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I NTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY,JULY 30, 2019
DANGER AHEAD?
DATA THAT WARNS
OF RECESSION RISK
PAGE 7| BUSINESSGRAND STAGE
BEFORE U.S. OPEN,
IT’S FORTNITE TIME
PAGE 13| SPORTSNO ESCAPING PRIVILEGE
AGAME ALL ABOUT
SOCIAL INEQUALITY
PAGE 14| CULTUREfull of fear,” said her grandmother Bedia,
who, like the relatives of other children,
asked that the family’s last name not be
used to protect its privacy. “In the last
month, she got herself together because
we took care of her.”
Turkey, like many Western countries,
has been slow to take back citizens who
ran off to join the Islamic State as the
group extended its violent rule across
Syria and Iraq, starting in 2014. Now
that the movement has lost its territory
in Syria and Iraq and thousands of fight-
ers and their families have been cap-
tured or dispersed, there are growing
fears that the remnants could bring ter-
rorism home with them.
More than 12,000 foreign women and
children are detained in Syria and Iraq.
This poses a difficult quandary for their
home countries, most of which have re-
fused to repatriate their citizens.
The reluctance to repatriate these loy-
alists has extended to family members
such as wives and children as well. But
under pressure from anxious relatives
— some of them grandparents who have
never even met their grandchildren —
Turkish officials have changed their
tune.
They began to help the families nego-
tiate Iraq’s legal bureaucracy and se-
cure the release of at least some of the
children being held in a jail near the
Iraqi capital, Baghdad.Sitting on a chair, swinging her legs, 9-
year-old Nisa flashes a rare smile at the
memory of her mother kissing her the
last time they saw each other. Barely a
month back from a prison camp in Iraq,
where her mother remains incarcerated
on a life sentence for aiding terrorism,
her short life has been one of untold
trauma and upheaval.
She lived for five years in the Islamic
State’s caliphate after her father took
the family from Turkey to join the terror-
ist group. And she lost her baby brother
and father to the war. She then spent
more than a year in an Iraqi jail with
dozens of other Turkish families affiliat-
ed with the Islamic State.
Now, she is one of more than 200 Turk-
ish children the government has repatri-
ated from Iraq. She was handed over to
her maternal grandparents in Istanbul,
who know only snippets of what she has
been through.
“She was really skinny. Her eyes wereNisa’s family and others like it insist
that the wives and children of Islamic
State members do not deserve to be
treated as criminals, as they frequently
are, but should be considered victims of
the movement instead.
Experts say that some women were
indeed taken to the caliphate against
their will. But many actively supportedthe cause and served as enforcers or
fighters. How to sort the terrorists from
the victims is a question many countries
are still grappling with, though some
seem content to leave the women in Iraq
and Syria.
Roughly 1,000 Turkish women and
children tied to the Islamic State, also
T URKEY, PAGE 5Nisa, 9, at her family’s home in Istanbul, where she has been living since leaving a prison camp in Iraq. Her mother remains incarcerated on a life sentence for aiding terrorism.PHOTOGRAPHS BY TARA TODRAS-WHITEHILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESHome in an unfamiliar place
ISTANBULTurkey begins taking back
children of ISIS followers
who had been in IraqBY CARLOTTA GALLMuhammad, center left, and Abdullah, center right, with their great-uncle Mehmet in
Konya, Turkey. The children arrived from Iraq with their brother and a young uncle.“My maternal grandfather, who was a
humble gardener, loved Verdi and Pucci-
ni,” the Danish composer Poul Ruders
recalled recently. “And when I was 10 or
11, he took me first to see ‘La Bohème,’
and then to see ‘Aida.’”
“But the experience,” he added, “did
not turn me into an opera freak. I only
know a few operas — perhaps four or
five.”
He was being either modest or mis-
chievous: Mr. Ruders has by now com-
posed five operas of his own. As he
spoke, seated alongside Becky and Da-
vid Starobin — the librettists of his most
recent opera, “The Thirteenth Child” —
in a Boston hotel room in May, Mr. Rud-
ers, 70, was awaiting the opening of Bos-
ton Lyric Opera’s starkly powerful new
production of “The Handmaid’s Tale”(2000), his second and most acclaimed
work for the stage.
He would leave shortly afterward for
New Mexico, where Santa Fe Opera
gave the world premiere of “The Thir-
teenth Child” on Saturday. (It runs
through Aug. 21.)
“The Thirteenth Child” is an unusual
entry in Mr. Ruders’s acidic, politically
charged operatic portfolio. Based on a
lesser-known Grimms’ fairy tale, it
presents a battle between good and evil,
with good triumphing, though not with-
out cost — a first for Mr. Ruders, whose
earlier operas are more pessimistic.
Oddly for opera, which revolves
around commissions, Mr. Ruders under-
took the work with no idea what com-
pany might stage it. And it was recorded
before any house had even had a look at
the score.
These departures have to do with the
Starobins, first-time librettists who are
better known for running Bridge
Records, a respected label that focuses
on new music. (Mr. Starobin is also a re-
nowned guitarist, with specialties in
RUDERS, PAGE 2From dystopias to a feel-good opera
After a bleak adaptation
of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’
Poul Ruders lightens upBY ALLAN KOZINNPutting the finishing touches on a staircase for the world premiere of “The Thirteenth
Child,” a new work by the composer Poul Ruders, at Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico.RAMSAY DE GIVE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThe New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.Along a vast alpine plain, hundreds of
factories are cranking out plastic per-
fume bottles, automobile parts and in-
dustrial tools. Trucks chug through
mountains ferrying thousands of ready-
made wares for export. On billboards
and warehouses, “We’re hiring!” signs
flutter in the breeze.
Jobs are plentiful in Ain, a sprawling
manufacturing region in eastern France
known as “Plastics Valley.” But compa-
nies in this forested frontier across from
Switzerland have slowed production be-
cause they cannot find enough workers
for a production line that increasingly
requires computer and digital know-
h o w.
“It’s a brake on competitiveness,” said
Gilles Pernoud, the president of Groupe
Pernoud, whose company makes injec-
tion molding for plastic parts for BMW
and other automakers. He said he has
turned away contracts worth nearly a
million euros in the past two years be-
cause he couldn’t find skilled people
here or anywhere in France who wanted
factory jobs.
“We need more tech-savvy employ-
ees,” Mr. Pernoud said, pointing to a
glass-encased robotic machine on his
factory floor programmed by a worker
to produce a precision steel mold. “But
not enough people are willing to take
these jobs.”
France, like many countries in Eu-
rope, has a labor problem. But in a na-
tion where thousands of people took to
the streets in the Yellow Vest movement
to protest income inequality and a lack
of economic opportunity, there is a pecu-
liar twist.
Despite an unemployment rate of
over 8 percent — the highest in the Eu-
ropean Union after those of Italy, Spain
and Greece — over a quarter of a million
jobs are unfilled. Businesses can’t find
people to work as plumbers, engineers,
waiters, cooks. The list goes on.
Nowhere is the challenge as stark as
in manufacturing, where nearly 40 per-
cent of companies cite a dearth of man-
power. In Ain, which specializes in mak-
ing plastic goods and machinery parts,
at least 18,000 jobs are on offer.
France needs a solution quickly. After
recovering from a double-dip recession
during the financial crisis, the economy
is slowing again, this time from a 1.7 per-
cent expansion as Europe’s recovery
cools. Manufacturing isn’t contributing
as much to growth as it could because of
the labor problem, Agnès Pannier-
Runacher, France’s economy minister,
has warned.
She recently began a campaign to en-
F RANCE, PAGE 818,000 jobs
in a French
region, but
few takers
OYONNAX, FRANCEManufacturers in an area
called Plastics Valley say
they are starving for helpBY LIZ ALDERMANTo widespread applause in the markets
and the news media, from conserva-
tives and liberals alike, the United
States Federal Reserve appears poised
to cut interest rates for the first time
since the global financial crisis a decade
ago. Adjusted for inflation, the Fed’s
benchmark rate is now just half a per-
cent and the cost of borrowing has
rarely been closer to free, but the clamor
for more easy money keeps growing.
Everyone wants the recovery to last,
and more easy money seems like the
obvious way to achieve that goal. With
trade wars threatening the global econ-
omy, Federal Reserve officials say rate
cuts are needed to keep the slowdown
from spilling into the
United States, and to
prevent doggedly low
inflation from sliding
into outright defla-
tion.
Few words are
more dreaded among
economists than
“deflation.” For cen-
turies, deflation was
a common and
mostly benign phe-
nomenon, with prices falling because of
technological innovations that lowered
the cost of producing and distributing
goods. But the widespread deflation of
the 1930s and the more recent experi-
ence of Japan have given the word a
uniquely bad name.
After Japan’s housing and stock
market bubbles burst in the early 1990s,
demand fell and prices started to de-
cline, as heavily indebted consumers
began to delay purchases of everything
from TV sets to cars, waiting for prices
to fall further. The economy slowed to a
crawl. Hoping to jar consumers into
spending again, the central bank
pumped money into the economy, but to
no avail. Critics said Japan took action
too gradually, and so its economy re-
mained stuck in a deflationary trap for
years.
Many Western economies appeared
to face a similar threat following the
global financial crisis of 2008. Since
then, led by the Fed, central banks have
responded aggressively to every hint of
a downturn, making money ever
cheaper and more plentiful to try to
juice growth.
Yet, in this expansion, the United
States economy has grown at half the
pace of the postwar recoveries. Inflation
has failed to rise to the Fed’s target of a
sustained 2 percent. Meanwhile, every
new hint of easy money inspires fresh
optimism in the financial markets,The world
should fear
easy money
Ruchir Sharma
Contributing WriterOPINIONCutting
interest rates
in the U.S.
now could set
the stage for
a collapse in
the financial
markets.S HARMA, PAGE 11Issue Number
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in a Boston hotel room in May, Mr. Rud-ПОДГОТОВИЛАГРУППАin a Boston hotel room in May, Mr. Rud-
ers, 70, was awaiting the opening of Bos-ПОДГОТОВИЛАГРУППАers, 70, was awaiting the opening of Bos-
ton Lyric Opera’s starkly powerful newПОДГОТОВИЛАГРУППАton Lyric Opera’s starkly powerful new
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