1Week USA 23 september 2016

Silicon Valley Men Behaving Badly / The Lost Bush Emails

IN THE
COMPANY
OF
TRUMP

09.23.2016

IF HE WINS,
HIS MANY
OVERSEAS
DEALS WILL
CREATE A
NATIONAL
SECURITY
NIGHTMARE


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09.23.2016

VOL.167

NO.11

+
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: Gurbaksh Cha-

hal at the Sikh Awards
in London in 2010. The
Silicon Valley entrepreneur faces 12 months
in jail, three years after
being charged with
smacking his then-girlfriend 117 times.

22 Civil Rights

Clenched Fists
Across the Ocean

26 North Korea

North Korea’s
Endless Loop

28 Tampons

A Generous
Monthly Allowance

NEW WORLD
46 Innovation

Got Milk
(Packaging)?

48 Tech

The BlinkingVCR Candidates

FEATURES

30

DEPARTMENTS

The Man Who Sold the World

BIG SHOTS

If Donald Trump gets into the White House, his
many foreign business deals will create a national
security nightmare. by Kurt Eichenwald

FEL IPE TRUEBA / UPPA / PHOTOSHOT/NEWSCOM

40

4 New York City

Stumble on the Trail
6 Douma, Syria
Cease-Fire
8 Diyarbakir, Turkey
Life Lessons
10 Port-au-Prince,
Haiti
Zika Looms

To Be Young, Gifted and Wack
Gurbaksh Chahal is the best of Silicon
Valley—a brilliant entrepreneur—and the
worst of Silicon Valley—a man who likes
to beat women. by Nina Burleigh

50 Happiness

Smile, Damn It!

DOWNTIME
54 Games

The Hurt Login

58 Animals

Czech Mates

60 Books

The Battle of
Jack Lemmon
and Yoko Moto

64 Rewind
PAG E O N E

COVER CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD BURBRIDGE/ART + COMMERCE

12 Politics

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A ‘Lost’ Generation

18 Medicine

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50 Years

Syrian Superbugs

1

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BIG
SHOTS

USA

Stumble
on the Trail

BRIAN SNYDER

B R I A N S N Y D E R / R EU T E RS

New York City—
Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton waves
outside her daughter’s apartment a few
hours after she left
the September 11 memorial service early
feeling overheated
and dehydrated. Amateur video showed
her being helped
into a van, her knees
apparently buckling.
Her doctor later said
she’d been diagnosed
with pneumonia two
days earlier. Republican critics saw that
as further evidence
that the 68-year-old
Clinton has been
covering up serious
health problems, as

they have been saying
for months, even
though she has released more detailed
information about her
medical records than
the 70-year-old Republican candidate,
Donald Trump.




BIG
SHOTS

SYRIA

Cease-Fire

SA M E E R A L- D OU M Y/A F P/G E T T Y

Douma, Syria—
A Syrian rescue worker carries a wounded
boy after airstrikes on
the rebel-held town,
east of Damascus, on
September 9. Hours
later, the United
States and Russia
agreed to a cease-fire
that was to take effect

on September 12, but
fighting continued,
including a strike on
a busy market in Idlib
that killed dozens of
civilians. Residents in
the area told Reuters
they believed the
warplanes were Russian. The latest truce
is supposed to bring
unrestricted humanitarian access and
joint Russian-U.S.
military action
against the Islamic
State militant group,
also known as ISIS,
and the Nusra Front.

SAMEER AL-DOUMY



BIG
SHOTS

TURKEY

Life
Lessons

I LYAS A K E N G I N /A F P/G E T T Y

Diyarbakir, Turkey—
Police detain a protester in the southeastern
city on September 9,
after Turkish authorities suspended more
than 11,000 teachers
over alleged links to
the banned Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK).
President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said
Turkey had launched
the largest operations
in its history against
the group, which it
considers a terrorist
force. Authorities also
removed two dozen
elected mayors in
Kurdish-run municipalities. Since surviving a coup attempt
in July, Erdogan has
cracked down on both
the PKK and supporters of U.S.-based
Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he
accuses of orchestrating the coup.

ILYAS AKENGIN

BIG
SHOTS

HAITI

Zika
Looms
Port-au-Prince,
Haiti—Government
health workers
fumigate the streets
of Haiti’s capital on
September 7 in an effort to stop the spread
of mosquitoes that
carry Zika and other
diseases. Budget constraints and a strike by
health workers have
hindered prevention
efforts in the country,
and the World Health
Organization warned
that experts were expecting an epidemic
on the island, where
the health system is
still recovering from
the 2010 earthquake.
Haiti has reported
3,000 suspected cases
of Zika, or about 30
per 100,000 people,

compared with 82 per
100,000 in Brazil,
but the WHO said it
believes the government has been
underreporting.

ANDRES MARTINEZ CASARES


ANDRES MARTINE Z CASARES/ REUTERS


P
MEDICINE

A

G

POLITICS

E

NORTH KOREA

O
CIVIL RIGHTS

N
TAMPONS

E
BUSINESS

A ‘LOST’ GENERATION

George W. Bush’s White House
failed to account for millions of
emails. Where’s the outrage?
FOR 18 MONTHS, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow
them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime
has been found. But now they at least have the
skills and interest to focus on a much larger and
deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies,
a private server run by the Republican Party and
contempt of Congress citations—all of it still
unsolved and unpunished.
Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoenadodging, email-hiding, private-server-using
George W. Bush administration. Between 2003
and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This included millions of emails
written during the darkest period in America’s
recent history, when the Bush administration
was ginning up support for what turned out to
be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims
that the country possessed weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was

NEWSWEEK

firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used
a private email server—its was owned by the
Republican National Committee. And the Bush
administration failed to store its emails, as
required by law, and then refused to comply with
a congressional subpoena seeking some of those
emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard
as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works
with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If
you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails
were on a private email system set up by the
RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we
had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails
set up on a private DNC server?”
Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there
were no emails available from the office of Vice
President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most

12

0 9 / 2 3 / 2016

BY
NINA BURLEIGH
@ninaburleigh


+
S M I T H CO L L ECT I O N /GA D O/G E T T Y

RADIO SILENCE:

Researchers
found a suspicious pattern in
White House email
system blackouts,
including periods
when no emails
were available
from the office of
Dick Cheney.

NEWSWEEK

13

0 9 / 2 3 / 2016


+
DON’T DELETE: In
2008, the Senate
Judiciary Committee found Karl
Rove, center, in
contempt of Congress for refusing
to comply with
subpoenas in the
investigation of
fired attorneys.

NEWSWEEK

14

0 9 / 2 3 / 2016


powerful vice president in history, should have
no archived emails in its accounts for scores of
days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the
imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director
of the Washington-based National Security
Archive, a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and
declassifying national security documents. It is
one of the key players in the effort to recover the
supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
The media paid some attention to the Bush
email chicanery but spent considerably less ink
and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s
digital communications in the past 18 months.
According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study
for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles
mentioning Clinton’s emails between March
2015 and September 1, 2016.
In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential
Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after
January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public,
not the president, owned the records.
The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s
rudimentary first email system.

Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records,
even as the number of White House
emails began growing exponentially.
(The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989,
a federal lawsuit to force the White
House to comply with the PRA was
filed by several groups, including the National
Security Archive, which at the time was mostly
interested in unearthing the secret history of the
Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court
order, issued in the waning hours of the first
Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White
House email backup tapes from being erased.
When Bill Clinton moved into the White House,
his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort
to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National
Archives and Records Administration to allow him
to treat his White House emails as personal. At the
time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White
House communications director—defended the
resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn’t want
subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.
The Clinton White House eventually settled
the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—
now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—
even invited members of the National Security

PAGE ONE /POLI T I C S

Archive into the White House to demonstrate

how the new system worked. If anyone tried
to delete an email, a message would pop up on
screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.
“We were happy with that,” recalls Blanton,
who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages
the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy.
Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told
the National Security Archive that the George
W. Bush White House was no longer saving its
emails. The Archive and another watchdog group,
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Wash-

M I C H A E L RO B I N SO N - C H AV E Z /
T H E WAS H I N GTO N P OST/G E T T Y

NINETY-FIVE PERCENT OF
[BUSH’S] CHIEF ADVISERS’
EMAILS WERE ON A
PRIVATE EMAIL SYSTEM
SET UP BY THE RNC.

NEWSWEEK

ington (which had represented outed CIA agent
Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.
The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides
had simply shut down the Clinton automatic
email archive, and they identified the start date
of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White
House claimed it had switched to a new server

and in the process was unable to maintain an
archive—a claim that many found dubious.
Bush administration emails could have aided
a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White
House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq
WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife,
Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald,
who was brought in to investigate that case,
said in 2006 that he believed some potentially
relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office
were in the administration’s system but he
couldn’t get access to them.

15

0 9 / 2 3 / 2016


on a different track but having no more luck. In
a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found
White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in
contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with
subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S.
attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines
and possible jail time, but no punishment was
ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals
court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008,
while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer
claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any
emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes

orderly,” according to the Associated Press.
By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration
basically ran out the clock. And neither the
Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.
The committee’s final report on the matter was
blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system
has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and
ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out
precisely what happened. The reasons given for

PAGE ONE /POLITICS

The supposedly lost emails also prevented
Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the
politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys.
When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were
inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private
server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com.
The White House, meanwhile, officially refused
to comply with the congressional subpoena.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy
(D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian
stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor
in exasperation and shouted, “They say they
have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!”
His House counterpart, Judiciary
Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.),
said Bush’s assertion of executive
privilege was unprecedented and
displayed “an appalling disregard for

the right of the people to know what
is going on in their government.”
In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White
House had lost three months’ worth of
email backups from the initial days of
the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded
a court-ordered deadline to describe
the contents of digital backup believed to contain
emails deleted in 2003 between March—when
the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also
refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails
relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming
a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million
emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that
the Bush administration knew about the problem
in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.
Eventually, the Bush White House admitted
it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then,
in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s
administration—the White House said it found
22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005,
that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache
was given to the National Archives, and it and
other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009,
to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet
been made available to the public.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating

“[T]HIS SUBVERSION OF
THE JUSTICE SYSTEM HAS

INCLUDED LYING, MISLEADING, STONEWALLING AND
IGNORING THE CONGRESS.”

NEWSWEEK

these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up,
and the stonewalling by the White House is part
and parcel of that same effort.”
At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency
on the White House’s part, but The Washington
Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House
explanation that the emails could have been
lost due to flawed IT systems.
The mystery of what was in the missing Bush
emails and why they went missing is still years
away from being solved—if ever. They won’t
be available to the public until 2021, when the
presidential security restrictions elapse. Even
then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers will still have years of
work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’
worth of emails around the time of the WMD
propaganda campaign that led to war.
“To your question of what’s in there—we

16

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+

FRUSTRATED:

W I N M C N A M E E /G E T T Y

Senate Judiciary
Committee
Chairman Patrick
Leahy described
the Bush White
House’s failure to
provide emails to
Congress as “Nixonian stonewalling.”

don’t know,” the National Security Archive’s
Blanton says. “There was not a commitment at
the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance
motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We
gotta save money’?”
Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails
were ever truly “lost,” given that every email
exists in two places, with the sender and with
the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about
forcing the State Department to publicly release
Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow
researchers have decided not to press their fight
for the release of the Bush emails.
Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush
email record will be found intact after 2021,
when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National
Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don’t

know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time,

NEWSWEEK

the government and the National Archives will
have much better technology and tools with
which to sift and sort that kind of volume.”
Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of
upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less
than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,”
he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.”
Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A
source involved with the stymied congressional
investigation recalled the period as “an intense
time,” but the Obama administration didn’t
encourage any follow-up, devoting its political
capital to dealing with the crashing economy
rather than investigating the murky doings that
took place under his predecessor. Since then, no
major media outlet has devoted significant—or,
really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or
to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly,
the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).

17

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PA G E O N E/ M E D I C INE

SYRIAN SUPERBUGS

Bashar al-Assad’s war in Syria could
produce something far more deadly
than ISIS: the end of antibiotics
MOHAMMED ABU ARA is the face of a grave new
threat, but propped up on his bed in an airy segregated hospital ward in Jordan, there’s not a
hint of menace about him. With his left arm cut
off above the elbow and one of his legs encased
in a metal splint, he looks like thousands of others whose lives have been shredded by the violence of the Syrian civil war.
Yet for many regional health analysts, Abu Ara
and several others at the Doctors Without Borders Special Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery
in Amman are part of a terrifying new trend: the
growing number of Syrians who are immune to
almost all antibiotics. The only way to treat them
is to amputate their affected limbs and inject
them with last-resort drugs. For those suffering
from less peripheral wounds, the prognosis is
even grimmer. “If the infection is in the chest or
brain, he will die,” says Rashid Fakhri, surgical
coordinator for the organization, known internationally as Médecins sans frontières (MSF), in
Amman. “You can’t amputate there.”
After five and a half years of death and destruction, those working at hospitals and makeshift
clinics along the Syrian border thought they’d
seen every injury imaginable—from chest wounds
stanched with hookah pipes to twin brothers
whose skulls were dented by an undetonated
rocket-propelled grenade. But as the conflict escalates and conditions worsen for civilians and soldiers alike, doctors and aid workers fear antibiotic

NEWSWEEK

resistance could soon become deadlier than the
Islamic State group (ISIS) or Bashar al-Assad’s
dreaded air force. And with resistant bacteria
spreading fast, Syria might even become the place
where antibiotics, one of the biggest lifesavers of
the 20th century, stop working altogether.
There are few reliable statistics on the
number of fatalities in Syria related to failing
drugs, and for now the problem seems manageable. Last month, a 14-year-old boy from
a barrel-bombed Damascus suburb, whose
body had rejected all available antibiotics, succumbed to multiple infections not long after he
arrived at a Jordanian clinic. At a field hospital
in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, medics say ineffective antibiotics appear to have increased the
death rate over the past year. “In 2015, we lost
two people,” says Mariam Mohamed, a volunteer nurse at an emergency refugee clinic outside Chtoura, halfway between Beirut and the
Syrian border. “So far this year, we’ve already
lost four who weren’t responding to treatment.”
Frazzled medical professionals believe the
problem is quickly getting worse, especially in
besieged swathes of Syria that doctors can’t reach.
At MSF’s hospital in Amman, half of the patients
now arrive with some sort of chronic infection; of
those, 60 percent are resistant to multiple drugs.
United Nations officials are so concerned they
recently called for an emergency General Assembly summit on superbugs in late September. “If

18

0 9 / 2 3 / 2016

BY
PETER
SCHWARTZSTEIN
@PSchwartzstein


TA NYA H A BJOUQA FOR NEWSWEEK

+
THE RESISTANCE:

Mohammed Abu
Ara is among a
growing number of
Syrians for whom
almost all antibiotics do not work.

NEWSWEEK

19

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LAST RESORT: Half

we start seeing even more of these cases,” Fakhri
says, “it will be disastrous.”

Syria’s antibiotic resistance comes at a time
when similar problems are plaguing other parts of
the world. About 700,000 people die every year
from antimicrobial resistance, according to a U.K.
government study that suggests that figure could
rise to 10 million by 2050. The reasons vary, but
many blame widespread drug use in agriculture,
as farmers force-feed antibiotics to animals to
fatten them up. In the U.S., large-scale livestock
farming has hastened the speed by which bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, environmentalists say, though representatives of major

NEWSWEEK

agricultural companies insist the animals need
those pills to stay healthy. Either way, the world
has reached a point where every existing antibiotic—from penicillin to last-resort drugs such as
polypeptides—has been compromised, according
to Antibiotic Research U.K., a British group that
campaigns to raise awareness of antibiotic abuse.
In Syria, part of the problem is rooted in the
country’s lax attitude toward medications. As in
much of the Middle East, antibiotics have long
been available without a prescription and are
often seen as cure-alls with no side effects. For
years, doctors doled them out for everything from
headaches to common colds. Farmers in isolated

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TANYA HABJOUQA FOR N EWSWEEK

the Syrian patients
coming to the
Doctors Without
Borders hospital
in Amman have
chronic infections.
+


areas self-medicated. Pharmacists who knew the
risks prescribed them anyway, fearing their customers would go elsewhere. And with dozens of
pharmaceutical factories churning out products
across the country, antibiotics became available
at low cost to pretty much everyone.
The outbreak of war and the subsequent breakdown of Syria’s health care system appear to have
sparked this crisis and created an environment
perfectly suited for the spread of germs. The
Syrian regime’s systematic targeting of doctors
with barrel bombs and cluster munitions has
destroyed much of the country’s medical knowhow, and its repeated bombings of hospitals have
set emergency room sanitation back decades in
some areas. In the besieged mountain resort of
Madaya, for instance, a veterinarian and a dentist in training have been left to treat the wounds
of a town of several thousand people. “When we
started to receive Syrians in 2012, we thought:
They have serious injuries, but they don’t have
multi-drug resistance,” says Nagham Hussein,

director of medical operations at MSF’s Amman
hospital. “But then, when the crisis became older
and older, the nice innocent bacteria changed into
nasty bacteria. Everything is more difficult now.”
Analysts still aren’t sure whether this resistance
is spread in the streets or strictly at battlefield
clinics. There are insufficient micro-laboratories
in the relevant areas, which are needed to scrutinize bone cultures for signs of deep infection, and
Syrians, it seems, are being killed too quickly for
analysts to keep up. It’s possible, doctors say, that
explosions—from car bombs to airstrikes—are
spreading resistant bacteria through body parts
and flesh that flies through the air after a blast.
Or it could be that under-trained medics, forced
to deal with so many casualties, have inadvertently created fertile breeding grounds for infectious diseases. Regardless, it’s a hellish scenario
that wounded Syrians—and the doctors who treat
them—are struggling to comprehend.
“There’s really no luck for us,” says Abdel
Salem, a 20-year-old from the southern Daraa
area who lost a leg in an airstrike in March 2015
and risks losing the other to an infection that took
root in his shrapnel-ridden ankle. “Even when we
are safe in Jordan, we are not safe.”
First treated in a field hospital run by the Free
Syrian Army, Salem was given whatever drugs
the rebel group had inside the blockaded town
by a fighter who doubled as a paramedic. After
the Syrian army conquered the area, he says, the
government troops refused to treat him, and his
wounds were left to fester until his family smuggled him out of the country. Before he reached

the border, five different doctors operated on
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PAGE ONE /MEDI C I N E

his legs, which were oozing puss by the time he
arrived in Amman.
More Syrians may wind up like him, depending
on the direction of the war, which shows few signs
of abating. As long as doctors continue to perform
complex operations in poorly lit basements and
caves with recycled equipment, infections will
remain common. And until the number of qualified medics corresponds to the high volume of
injuries, analysts say it will be difficult to thwart
the spread of resistant bacteria within Syria.
There is, however, cause for some guarded
optimism. Jordan, which has taken in more than
a million Syrian refugees, has been implementing tight new controls on the use of Colistin,
an extra-strength antibiotic that can be used
as a last resort. Only four pathologists across
the country are licensed to distribute the drug,

“IF THE INFECTION IS
IN THE CHEST OR BRAIN,
HE WILL DIE. YOU CAN’T
AMPUTATE THERE.”
and even they seldom prescribe it. Patients also
seem increasingly open to recounting what happened to them, unlike in the war’s early days,
when many were wary of saying how they were
injured for fear of Assad’s forces. And if the situation continues to deteriorate and Colistin loses

its effectiveness (there have already been a
number of recorded cases of resistance in a few
countries), then the possible discovery of a new
class of antibiotics—derived from human nasal
mucus—offers some hope.
Yet with the Syrian war still killing and maiming
at a pace unmatched in recent memory, doctors
and scientists say there’s only one guaranteed way
to preserve one of our world’s greatest discoveries.
“The problem is not the mentality of the doctors;
it’s the conflict,” says Fakhri. “We have to treat the
conflict to stop antibiotic resistance.”

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CLENCHED FISTS ACROSS THE OCEAN

The British chapter of Black Lives Matter
is already making noise and drawing the
attention of haters
AFTER REHEARSING with his hip-hop band one
evening last summer, 25-year-old Josh Virasami
began making his way to his home in Tottenham,
North London. He headed into New Cross Gate
station, where he planned to take a train. It was
late, but the station was busy—supporters of the
Clapton Ultras, a non-league soccer team, were

returning from a game. As he walked toward the
turnstiles, Virasami noticed police officers searching two black men, who were stood up against the
wall of the station. Virasami, who is also black,
began filming the incident with his phone.
Less than a minute later, Virasami says, a white

NEWSWEEK

officer came up behind him and twisted his arm
behind his back, causing him to drop his phone.
The officer then handcuffed him and began to
search him. “Under what section are you searching me?” Virasami says he asked. The officer
responded, he says, by calling over to the two
black men: “Do you know this guy?”
Officers then dragged Virasami out of the
station and into the back of their van. “This is
unlawful. This is racist,” he says he told them.
The officers drove him to the Lewisham police
station, a 10-minute drive, then led him into a
small windowless room. They ordered him to

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BY
MIRREN GIDDA
@MirrenGidda

+
SLOW JUSTICE:

Carole Duggan,
center, aunt of
Mark Duggan,
who was shot by
police five years
ago, walks with
supporters during
a march for people
killed by police.

strip naked, turn around, bend over and cough.
Virasami says that during this body search the
officers laughed at him.
Once the search was over and he was released,
Virasami says he waited at the station for two or
three hours, asking the police for paperwork documenting what had happened. Eventually, he
gave up and went home. (The Lewisham police
station says it has no record of this incident.)
Virasami believes the officers who detained
him are racists, an accusation that racial equality campaigners have long made about British
police. It’s a criticism that intensified on August
15 following the death of Dalian Atkinson, a black
man and former soccer star who passed away
after police Tasered him during an encounter in
Telford, in the west of England. (An investigation
into Atkinson’s death is ongoing.)
As British police continue to detain, arrest and

kill black people in disproportionate numbers,
a group of anti-racism campaigners—Virasami
among them—are organizing and looking to the
U.S., where the Black Lives Matter movement has
galvanized thousands of people to protest against
racial injustice. Virasami and his colleagues, some
of whom know the three U.S. founders of Black
Lives Matter, decided to adopt the moniker for
their group. Armed with the most
potent name in modern anti-racism activism—and one that protesters have chanted throughout
Europe—Black Lives Matter UK
wants to unite people across Britain
to defy racial inequality. On August
5, the group held its first protests,
shutting down roads in Birmingham, Nottingham and London.
Like its U.S. counterpart, Black
Lives Matter UK has made opposing police violence a priority. Since
2004, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, a government-funded organization, has
collected data on the number of people the police
have killed in that time frame: 1,115 people, or 93
deaths a year. Black people—who make up 3.4
percent of Britain’s population—account for 7.89
percent of the fatalities.
In an email to Newsweek, the National Police
Chiefs’ Council says it is aware of this disparity
and that black people are disproportionately
represented in arrest and detention figures. It
adds, however that the reasons for this “are
wider and more complex than simply contact
with the police.” The NPCC says the well-known

black politician David Lammy is leading an
independent review—along with the U.K.’s Ministry of Justice—into the police and the courts’

PAGE ONE /CIVIL R I G H T S

treatment of ethnic minorities. (The report’s
findings will be released next spring.)
Lammy, who is from the center-left Labour
Party, represents the borough of Tottenham,
where around a fifth of the residents are black.
Many of them have a deep-rooted distrust of the
police. In 1985, a black woman named Cynthia
Jarrett died of heart failure during a police raid of
her home in the Broadwater Farm estate, a public housing project in Tottenham. The next day,
residents of Broadwater Farm—who were suspicious of the circumstances in which Jarrett’s
death occurred—began rioting. Amid the uproar,
a crowd of people hacked a British police officer,
Keith Blakelock, to death.
More than two decades later, there was another
riot in Tottenham. In 2011, police shot and killed a
29-year-old black man named Mark Duggan, who

DA N I E L L E A L- O L I VAS/A F P/G E T T Y

MARK DUGGAN’S DEATH
SPARKED FIVE DAYS OF RIOTING ACROSS BRITAIN, WHICH
RESULTED IN AROUND $265
MILLION OF DAMAGE.

NEWSWEEK

lived in the Broadwater Farm estate. His death
sparked five days of rioting across Britain, which
resulted in around $265 million of damage.
Today, Broadwater Farm is a more peaceful
place. Housing up to 4,000 people, it feels like
a self-contained town. Residents live in colored
tower blocks, linked by walkways; also on-site is
a nursery, a playground and a church. At the back
of the estate is the Broadwater Farm community
center, where Clasford Stirling, who runs the center’s soccer club and who has lived in Tottenham
for decades, spends most of his time. In 2007, the
queen gave him an MBE—a community service
award—for his work. Now, Stirling says, for all that
he has done, one problem remains unchanged.
“[Police racism] hasn’t gone; it hasn’t gone at all,”
he says, sitting at a table in one of the center’s

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