwell on her supposed promiscuity. The defendants argued that she “didn’t show much resistance.” The implication? That her trauma was ambiguous, possibly even self-inflicted. The men walked free with suspended sentences, the ruling stating that jail would do them, and society, little good. It was a decision that prioritised the reputations of boys over the violence inflicted on a girl.

As Heimildin reports, the idea of “reputation” as judicial currency lingers ominously through Iceland’s legal history. Before 1940, rape laws explicitly imposed harsher penalties only if the woman had a “good reputation.” Even after the law was supposedly reformed, cultural inertia clung on like a shadow. In a chilling echo decades later, a 36-year-old man who had confessed to raping two girls in Reykjavik avoided pre-trial detention. Why? He was deemed a “family man” with no prior offenses, and therefore, no presumed threat to society. His victims’ broken bodies and fear were not enough to outweigh his societal standing.

A government relatively silent on sexual violence until the 1980s only began to stir when the Women’s List, a feminist political party, forced the conversation into Parliament. Kjartansdóttir writes, “There had been little or no discussion of sexual violence in the Althingi (the Icelandic parliament), until the Women’s List took action in the Althingi and requested an investigation into the handling of rape cases in 1984.” But progress was glacial.

Astonishingly, between 1997 and 2001, out of 224 reported rape cases, only 11 resulted in convictions. One landmark civil suit saw a woman suing both her assailants and the state after police botched the investigation so badly that it was dropped. The men admitted to sex, acknowledged the woman’s fear and couldn’t recall asking her consent. However, their consistency in denying wrongdoing was considered somehow more credible than her trauma. The civil suit resulted in the men paying damages. But they faced no criminal punishment.

Even when digital evidence entered the scene, little changed. In 2014, a teenage girl accused five young men of gang-raping her, one even filming the act and playing it at school. The courts ruled in favour of the accused, citing the girl’s inconsistent testimony. Trauma’s known effects – disorientation, memory fragmentation – were treated not as symptoms of violence but as grounds for disbelief. The boys were acquitted. One of them is quoted in the article saying, “Now we can do what was done there.” He had learned a simple lesson: there would be no consequences.

Today, that lesson holds. In 2024, two women, strangers to each other, allege that they were drugged and raped in eerily similar circumstances, just two weeks apart. The cases appear connected, orchestrated by the same man. Both women endured hours of abuse, yet no suspects have been detained. The police cite due process. They avoid the term “threat to public safety.” Detention, they remind the public, is a serious deprivation of liberty. The irony is blistering.

Meanwhile, victims hide in their homes, fearful and hollowed out. Only a fraction report their assaults, fewer still see justice. Many carry shame so deeply ingrained that they believe the rape was, somehow, their fault. When the law fails them, so too do the institutions meant to protect them. They face not only their attackers but a justice system that treats them as unreliable narrators of their own pain.

The rhetoric from the state is defensive, procedural, Heimildin reports. “We are a country governed by the rule of law,” a former minister of justice tells the newspaper. But in practice, the law bends protectively around the accused while remaining rigid against the violated. A society that still permits girls to be defined by the whispers of their peers and the prejudices of their elders, “a girl who would be of benefit to everyone, both boys and adults”, is not merely unjust, it is dangerous.

Original article (“Stúlkan sem var sögð allra gagn”) by Ingibjörg Dögg Kjartansdóttir was first published in Icelandic in Heimildin on 2 May 2025.

It’s available here.

Heimildin is an Icelandic weekly newspaper known for investigative journalism.

Summary by TMH.

Thesis on a Domestication

Camila Sosa Villada’s latest film reimagines trans identity beyond pain, poverty, or even death

In Thesis on a Domestication, Camila Sosa Villada turns the tired trope of trans suffering on its head. The film, based on her own novel and co-written and performed by Villada herself, centres on a successful, wealthy, sexually liberated trans actress who seems to have everything except happiness. In doing so, it offers something rare in cinema: a trans protagonist who is alive, complicated and not defined by trauma or pity.

Writing in Revista Anfibia, trans artist and writer Donna Tefa celebrates the film’s refusal to conform to the usual formula: a trans woman kicked out of her home, prostituted, brutalised and ultimately erased. Instead, Thesis dares to imagine a trans character who is neither poor nor ornamental, but who lives, desires and struggles on her own terms. She is not a victim, but a subject. She is not only desiring, but also desired.

The protagonist's sexual agency, often pathologised or erased in trans portrayals, is front and centre. She has sex for pleasure, not survival, a radical shift from the dominant cultural imagination that associates trans women’s sexuality solely with prostitution or abuse. Her real crisis isn’t whether she lives or dies, but how to find fulfillment in a world where desire is always shaped by others.

Yet Thesis on a Domestication doesn’t ignore trans memory or community. Ghosts from the protagonist’s past return. Her trans sister confronts her, calling her a traitor to their shared history. But this is a film about the complicated now: about surviving, thriving and still feeling that survival isn’t enough.

Tefa reads the film as a symbolic moment in trans representation: a refusal to remain stuck in narratives of pain and a call for trans creators to define new ones. Villada’s multifaceted involvement as a writer, actor and producer really underscores the argument: only by telling their own stories can trans people reimagine themselves fully. Not as symbols or lessons, but as people.

Original article (“Tesis sobre una domesticación: una travesti que viva para contarlo”) by Donna Tefa was first published in Spanish on 12 May 2025.

It is available here.

Revista Anfibia is an Argentine online magazine that blends narrative journalism, academic insight and personal essay to explore contemporary social and cultural issues with depth and innovation.