The Washington Post - 27.03.2020

FRIDAy, MARCH 27 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST ez re A

the coronavirus pandemic

BY WILLIAM BOOTH, KARLA ADAM AND PAMELA ROLFE

london — Clapping is now a
big thing. With people stir-crazy
in their locked-down homes, the
phenomenon of stepping onto
the balcony in the evening, fling-
ing open the windows, to ap-
plaud health-care workers fight-
ing the coronavirus on the front
lines has gone global.
Part balm, part defiance, part
celebration — we’re still here! —
the practice has migrated, along-
side the virus and enforced quar-
antine, from the Chinese epicen-
ter of Wuhan to the medieval
villages of Lombardy, f rom Milan
to Madrid, onto Paris, and now
London.
There have been standing ova-
tions, too, in Istanbul, Atlanta,
Buenos Aires and Ta mil Nadu,
India.
In Britain, millions of people
came out o n Thursday evening to
cheer the staff of the country’s
beloved National Health Service,
whose intensive-care units and
arrivals and emergency wings
are bracing for an explosion in
cases, as already exhausted nurs-
es, some wearing garbage bags,
are begging for more and better

protective equipment. There were, almost instantly, thousands of tweets with pic- tures and short video clips of people applauding — from Brit- ish Prime Minister Boris John- son to residents of council es- tates in south London, to Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. L andmarks big and small, from the London Eye to the Shard to local libraries, were lit up in “NHS blue.” “We owe them so much,” said James O’Neill, 58, who was clapping from the back garden of his council estate in London’s Bat- tersea neighborhood. He is one of the 1.5 million at-risk Britons who aren’t supposed to leave their homes for three months. “It must be scary working for a hospital right now. It’s scary just walking around,” he said. The phenomenon of people cheering in the evenings began in mid-January in the shut-down city of Wuhan in China, where the first social media posts re- corded anonymous voices in the night, shouting from their high- rise apartment buildings a cry of “‘jiyóu!” — which literally means “add oil,” but translates to “keep up the fight.” The practice took off in Italy,

where the shut-ins first emerged to bang on pots, play accordions and wave flags. And, being Ital- ians, they sang. Arias from opera stars. Soccer chants. By mid-March, the first flash mobs promoted by social media in Italy began to call for group applause for the doctors and nurses risking their lives in the virus wards. But be warned. In Italy, the applause is b eing muted, and less regular, as the lockdown has dragged into its third week. The city of Florence last week put a stop to the ovations out of respect for the dead, in solidarity for people who are suffering and mourning, according to the Cor- riere della Sera newspaper. Facing a surging caseload and body count, Spaniards in lockdown are sharing online classes, yoga by Zoom, balcony bingo a nd Houseparty app get-togethers. But perhaps the highlight every day is at 8 p.m. sharp, when people lean out their windows to celebrate the “heroes,” as they are broadly called, the country’s health workers and security f orces. “The applause at 8 p.m. serve as an oasis for those of us who have been indoors for 13 days

and counting,” said Emanuel Diaz, who lives in the center of Madrid’s historic area. “I can honestly say that I look forward to them every single day.” For Diaz and others, the nightly moment gives them a sense of community. “I was a ghost on my street until I started going to the balcony and establishing relationship with my neighbors,” he said. “My neighbor on the front balcony told me last night: ‘After this is all over, I can’t wait to go to the street to finally meet you and have a drink together.’ ” One night this week, police and ambulances joined in the moment flashing their siren lights in front of Madrid’s ice skating rink, which is serving as the city morgue. In Paris, the sound of cheers can be deafening — it resonates down wide boulevards, through thick stone walls and into quiet inner courtyards, where Pari- sians gather to applaud, even if their apartments do not face the street. In an editorial on Thursday, the French newspaper Le Monde argued that support for health workers was essential but that it should extend beyond nightly

applause. The real way to support health professionals was to take the confinement rules seri- ously, Le Monde said, as some in France and across Europe have refused to follow their government’s lockdown guidelines. “By respecting and enforcing the rules of containment, by questioning their behavior in terms of the common interest, everyone can indirectly relieve the burden on overworked per- sonnel,” the editorial read. “No one should feel exempt from this responsibility. Residents of cities across Tur- key began cheering medical workers last week, in passionate outbursts — accompanied by the flicking of living room lights, car horns and whistles. “Thank you for your third applause Turkey!” the country’s now ubiquitous health minister, Fahrettin Koca, wrote on Twitter, in a post that included footage of the balcony ritual, which takes place every evening at 9 p.m. “Let’s show our support to our health workers at every opportu- nity,” he wrote. President Recep Tayyip Erdo- gan and E mine Erdogan, the first lady, have also joined in, applauding from their balcony in

Istanbul. In London on Thursday, the cheering was raucous. Little streets that have been eerily quiet amid a national lockdown this week, like Rosecroft Avenue by Hampstead Heath, saw neighbors cheering, blasting music from home stereos, waving c ellphone flashlights and bang- ing on pots and pans. The applause rippled across central London. “I was clapping and whooping and then laughing,” said Susan Schulman, who leaned out her second-story flat in Clerkenwell. “It’s a community thing — and it’s some sort of communication with people now that you are isolated. It wasn’t that long, though — I mean, the Italians do opera. This was kind of whoop- clapping... and you couldn’t see anyone else. But it did make me laugh.” [email protected] [email protected]

rolfe reported in madrid. chico Harlan and stefano Pitrelli in rome, Kareem Fahim and zeynep Karatas in Istanbul, loveday morris in Berlin, James mcAuley in Paris and christine spolar in london contributed to this report.

Citizens around the globe give health-care workers a standing ovation

Cairo last week in front of the government’s cabinet building. Seif’s activist brother, Alaa Abdel Fattah, has been imprisoned since September, when small anti- government protests erupted in Cairo and other cities. Security forces detained the women overnight at a police sta- tion before releasing them on bail. They were charged with inciting a protest, disseminating false news and possession of material disseminating false news.

Europe, Asia and Australia Some countries are responding aggressively to the threat the virus poses inside their prisons. After about a dozen cases were reported among inmates and staff members at South Korean correctional facilities, health authorities swiftly quarantined the patients and tested other inmates. A South Korean court released two infected inmates on bail from one prison and ordered them to self-quarantine at their homes. In Australia’s Northern Te rrito- ry, authorities this week banned all prison visitors, including vol- unteers and social workers, and British authorities on Tuesday

placed correctional facilities across England and Wales o n lockdown, canceling visits and re- stricting prisoners’ movements. But such tough measures have stoked tensions in nations such as Italy and Germany. French inmates have grown in- creasingly alarmed that their wel- fare is being ignored after the French government ordered a national lockdown last week for those outside prison walls. Prison authorities have reported about 30 incidents of insubordination, most involving inmates refusing to return to crowded cells after daily walks in prison courtyards. Some European countries are also taking steps to reduce over- crowding. T he Italian government adopted a decree that, in part, allows for early supervised release of prisoners with less than 18 months left to serve. Germany, which released 40 inmates in Hamburg who were imprisoned because they could not pay a fine for their crime, has delayed incar- ceration for those facing sentenc- es of less than three years.

Latin America In Latin America, many of the

inmates have taken matters into their own hands. Video on social media of the prison riots in Colombia depicted hellish scenes, with inmates light- ing fires and screams echoing across courtyards. At least 23 people were killed and more than 80 injured across 10 prisons. Two weeks ago, as many as 1,000 inmates escaped in the Bra- zilian state of Sao Paulo after prison furloughs were suspended in an effort to contain the spread of the virus. Five inmates in Vene- zuela were fatally shot last week while trying to escape. Riots have also upended prisons in Peru and Chile. Since the violence, Colombian officials have voiced increasing concern a bout t he deterioration of conditions in the prison system. Brazilian authorities, meanwhile, have mandated the use of surgical masks during inmate transfers and the isolation of potentially infected people. But critics say such measures will almost certainly be insufficient on a continent that has seen decades of mass incarcerations, with long-neglected prison sys- tems that are afflicted by a lack of

sanitation, poor health facilities, mismanagement and gang activi- ty. Robert Muggah, research director at the Rio de Janeiro-based Igarapé Institute, which tracks violence in Latin America, said the coronavirus “is a ticking time bomb f or Latin America’s prisons.”

Middle East Some Middle Eastern governments have selectively released prisoners in the face of the pandemic. These include Iran, which is reeling from the region’s deadli- est coronavirus outbreak. The country’s judiciary has granted temporary release for 85,00 0 p risoners and ruled that 10, o f them be granted amnesty, i ncluding some political prisoners. Bahrain has released nearly 1,500 prisoners, but activists have declared the action insufficient, as large numbers of political leaders and human rights defenders remain behind bars. In Israel, the issue of releasing prisoners is unusually complicat- ed because about 4,500 Palestin- ians are being held in Israeli jails, all on security or terrorism-related

BY SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN AND LOUISA LOVELUCK

cairo — Hundreds of thousands
of people around the world are
jailed in crammed cells under
unsanitary conditions, fertile
ground for the spread of the coro-
navirus, but many governments
have yet to adopt measures that
could prevent the pandemic from
taking hold there.
Inside many of these poorly
maintained prisons, safeguards
such as quarantines, social dis-
tancing, sanitary items and even
proper health training are rare,
say human rights groups and pris-
on monitors. And the restrictive
measures some detention facili-
ties have taken, such as suspend-
ing prison visits, have sparked
tensions and even unrest from
Latin America to Europe to the
Middle East.
Outside the walls, prisoners’
families dread the coming weeks.
“It’s a very dark situation for the
families,” said Mona Seif, an Egyp-
tian activist whose brother is
jailed at Cairo’s notorious To ra
prison.
China and South Korea, among
the countries hit hardest by the
coronavirus, have reported large
outbreaks in their prisons. China
alone has reportedly had 806 cas-
es in five prisons across three
provinces. In Spain, where the
virus is spreading rapidly, 37 pris-
on workers nationwide and two
inmates have been infected. On
Tuesday, Spanish authorities con-
firmed that a 78-year-old inmate
had died; the facility where the
prisoner was held is now under
quarantine.
Turkey’s government is seeking
to fast-track a plan to release as
many as 100,000 inmates from its
overcrowded facilities, joining
Iran and other countries that have
freed some of their prisoners in
response to the pandemic.
Elsewhere, anger over restric-
tive measures and anxiety about
the coronavirus have led to vio-
lence. In Colombia last weekend,
nearly two dozen people died in
riots that swept the prison system
as inmates protested what they
called inadequate safeguards
against the virus. In Italy, riots
erupted in almost 50 prisons this
month, leaving 13 inmates dead
and 59 guards injured. Authorities
said the inmates died of drug
overdoses after raiding a prison
infirmary.
In the Middle East, where hun-
dreds of thousands of people have
been rounded up in recent y ears in
response to political uprisings,
terrorism and the growth of con-
servative Islam, many prisoners
are held in densely populated
facilities that lack hygienic condi-
tions and sunlight, leaving them
susceptible to disease and infec-
tions. The majority of these pris-
ons are in Egypt, Syria and Iran.
Human rights groups and U.N.
officials are urging Middle East-
ern governments to release pris-
oners from overcrowded facilities.
“Generally, if you are in prison in
the Middle East, you a re in a pretty
worse case than other parts of the
world,” said Philippe Nassif, the
advocacy director for the Middle
East and North Africa at Amnesty
International USA, referring to
the threats posed by the coronavi-
rus.
Such concerns prompted Seif,
her mother, aunt and a family
friend to stage a rare protest in

charges. Israel is considering transferring 500 jailed criminals to house arrest, but such a fur- lough would not be extended to Palestinian prisoners. Two of the biggest jailers in the Middle East — Egypt and Syria — have so far made little apparent effort to prevent the virus from spreading in prisons. In Egyptian prisons, where as many as 60,000 people are said to be jailed, there have been no significant releases or plans an- nounced to mitigate the risk of infection, activists said. “In Egypt, there are tens of thousands of peaceful dissidents, writers, bloggers, protesters, LGBT people and others in dirty, crowded prisons where they should have never been,” said Amr Magdi, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “The government only released 15 yester- day. This is a joke.” Egypt has suspended visitation at prisons, but this has only left “families and observers in the dark about what’s going on inside,” Magdi added. When Mona Seif and her mother went to To ra prison to visit her brother, they carried food, medi- cine, hand sanitizer, gloves and masks for him but were not al- lowed in. A security guard finally said he would deliver the supplies himself. But Seif said they don’t know if he did. “ We have zero news about Alaa,” she said.

Syria Syrian detainees released in recent months describe overcrowded cells and appalling c onditions. The floors on which men and women sleep are often sticky with blood and feces, they say. When prisoners fall sick, there is little medical help available. According to observers moni- toring Syria’s prison network, no measures have been taken to contain the virus, aside from the suspension of family visits to one civilian prison. D octors in one facility say that they are treating patients bearing symptoms of the coronavirus but that there is no way to test them. “Many people are afraid of going to our horrific isolation rooms,” said o ne doctor. “Even i f they show signs of sickness, they don’t dare leave their cell.” For Sana Mustafa, the c oronavi- rus has shattered what little hope she had of seeing her father, Ali, alive. After eight years of war, more than 100,000 Syrian detainees remain unaccounted for in the packed jails of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. “The regime has mastered the art of detention and torture. We know that coronavirus isn’t the worst that could happen to them,” said M ustafa, 2 8, whose f ather was seized at the family’s apartment in Damascus in July 2013. “For us, the thing about corona is that it makes it hard to stay hopeful.” s [email protected] [email protected]

loveluck reported from london. miriam Berger in Washington, te rrence mccoy in rio de Janeiro, Pamela rolfe in madrid, James mcAuley in Paris, luisa Beck in Berlin, ruth eglash in Jerusalem, Hazem Balousha in gaza city and min Joo Kim in seoul contributed to this report.

In world’s prisons, unease over pandemic ignites turmoil

ezrA AcAyAn/Agence-FrAnce Presse/getty ImAges

IVAn VAlencIA/AssocIAted Press IQBAl KusumAdIrezzA/ePA-eFe/sHutterstocK

TOP: An inmate at the Manila City Jail wears a face mask to protect against the coronavirus. ABOVE LEFT: Inmates’ relatives gather outside La Modelo prison in Bogota, Colombia, on Sunday as inmates across the s ystem protested what they said was a lack of adequate safeguards against the virus. ABOVE RIGHT: An Indonesian Red Cross official disinfects a room at a women’s prison in West Java.

The Washington Post - 27.03.2020

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