18 The Sunday Times February 6, 2022WORLD NEWS
Ghosts of Stalin’s Terror Famine hover over wheatfields of Ukraine
beginning to fear that his life’s
work will be devastated by a
Russian invasion — or even
the threat of one.
“I am a little worried now,”
said the 74-year-old as snow
fell thick on his precious
farm, 20 miles northeast of
the capital, Kyiv. “I am hoping
there won’t be a conflict. If
something happens, I’ll stay.
And I’ll send my sons and
their families away.”
He is not the only one who
is concerned. Ukraine,
known as the breadbasket of
Europe, is responsible for
10 per cent of the world’s
wheat exports — about20 million tonnes a year.
Grain fields, including wheat,
barley and rye, cover one
sixth of the country.
Most of the wheat fields lie
far to the east of Plaksia’s
farm, along the
extraordinarily fertile belt of
loamy black soil that
stretches across a large
swathe of the country.
As 100,000 Russian troops
mass along Ukraine’s
borders, stoking fears of an
incursion, Ukrainian farmers,
agricultural exporters and
food security experts are
worried that the continuing
instability could have globalconsequences for the wheat
industry.
“The risk of having
large-scale food price spikes
is very real,” said Alex Smith,
a food and agriculture analyst
at the Breakthrough Institute,
an environmental think tank
based in California.
In countries such as Yemen
and Lebanon, both highly
reliant on Ukrainian wheat,
any price increase could have
fatal consequences. In recent
years, rising food prices have
sparked protests from Jordan
to Tunisia, and were a
contributing factor in the
“Arab Spring” revolts.“There’s a risk of
destabilising Lebanon, which
is an important state in the
Middle East, and that can
destabilise the region more
broadly,” Smith said.
Last year Ukraine recorded
a bumper wheat crop of
30 million tonnes. Farmers
stored the grain in silos after
the spring harvest to sell
throughout the year. But any
military action could lead to it
being abandoned.
“My wife’s family has fields
close to the occupied
territories, and they’re not
being used any more because
of the military action takingplace nearby,” said Andrey
Marchenko, a Ukrainian
fertiliser importer and
agricultural consultant.
Some farmers in parts of
the eastern Donbas region,
where Russian-backed
separatists declared
independence in 2014, are
said to have sold their wheat
through Russia.
For Ukrainians, wheat is
wrapped in painful history. In
the 1930s, Joseph Stalin
ordered the mass requisition
of grain from Ukrainian
farms. Combined with other
factors, including forced
collectivisation of farms, thisHis lined face squinting into
the wind, Sergey Plaksia
trudged through the snow
towards the barn where he
keeps his golden wheat stocks
through the winter.
For the past 30 years, he
has farmed the fields that
appear to stretch endlessly
across this part of Ukraine,
expanding his smallholding
of 250 acres into more than
6,000 acres, which are
managed by 110 employees
and produce 2,000 tonnes of
wheat a year. Now he isLouise Callaghan
Sempolky, Ukrainecountries are complicit in
slave labour for agreeing to
Cuba’s demands for 80 per
cent of expatriate workers’
wages and turning a blind eye
to other abuses, including
Havana’s restrictions on
whom they can meet and
where they can travel.
While most of the Cuban
workers abroad are doctors,
one of the world’s biggest
cruise lines, MSC, has also
hired Cuban crew under the
scheme. “Tourists on these
ships don’t know that the
people serving them cocktailseight years. A state security
agent told his father in Cuba:
“Your son has betrayed the
fatherland.”
Another “deserter” is
Leonel Rodriguez, who
joined a Cuban medical
“mission” in Ecuador years
ago in the hope of earning
more to support his family
than he could at home.
“You sign the contract and
accept for a while the abusive
terms because you know that
even with that little bit of
money you earn, it can make
a big difference to your family
at home in Cuba,” he said.
After criticising the
government on social media,
though, he too has been
banished from Cuba. He last
saw Thalia, his daughter, five
years ago, when she was 13.
“This policy of banning us
for eight years is inhumane,”
he said. He then forwarded
me his daughter’s latest,
heart-breaking audio
message: “Daddy, please, I
need you with me in Cuba.”
Reprisals against family
members in Cuba are
common. Clara, 53, a doctor,
said her two grown-up sons
had lost jobs, one as an
engineer, the other as an
economist, in Havana when
she broke her contract in
order to stay on in Brazil.
She got them on a flight to
Guyana and from there theytravelled overland to join her
in Brazil. “We are together
and much better off here,”
she said. “The last time I was
home I saw old people trying
to sell a bit of rice so that they
could get medicine.”
Others are punished for
personal choices. Flor
Vicente, 61, a physiotherapist
attached to a “medical
brigade” in Venezuela, was
told she had committed a
“disciplinary breach” by
marrying a native. In Havana,
her daughter, Sarita, 16, was
taunted at school: “They said
to her, ‘Your mother is a shit
and a traitor’ for staying in
Venezuela.”
Vicente added: “I never
intended to stay here,
though. And even though it’s
been more than eight years,
they won’t let me back.”
Sarita, now 28 and a teacher,
visited briefly seven years ago
with her two small sons.
Now Vicente, who earns a
meagre income as a cleaner,
has a third grandson: she has
met him only on video calls.
As for Maria, the mother of
two in Madrid, she hopes the
children will be allowed to
join her one day before they
are grown. “Hundreds of
mothers have been separated
from their children like this,”
she said. “It’s shameful,
inexcusable. God won’t
forgive it.”Alicia was thrilled to be
allowed out of Cuba for the
first time in her life. She had
qualified for a job on a foreign
cruise ship, departing just
before the pandemic struck.
“The flight was Havana to
Paris, then Genoa,” the 31-
year-old recalled last week.
“Wow! What satisfaction!
Most Cuban women can only
travel abroad by marrying a
foreigner, but I was living my
dream, doing it on my own.”
Now that dream has
turned into a nightmare.
After six months of cleaning
cabins, instead of going home
she decided to visit a relative.
“I wanted to see Europe,” she
said. “I had six months left on
my visa.”
For Cuba, though, this
made her a “deserter” and
“traitor”, for which the
penalty was severe: she was
informed that she was
banned from entering Cuba
for a period of eight years.
One of the world’s last
communist bastions, Cuba is
famous for locking its citizens
in — but the same system also
keeps tens of thousands of
others locked out and
separated from loved ones.
This is their punishment
for bending the rules of an
employment programme
under which Cuba takesMatthew Campbellcaused a famine, known as
the Terror Famine or the
Holodomor, a term derived
from the Ukrainian words for
hunger and extermination.
More than 5 million people
died across the USSR, at least
4 million of them in Ukraine.
“Wheat is probably one of
the most emotional aspects of
Ukrainian security and
economy,” said Lada Roslycky
of Black Trident Consulting, a
security company in Ukraine.
“Heaven forbid that history
repeats itself, that Ukrainians
starve while their grain is
exported to the international
market.”Few families were left
untouched by the famine.
Plaksia spoke about his
grandfather, Roman. He
had worked on a collective
farm during the grain
requisitions, and like so many
others was left with nothing
to eat.
One day he was found dead
by the side of the road. His
two daughters — one of them
Plaksia’s mother — survived.
“They only lived because they
had a cow, and they drank the
milk,” he said.
@LouiseElisabet
Additional reporting:
Natalie Gryvnyakdeserting. “The Marxist-
Leninist discourse about
international solidarity and
helping poor countries is
obsolete and hypocritical, it’s
just a business — an abusive
one,” said Emilio Arteaga
Perez, 50, a psychiatrist who
worked in Bolivia, Angola and
Namibia before being forced
to seek asylum in Spain.
“If it were help the Cuban
government was offering, it
wouldn’t be making so much
money out of it,” he added.
“We were being brutally
exploited, us doctors. Of the
salary we were down for,
we’d get only 15 to 20 per
cent, and the conditions were
awful, like being in the
military — you had to ask
permission to do anything.
And like in the military you’re
a ‘deserter’ if you quit.”
He decided to leave his job
after being accused of posting
anti-government memes on
social media: “They wanted
me to confess to being a
puppet of the ‘enemy’ but I
said, ‘No, those are my
comments and nobody — not
the CIA, nobody — is paying
me to think the way I do.”
Fearing he might be
captured and sent home to
prison, he hid in a friend’s
garage in Namibia for six
months before moving to
Spain and has been banned
from returning home forAn MSC ship in
Havana. The firm
hires Cubans as
crew membersCuba
takes
80% of
their
wagesare in a position of slavery,”
said Larrondo.
Carlos, who worked on a
cruise ship, said even if the
government took 80 per cent
of his salary, his first trip
outside Cuba had been worth
it. “It was my first taste of
freedom,” he said. “I started
to understand that what they
had told us in Cuba about the
outside world was all lies.
That’s why I didn’t want to go
home after my six months
and why I’m now banned for
eight years.”
More and more doctors are80 per cent of its citizens’
overseas earnings, or about
£8 billion a year, a crucial
lifeline for a regime struggling
with economic chaos and
growing public dissent.
“Enforcing the rules is
critical if the government is to
carry on getting the fruits of
people’s labour year after
year,” said Javier Larrondo of
Prisoners Defenders, a
Spanish human rights group.
“It’s a sort of modern-day
slavery.”
It has spawned immense
suffering. Alicia, who did not
want her full name or the
country she is living in
published for fear of reprisals
against her family in Havana,
worries her parents will die
before she is allowed home.
Others face the torture of
watching remotely as
children grow up. Maria, 42, a
doctor who was sent to work
in Saudi Arabia, has been
separated from her 10-year-
old son and five-year-old
daughter since 2018, when
she was exiled for eight years,
accused of breaking her
contract. Her mother, who
had been looking after the
children, died of Covid three
months ago, leaving Maria’s
sister in charge. “All of this is
agonising, a torture,” she said
last week from Madrid. “I
miss my children so much,
it’s a physical pain.”Cuba first began deploying
doctors abroad in the 1960s
as part of a Soviet-inspired
push to promote communism
in America’s “back yard”. For
state propaganda, this “army
of white coats” — an example
of revolutionary solidarity
with poorer countries — was a
source of national pride and
prestige.
But it masked a sinister
reality. In a complaint before
the International Criminal
Court, Prisoners Defenders
has accused Cuba of human
trafficking. It alleges that host
ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI/ALAMYCubans sent abroad as ‘slave workers’ — then banned from coming back
RoubaixParisFRANCE20 milesturned Roubaix into one of the poorest
and most socially deprived places in
France: its streets are lined with small sin-
gle and two-storey houses, many
boarded up and awaiting reno-
vation, and with grim former
industrial buildings.
Memories are still fresh of a
damning book about the
town published in 1996 that
described Muslim “ghettos”
where police feared to tread.
Now Roubaix has been unwill-
ingly thrust into the limelight
again by Zone Interdite (Forbid-
den Zone), the 90-minute inves-
tigative documentary, in which
it featured alongside Marseilles
and the Paris suburb of Bobigny.
Among its leading protago-
nists was Elbahi, who has cam-
paigned against Islamisation since
his elder sister was among a num-
ber of Muslims from Roubaix who
went to Syria in 2014 to live under
Islamic State. The sister, a schoolgirl
when she left, is in a Kurdish prison
camp. Her young children are also
there, unable to return to France.
Elbahi persuaded authorities to inves-
tigate a local charity paid more than
€80,000 (£67,000) in public money to
help struggling school pupils that he
claimed was clandestinely teaching Islamcurtained-off booths. Hidden cameras
were again used to film a clothes shop a
few doors away that also sells children’s
books whose characters are drawn with
blank faces. “But we have other books
whose characters do have features. Buy-
ers can choose,” said the shop’s owner,
Samir Mezin, 32, who says the street was
misrepresented in the documentary. “It’s
not just halal butchers here. There’s also
a wine shop.”
Since the programme was screened,
Mezin too has received death threats. He
played me one on his mobile phone
answering machine from an anonymous
man calling himself “a normal French-
man”, who said: “We are coming for
you.”
Gagnet has defended the programme’s
methods, and says she resorted to hidden
cameras only after being denied permis-
sion to film openly. “Selling a doll without
a face is not going to destroy the French
republic,” she said. “But it is a marker of
radical Islam and a sign that people don’t
want to live according to the French
republican model.”
The documentary has clearly touched
a nerve in a country that, over the past
decade, has suffered the worst Islamist
violence in Europe. It reached a high
point in 2015, when 12 people were killed
in January in a shooting at the offices of
the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo
and 130 died in November in attacks on
the Bataclan concert hall and other tar-
gets in Paris.
Tensions were raised again in October
2020, when Samuel Paty, 47, a teacher,
was beheaded by a young Chechen in
response to an online campaign by par-
ents of children at the school who vilified
him for using cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad as part of a civics lesson on
free speech.
The controversy looks certain to play
into the hands of Zemmour and Le Pen,
who can together count on the backing of
almost 30 per cent of voters with cam-
paigns that have drawn heavily on oppo-
sition to immigration.
Le Monde, which this weekend pub-
lished the results of a nine-month investi-
gation into what drew people to vote for
the two far-right candidates, said their
response could be summarised as: “I
don’t understand anything any more.
France is no longer France.”
@Peter_ConradiHatchet job or brave reporting? French
town torn apart by TV documentary
Roubaix, once a grand textile town in
northern France, has long been known as
the finishing point of one of Europe’s
most gruelling cycle races. In recent
days, however, it has been at the centre of
a row over free speech, creeping Islami-
sation and dolls without faces that is add-
ing to the toxic atmosphere before April’s
presidential election.
Ophélie Meunier, 34, a television pre-
senter, and Amine Elbahi, 25, a cam-
paigning lawyer, have been put under
police protection after receiving hun-
dreds of death threats over a television
documentary that portrayed the town of
96,000 people, near the Belgian border,
as a hotbed of religious fundamentalism.
They join 35 journalists, lawyers and
activists in France already forced to seek
protection after making remarks critical
of Muslims, Islam or Islamism.
Le Figaro newspaper published an
open letter last week signed by 160 lead-
ing figures demanding more be done to
protect freedom of the press, while politi-
cians vying for France’s substantial right-
wing vote have seized on the controversy.
“Afghanistan, two hours from Paris,”
tweeted Eric Zemmour, the right-wing
polemicist and presidential candidate,
who held a rally yesterday in nearby Lille.
Supporters of his rival, Marine Le Pen,
who was staging her own event 130 miles
to the south, in Reims, have also weighed
in.
Yet the programme has provoked a
furious backlash among many in Roubaix
who regard it as a hatchet job — as
became clear during a visit last week.
“Yes, there are sensitive areas and
some abandoned buildings, but it’s a
great place and very dynamic. They
didn’t show any of that,” said Sami
Belfadel, a 24-year-old of Algerian origin
who is completing a masters in health
economics, as we sat with his friends in a
chic café that would not be out of place in
one of the more hipster corners of Paris.
The question of Islamisation is a deli-
cate issue in Roubaix, whose Muslim pop-
ulation is proportionately one of the larg-
est in France. Many Muslim residents
came from north Africa in the 1960s and
1970s to work in its textile factories. It
now has seven mosques, alongside 12
Catholic churches.
The industry’s subsequent decline hasPeter Conradi RoubaixWhen Roubaix was labelled a hotbed of Islamism it forced a journalist into hiding and triggered a toxic pre-election row
Ophélie Meunier is in hiding
after an incendiary report
on Islamisation in Roubaix,
famous for its cycle race
under the cover of Arabic lessons. If
proven, it would be a crime under French
law, which bars state funding for religion.
Also entangled in the affair is
Roubaix’s mayor, Guillaume Delbar,
accused of embezzlement by negligence
for failing to spot what was going on. He
and three of those who ran the charity
were due to go on trial last week, but their
hearing was postponed until October
amid fallout from the documentary. They
have denied any wrongdoing.
Elbahi has since received more than
300 death threats and left his home in
Roubaix, according to Michaëlle Gag-
net, the journalist who made the
documentary; Meunier, who
fronted it, has received dozens.
“On their phones, texts, Whats–
Apps and so on there are very
clear threats of decapitation,
rape, murder. Really horrible
things,” Gagnet told me.
The programme also featured
footage, shot with a hidden camera,
of shops on Rue de Lannoy, a main street
leading into town, selling dolls without
features on their faces, and of window
displays of headless mannequins — in
respect for Islamic fundamentalist doc-
trine that bars the depiction of the
human form. Another scene showed a
restaurant where women could avoid
the gaze of male diners by eating inSTEPHANE GRANGIER/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES; NATHAN LAINE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES; ALAMY