The Saturday Profile: Russia’s Best-Known Gay Activist Has an Uphill Fight

AT first glance, it seemed like a breakthrough for homosexual equality in Russia. After years of battling the authorities, here was Nikolai Alekseyev, Russia’s most visible gay-rights campaigner, on a popular prime-time debate show called “Duel” recently talking about plans to hold a gay pride rally in Moscow.

But the discussion quickly deteriorated, with hostile and bigoted remarks coming not just from Mr. Alekseyev’s opponents but also from the host, who at one point equated homosexuality with pedophilia. When a woman in a Kentucky Derby-style hat started into a screed about “homosexual extremism,” he had had enough.

Calling the woman a lying “hag in a hat,” Mr. Alekseyev charged offstage, stamping a hole through the set as he left.

Any conversation about gay rights in Russia today is bound to be tense. But with Mr. Alekseyev, it can be explosive.

For six years, he has flouted a government ban and held an annual gay-rights event that he calls Moscow Pride. He has weathered arrests and attacks by neo-Nazi thugs, and once got into a shoving match with the press secretary of Yuri M. Luzhkov, the former Moscow mayor who has referred to Mr. Alekseyev’s protests as “satanic.”

With short blond hair and a round, youthful face, Mr. Alekseyev, 33, has the air of a maligned schoolboy out for retribution. He decided to become an activist after Moscow State University, where he was enrolled, refused to accept his graduate thesis, “Legal Regulation of the Status of Sexual Minorities.”

He is brash and provocative, even among would-be supporters. He has berated journalists for coverage he disagrees with.

“He is a complicated person and does not have a mild personality,” said Anna Komarova, a transgender activist allied with Mr. Alekseyev. “But laid-back people choose other occupations.”

BEING a gay-rights activist in Russia is not for the timid. At this year’s Moscow Pride, held outside the Kremlin last month, the two dozen or so participants stood little chance against the phalanx of police officers deployed to stop them. Most were arrested seconds after unfurling a rainbow flag or a placard denouncing homophobia. Gangs of muscular men wearing surgical masks and yelling antigay slurs chased away the rest.

Participants suffered only minor cuts and bruises, and all were released the same day. Mr. Alekseyev, who spent this year’s protest coordinating from an apartment — his father was recently found to have cancer, he said, and he could not risk being jailed as a repeat offender — said previous years were bloodier.

Few others in Russia have risked being as publicly outspoken — or just as out — as Mr. Alekseyev. He calls news conferences at fancy Moscow hotels, gives interviews to newspapers and has appeared on television with increasing regularity. He has, for better or for worse, become the face of a budding campaign for gay rights in Russia.

His efforts have attracted news media attention and forced politicians to discuss the issue. But it is a steep uphill battle; asked to weigh in, Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, said homosexuals deepen Russia’s demographic crisis. And Russia joined many African and Muslim-majority countries on Friday in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning discrimination against homosexuals that, nevertheless, passed.

Mr. Alekseyev, who founded the group Gay Russia in 2005, believes that there can be no advance in rights until gay people are allowed to protest publicly.

But in a country where the authorities view any sort of public protest with trepidation, his position has provoked hostility.

“This is a very dangerous thing,” said Aleksandr Khinshtein, a member of Parliament, and Mr. Alekseyev’s principal opponent on the recent debate show. “Homosexuality can never be allowed to be considered normal. It’s a question of survival.”

Even other gay-rights campaigners have criticized Moscow Pride, saying the rallies and the violence that typically accompanies them distort perceptions of the issue in Russia, where there is still significant confusion about what homosexuality is and what exactly gay people want.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 18, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the citizenship of Nikolai Alekseyev as a result of his marriage to his Swiss partner. He is not a Swiss citizen.

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In Afghanistan, Gates Stresses U.S. Is Committed to the Fight

Mr. Gates said at a news conference that it was too early to assess whether the Taliban would come to the negotiating table and disavow ties to Al Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist organization’s founder, who had personal connections to some top insurgent leaders.

On his 12th and final visit to Afghanistan as defense secretary, Mr. Gates said the allies must take full advantage of political opportunities from President Obama’s deployment of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, which has increased pressure on the insurgency.

“The enemy has absorbed serious losses — in leadership, manpower and territory — over the last year and a half,” Mr. Gates said. He argued that the mission should be given time to force the Taliban to lay down their arms and negotiate an end to the war.

Mr. Gates expressed hopes that the Kabul government could open significant reconciliation talks with the insurgency “toward the end of this year.” At that point, he said, the United States might “at least be in a position where we can say we’ve turned the corner here in Afghanistan.”

He warned that “making any change prior to that time would be premature.”

Mr. Gates said the administration was unwavering in its pledge to begin withdrawing the 30,000 “surge” forces beginning in July, based on conditions on the ground; no decision on numbers or pace of the drawdown has been made. All foreign combat troops are to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

Fiscal constraints in Washington, and the death of Bin Laden, have prompted some in Congress to call for swiftly ordering a smaller troop commitment — one focused on hunting terrorists and insurgents, with fewer personnel and less money devoted to rebuilding Afghanistan’s economy and corrupt government institutions. Some administration officials also have favored this more contained mission.

In answer, Mr. Gates said, “The most costly thing of all would be to fail.” At the same time, he acknowledged, “You can’t be oblivious to the growing war-weariness at home and the diminishing support in the Congress.”

A rapid American withdrawal also might be used by allies as a reason to order their forces home, he warned. “We certainly don’t want to precipitate a rush to the exit by our partners,” Mr. Gates said.

At the news conference, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, repeated his condemnation of raids by American-led NATO forces that resulted in civilian deaths. “While we are partners and allies in the war, the people of Afghanistan do not wish or want to see their houses being bombarded, civilians being killed and lives lost,” Mr. Karzai said. “This is the people’s expectation, and demand.”

Mr. Gates noted “that the vast majority of civilian casualties are caused by the Taliban.”

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A Grass-Roots Fight to Save a ‘Supertree’

But can it survive a development-hungry Chinese Communist Party? In Nanjing, a southeastern city of eight million people, the answer seems — for now — to be yes.

In a nation where homes and farmland are routinely chewed up for the sake of high rises and factories, a grass-roots campaign by Nanjing residents this spring to save hundreds of the trees, known here as the wutong, from a subway expansion might seem like a nonstarter. But the effort, organized mostly online, has led to a surprising compromise from local government officials.

It was not a shining example of democracy in action. But neither were ordinary citizens left fuming about power-drunk bureaucrats deaf to anyone below.

Maybe that is because some Nanjing officials consider the Communist Party’s credo of “supervision by the people” to be more than mere words. Or maybe it is because trees, in the scheme of development, provide an easy compromise.

Giants in the arboreal world, the wutongs were introduced in China by the French in the late 1800s or early 1900s to adorn their settlement in Shanghai, Nanjing officials say. In 1928 and 1929, Nanjing planted more than 20,000 saplings along Zhongshan Avenue, a road leading to the mausoleum of the anti-imperialist leader Sun Yat-sen, revered as the father of modern China.

Many more were reportedly planted after the Communists took power in 1949. The trees grew fast and provided shade during Nanjing’s scorching summers. And they became not just a symbol of Nanjing’s graceful beauty, but of its civic philosophy. China’s capital through multiple dynasties, Nanjing regards itself as a cultural haven. Its urban plan touts the city’s integration with mountains, rivers and trees.

Liu Hengzhen, a former military employee, planted wutongs in the 1950s. “They keep the whole city cool,” Mr. Liu, now 80, said as he played mah-jongg at a street cafe, its roof pierced by a massive wutong branch.

“The people of Nanjing grew up together with these trees,” said He Jinxue, the daily operations director for the city’s urban construction commission. “There is so much emotional attachment to them.”

That did not shield them from the onslaught of development. In 1993, more than 3,000 were felled virtually overnight to make way for the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway. Nearly 200 more were removed to build Nanjing Subway Line Two in 2006.

Then, this year, came Subway Line Three, calling for more than 1,000 trees — mostly wutongs — to be beheaded, uprooted and plunked down elsewhere to make space for six above-ground stations in the city center.

Nanjing’s two existing subway lines, each carrying a million commuters a day, are not nearly enough, said Mr. He, the urban commission director. More than 10 new lines are planned, he said.

But once workers had reduced a first batch of 49 wutongs to trunks and a few feet of branches, the Chinese equivalents of Twitter rustled with more than 10,000 outraged messages. A schoolteacher organized students to tie green ribbons around some untouched trees.

Several celebrities weighed in, including Huang Jianxiang, a freelance television host and sports commentator whose Sina Weibo microblog is followed by more than five million people. So did a Taiwan legislator with the Kuomintang Party, which made Nanjing its headquarters until it was vanquished by the Communists in 1949.

Zhu Fulin, an enterprising reporter for the government-owned Nanjing Morning Post, traced the fate of 190 trees that had been moved elsewhere five years ago to construct Line Two. Despite the government’s pledge to protect and replant them, he found 80 of the wutongs languishing in a trash-strewn city field.

Mia Li contributed research from Beijing, and Barclay Walsh from Washington.

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Albertina Sisulu, Who Helped Lead Apartheid Fight, Dies at 92

The African National Congress confirmed her death.

Mrs. Sisulu’s passing extinguishes another light of a generation that fought one of the great moral battles of the 20th century. Since her death, virtually every one of this nation’s leaders have come to her home to offer condolences. Only Nelson Mandela has been conspicuously absent. He is increasingly frail, and members of the Sisulu family visited him instead.

A humble but forceful woman, Mrs. Sisulu was the widow of Walter Sisulu, one of Mr. Mandela’s earliest political mentors, who died in 2003. She kept her dignity through decades of government harassment. Mr. Sisulu was imprisoned for 26 years, and she herself was repeatedly jailed, held incommunicado and “banned,” a restriction limiting where she could go and how many people she could see.

“But try as they might, they could not break her spirit, they could not make her bitter, they could not defeat her love,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said in one of the many tributes offered after her death.

Nontsikelelo Thethiwe was born into a poor farming family in the Transkei, a former British protectorate that is now part of Eastern Cape Province. When she enrolled in a school run by missionaries, she was given a list of Christian names to chose from and selected Albertina.

Her father died when she was 11, and poverty might have kept her from finishing her education had she not won a scholarship to a Roman Catholic secondary school. After graduation, she accepted the advice of an admired priest and moved to Johannesburg to study nursing, a career that offered a small salary as she apprenticed.

In 1941, she was training at the Non-European General Hospital when she met Mr. Sisulu, a political activist with the African National Congress. Their courtship would be her political awakening. They married three years later. Nelson Mandela was best man at the ceremony.

In his autobiography, Mr. Mandela describes Albertina as a “wise and wonderful presence.” At the Sisulus’ wedding reception, he wrote, an A.N.C. stalwart warned the bride, “Albertina, you have married a married man: Walter married politics before he met you.”

She, in turn, was marrying the liberation movement. The Sisulus’ home in the Orlando area of Soweto became a central meeting place for the robust discussions that shaped the direction of the A.N.C. She combined her work as a visiting nurse with the distribution of political pamphlets.

On Aug. 9, 1956, Mrs. Sisulu was a leader of a historic march by 20,000 women against the nation’s pass laws, which restricted the movements of blacks. One slogan from the protest was, “You strike a woman, you strike a rock.” Aug. 9 is now celebrated in South Africa as Women’s Day.

Walter Sisulu would go on to head the A.N.C., and later, along with Mr. Mandela and others, create an armed wing of the organization. The Sisulus’ relationship has been celebrated in South Africa as a great love story, but during the first 20 years of their marriage, he was so often in jail or on the run that the couple barely spent 9 years together.

Once, in 1963, when the police failed to locate her husband, they seized Mrs. Sisulu instead, arresting her while she was treating patients. She was placed in solitary confinement under a notorious law that allowed detention for 90 days without charges.

“There was nothing to read, nothing to do, nothing to occupy my mind—nothing except to think of what was happening to my children at home,” she recalled in a 2002 biography written by her daughter-in-law, Elinor Sisulu.

The couple had five children and raised three more who belonged to Mrs. Sisulu’s deceased sister. Unknown to Mrs. Sisulu, after she was jailed, her 17-year-old son Max was arrested and held under the same law.

In 1964, Mr. Sisulu was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving most of his time, like Mr. Mandela, on Robben Island. Mrs. Sisulu was banned for 10 years. Her children either went into exile or entered boarding school.

As the decades passed, MaSisulu, as she was affectionately called, was frequently arrested, locked up for infractions as slight as attending the funeral of a friend. Her children faced similar harassment.

“I did not mind going to jail myself, and I had to learn to cope without Walter,” Mrs. Sisulu once said. “But when my children went to jail, I felt that the Boers were breaking me at the knees.”

Nevertheless, her political activities continued. In 1983, she became one of the founders of the United Democratic Front, a powerful antiapartheid coalition that brought together religious, labor and student groups.

In July 1989, she led a delegation on an overseas mission, arguing for sanctions against the apartheid government. She met with President George H. W. Bush and former President Jimmy Carter. She dined with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

The days of racist oppression were drawing to a close. That October, Mr. Sisulu was set free; Mr. Mandela would be released four months later.

In 1994, with multiracial democracy finally having replaced white domination, Mrs. Sisulu was elected to Parliament. She served for four years, retiring from politics though remaining active in social causes.

The Sisulu family, for so long badgered and humiliated, is now a political dynasty. Her daughter Lindiwe Sisulu is the nation’s defense minister. Her son Max is speaker of the National Assembly. Another daughter, Beryl Sisulu, is South Africa’s ambassador to Norway. She is also survived by her son Zwelakhe Sisulu and daughter Nkuli Sisulu.

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Private sector 'faces NHS fight'

。 15 May 2011 Last updated at 19:07 ET By Nick Triggle Health correspondent, BBC News  The NHS reforms are on hold The private sector will still remain a small player in NHS hospital care for at least a decade even if government plans go-ahead, health firms say.

The NHS Partners Network, which represents health firms, said it was a myth that the NHS was to be privatised.

Just 3.5% of NHS operations are done by private firms currently - and the network said that was unlikely to even double over the next decade.

But unions said the reforms could still destabilise the NHS in England.

Opening up the health service to greater competition has become one of the most controversial aspects of the government's changes.

Last month ministers were forced to put the plans on hold amid mounting criticisms to carry out a "listening exercise".

There are now suggestions the duty of the regulator to promote competition may be dropped.

'Myth'

But David Worskett, director of the NHS Partners Network, which includes private firms already doing NHS work, said the fears were unfounded.

"All this talk of privatisation is so obviously inaccurate. It is just a myth. The NHS is very cautious and contracts for work are not that easy to come by so I can't see that changing even with these reforms."

He said the 3.5% figure, which covers non-emergency treatment such as knee and hip replacements and cataract operations, would probably not even double over the next 10 years.

Although he said if the NHS did not start innovating that could change in the long-term - something which would be "desirable" anyway to improve patient care.

Continue reading the main story

The scenario that everyone is worried about is that there will be huge radical change, but that is unlikely to happen”

End Quote Nigel Edwards NHS Confederation Nigel Edwards, of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS managers, agreed.

"The scenario that everyone is worried about is that there will be huge radical change, but that is unlikely to happen. If you look at the telecommunications industry, even after 10 years BT still dominated the residential market."

Sir Stephen Bubb, who is leading the competition arm of the government's listening exercise, said it was hard to predict exactly what would happen, but added there was a lot of "misinformation" about the private sector.

But Dr Hamish Meldrum, chairman of the BMA, said the changes as they stood would lead to a "move away from an ethos of co-operation to one of competition".

"The current proposals would actively enforce conditions in which all providers - NHS hospitals, profit-making companies and charities - would be pitted against each other. This seriously risks creating a more fragmented system, and destabilising NHS hospitals, due to 'profitable' parts of their work being cherry-picked by others."