Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor

Former South Carolina Gov. and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks with voters at a campaign event in Claremont, New Hampshire, Sept. 5, 2023.

When picking a presidential nominee for 2024, Republican voter Shawn Walsh’s main concern is “electability.” Which means, he adds, that one of his main concerns is also abortion. 

“Abortion to me is technically not a huge issue, but I know it’s a huge issue come voting,” says Mr. Walsh, a gunsmith and Army veteran from Claremont, New Hampshire, ahead of a campaign event for former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley at a local senior center. “If the midterms weren’t an eye-opener for the Republicans, I don’t know what is because we should have won that, hands down. That should have been a landslide across the country.”

Last fall, in the first congressional elections after the Supreme Court overturned a nationwide right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson, Republicans fell far short of their anticipated “red wave,” winning only a slim majority in the U.S. House and failing to retake the Senate. Abortion was a leading issue for voters, according to various exit polls. Mr. Walsh says he watched the impact in his state firsthand: Friends and family who had always voted Republican voted against state candidates with hard-line anti-abortion stances. 

Now, almost a year out from the presidential election, many Republicans are beginning to worry about a 2022 repeat in 2024, as abortion rights seem likely to again be a central concern for voters. 

Polls show a close race between President Joe Biden and top Republican presidential candidates, with independent voters – and suburban women – likely to play a crucial role. Large majorities of both of these groups say they are less likely to back an anti-abortion candidate, according to a July Reuters poll.

Most GOP primary voters, however, remain strongly opposed to abortion – a reality that has some 2024 presidential candidates gingerly trying to thread the needle on one of the nation’s most divisive issues.

Ms. Haley in particular has been nudging her party to take a more moderate stance – or at least, a softer tone. On campaign stops across early-voting states, she asks voters to give abortion “the respect it deserves” and look for policies where both sides can agree. And while her messaging has been criticized by some as vague, it also seems to be working: Ms. Haley has seen a mini-surge in support since the first GOP primary debate in late August, where candidates spent more time talking about abortion than about any other issue.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Gunsmith Shawn Walsh, photographed before hearing presidential candidate Nikki Haley speak in Claremont, New Hampshire, says abortion is “a huge issue” for electability.

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump, the dominant front-runner in the primary race, raised eyebrows when he also struck a more moderate note on abortion. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he claimed credit for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, but also called the six-week ban signed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “a terrible thing, a terrible mistake.”

“I think the Republicans speak very inarticulately about this subject,” he continued. “Other than certain parts of the country, you can’t – you’re not going to win on this issue.” Mr. Trump said he would be “a mediator” between both sides to determine at what point and under what circumstances abortion should be illegal, insisting without elaborating that he could find a policy that is “good for everybody.”

This conciliatory tone and emphasis on consensus coming from both Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley reflect just how far the conversation has shifted over the past year and a half – including within the Republican Party. As the GOP has increasingly moved from offense to defense on the issue, some Republican voters say it’s an approach the party as a whole needs to heed.

“If we as a party don’t deal with abortion, we’re going to lose,” says Mr. Walsh, who thinks Ms. Haley’s abortion stance could appeal broadly to enough of the electorate to get her to the White House. “Republicans need to wake up.”

Evolving pressures – and campaign positions

At a closed-door conference meeting in the Capitol earlier this month, a super PAC aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gave Senate Republicans a briefing that seemed intended to serve as a wake-up call. The Dobbs decision has “recharged the abortion debate and shifted more people (including some Republicans) into the anti-Dobbs ‘pro-choice’ camp,” the political action committee’s report stated. Some senators reportedly left the meeting brainstorming potential new labels, such as “pro-baby,” that could replace the increasingly fraught “pro-life.”

Unlike in the past, when conservative candidates could simply identify themselves as “pro-life” without having to be specific, they are now being peppered with questions about real policy choices: Should abortion be banned at the state or federal level? After how many weeks? With or without exceptions? What about abortion pill restrictions?

At one end of the 2024 spectrum are Vice President Mike Pence and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who have strongly leaned into an anti-abortion message. Both candidates have endorsed a national 15-week abortion ban.

By contrast, Mr. Trump, in his “Meet the Press” interview, declined to explicitly endorse a 15-week ban, drawing a rare rebuke this week from Senator Scott. Ms. Haley has outright dismissed a national 15-week ban as unrealistic – one of the “hard truths” that she has been delivering to voters across New Hampshire and Iowa. She says the Supreme Court was “right” to send abortion back to the states.

“Republicans are kind of all over the place – either they don’t want to talk about abortion or they’re super restrictive,” says GOP strategist Maura Gillespie.

With the “super restrictive” stance seeming like a potential liability in a general election, she adds, a better way to address the issue would be to focus on broader solutions, as Ms. Haley does when she talks about child care, adoption, and access to contraception.  

“Nikki Haley is leading the charge on how best to have this conversation,” says Ms. Gillespie. “She’s the only female on that stage, and she’s looking at it from all angles.”

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

During the Q&A portion of his campaign stop in Fremont, New Hampshire, on Sept. 5, 2023, former Vice President and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence listens to a voter named Suzanne tearfully thank him for attending the March for Life rally in Washington while in office.

Many GOP women lawmakers have been emphasizing access to contraception in counterbalance to their anti-abortion positions. Over the summer, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, along with eight other Republican women, many representing competitive districts, introduced the Orally Taken Contraception Act of 2023 to improve the accessibility of over-the-counter contraceptives.

In April, South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who calls herself pro-life, urged the Food and Drug Administration to ignore a federal judge’s ruling that threatened the use of a pill used commonly for abortions. In an interview with ABC News, she warned that Republicans would “lose huge” if they continue to pursue strict abortion bans with no exceptions, rather than “commonsense positions.” 

“I don’t think you can run, especially now, and not have to answer the question about abortion, because it’s actively in play,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for Women in American Politics. This is particularly the case for female candidates, she adds: “The public sort of turns to the woman on the stage first in a conversation around abortion.” 

Ms. Haley, like most of her competitors in the 2024 presidential primary, has a history of supporting anti-abortion efforts. As governor of South Carolina in 2016, Ms. Haley signed a 20-week abortion ban, joining the 12 other states with bans at the time. She has reiterated on the campaign trail and the debate stage that she is still “unapologetically pro-life,” but says she favors policies “where we can find consensus” such as banning abortions later in pregnancy, which a June poll found that about two-thirds of Americans support.

Mark Tepper, a tech salesperson from Nashua, was so impressed with Ms. Haley’s debate performance last month that he was inspired to come see her at a veterans’ post in Merrimack, New Hampshire. An independent who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Tepper says he’s now leaning toward Ms. Haley.

“Nikki, with her position on abortion and some of the more thorny issues, she’s threading the needle correctly to win a general election,” says Mr. Tepper. “She just has to figure out how to get that hardcore 30% of the Republican Party to realize that Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer [of being reelected].”

“I don’t like wishy-washy”

Yet for many of those “hardcore” Republican voters, ending access to abortion remains a top policy priority – one that has only recently gone from a distant dream to a present reality. To win the GOP nomination, a candidate still has to win over voters like Suzanne W. from Fremont, New Hampshire, who came to hear Mr. Pence speak at a senior center in Raymond.

Suzanne, who declined to give her last name, voted for Mr. Trump in the previous two elections and “liked him a lot,” though she wishes he was “more upstanding in terms of morality.” 

She describes Mr. Pence as not only a “moral and kind person,” but also one of the strongest anti-abortion candidates she’s seen in her lifetime – which is why she calls him her “No. 1” choice. Following Mr. Pence’s stump speech, during which he says “I’m pro-life and I don’t apologize for it,” Suzanne tears up while thanking him for being the first vice president to speak at the March for Life rally in Washington. 

“I’m very pro-life, so I could never vote for a Democrat,” she says afterward. But she also wouldn’t vote for Ms. Haley if she were the Republican nominee next November. “I don’t like wishy-washy. Either you’re for abortion or you aren’t.” 

Indeed, despite Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump vowing to find consensus, there is a real – and growing – gap between Republican and Democratic voters on the issue. According to Gallup polling, 60% of Democrats today say abortion should be legal under any circumstances, a 10-point increase over the past two years. Among Republicans, only 8% say the same, a decrease from 15% in 2021. An August poll found that almost 60% of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa – which holds the first GOP nominating contest – support their state’s law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

At the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition’s fall banquet last weekend, abortion was a much-discussed topic. Candidates such as Mr. Pence and Mr. DeSantis praised abortion bans. Mr. Scott said he would redesign the tax code to provide benefits once a woman gets pregnant. Ms. Haley reiterated that she would try to “bring people together” by encouraging adoption and allowing doctors who object to abortion to abstain from providing them.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson took issue with Mr. Trump’s comments on “Meet the Press” that he would find a way for both sides to “like me” on the abortion issue.

“Both sides aren’t going to like you,” said Mr. Hutchinson. “This is going to be a fight for life, and we’ve been doing that for 40 years. You take a stand. You state your position.”

Time may be running out for the self-declared republic of Artsakh, which lies within Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian-populated region of Azerbaijan.

As Azerbaijani forces launched a concerted military assault on Karabakh Tuesday, no help appeared to be forthcoming from the West, Russia, and even the region’s long-time sponsor Armenia. People on the ground in the region’s capital of Stepanakert described massive shelling of the city beginning Tuesday afternoon, and a desperate scramble to find shelter.

“The basement is full of children crying,” Gayanne Sarkisian, an operations manager at the Hub Artsakh nongovernmental organization, told the Monitor over a Zoom call after taking refuge. Whenever she can get an internet connection, Ms. Sarkisian sends out urgent pleas for help on social media. “The situation is so tense, we hear them shelling, we hear exchanges of fire. People are hugging each other, trying to make the kids smile, but panic is spreading.”

Azerbaijan described its lightning operation as “anti-terrorist activities of a limited character,” designed to eliminate the fighting capabilities of the region’s defenders using “precision strikes.” Armenia’s foreign ministry described it as a “mass-scale aggression” that portends “ethnic cleansing” of the region’s Armenian population.

Russia, which maintains about 2,000 peacekeeping troops in Karabakh, said it had been informed about the operation just minutes before it began. Moscow issued a terse statement urging the two sides to stop fighting and observe the terms of a peace deal that was reached between Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan earlier this year. There seemed little chance that Russian troops would intervene.

“Everyone, including Armenia, agrees that Karabakh is part of the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan,” says Sergei Strokan, an international affairs columnist for the Moscow business daily Kommersant who recently returned from a trip to the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. “So, it’s very difficult to argue with Azerbaijan’s desire to dismantle all Armenian military infrastructure in the region, and perhaps put an end to the ‘independent’ Armenian administration there, which Baku considers to be illegal. It remains to be seen how far they will go. Russian peacekeepers are there, but it looks like they will do nothing.”

Karabakh now seems isolated and alone. But its leaders remain defiant.

“The people of Artsakh do not accept to be part of Azerbaijan, and at the moment we need to communicate this strictly,” David Babayan, former minister of foreign affairs of the little self-declared republic posted on his Facebook page last week. “Our right to be independent can not be dismissed by any country, including the Republic of Armenia.”

Siranush Sargsyan/AP

A damaged residential apartment building following shelling is seen in Stepanakert in the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, Sept. 19, 2023. Officials in that region said there was heavy artillery firing around Stepanakert after Azerbaijan declared that it started what it called an "anti-terrorist operation" targeting Armenian military positions.

Broken cease-fire

The conflict is centuries old, but has its current roots in the breakup of the Soviet Union three decades ago. Nagorno-Karabakh, which the USSR had designated as an “autonomous region” within Azerbaijan, was at the center of a savage war and mutual waves of ethnic cleansing that ended in the early 1990s with Armenian victory, the self-declaration of Artsakh as an independent state, and the Armenian occupation of large swaths of Azerbaijani territory, which made tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis refugees in their own country.

Attempts to find a diplomatic solution never got much traction over the intervening decades, with Azerbaijan insisting on the return of its territories, including Nagorno-Karabakh – perhaps with some form of autonomy for the little territory – and Armenia refusing various attempts by the Minsk Group, headed by Russia, France, and the United States, to broker some kind of compromise.

After years of building up its military forces, oil-rich Azerbaijan launched a 44-day blitzkrieg in 2020 that swept the Armenians out of most of the captured territories. Under the terms of a Russian-brokered cease-fire, Azerbaijan stopped short of occupying most of the original Armenian-populated territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Its eventual status was left to further negotiations which have seen no progress. The leaders of Karabakh refuse to accept anything short of independence or reunification with Armenia. Azerbaijan insists on asserting full sovereign control over the territory.

Since last December, Azerbaijan has been blockading Karabakh by choking off all access to Armenia, preventing movement of people and supplies. The goal, officials in Baku said, was to compel the self-declared entity to accept that it is part of Azerbaijan and negotiate terms. Defiant leaders in Stepanakert have so far refused to do so, but on Tuesday evening they did reportedly issue an appeal to Azerbaijani leaders to cease hostilities and open negotiations.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Russia has made some efforts to get the sides to think about a settlement that would protect the civil rights of Karabakh Armenians, if not the self-determination they yearn for. But Moscow has been deeply distracted by its war in Ukraine, and is currently irritated by Armenia’s flirtations with the U.S., including ongoing joint Armenia-U.S. war games.

“I suspect that Armenian leaders want to orient themselves toward powers that are very far away, and imagine [the U.S.] might solve Armenia’s problems,” says Andrey Klimov, deputy chair of the international affairs committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament. “They should remember the geographical factor, and realize that only the states in their immediate neighborhood have any real interest or ability to help in resolving these issues.”

Azerbaijan blames Russia for failing to disarm Armenian fighters in Karabakh under the terms of its 2020 peacekeeping mandate. Armenians are angry that Russian troops didn’t prevent the Azerbaijani blockade of Karabakh. With the crisis coming to a head, Moscow appears unwilling to step between Azerbaijani forces and the defenders of Karabakh, at least for now.

No one to intervene?

Tuesday’s Azerbaijani assault on Karabakh has sharpened political divisions within Armenian society, which has never fully adjusted to the humiliating military defeat of three years ago.

Many Armenians say they feel a sense of hopeless rage at what looks like the imminent erasure of the Armenian entity in Karabakh, a region that is considered the cradle of Armenian culture. While Azerbaijan is being careful to avoid the appearance of ethnic cleansing, Baku has made it clear that the Armenian population must give up their self-declared independence and either accept the terms of Azerbaijani citizenship or leave the country. 

Hundreds of protesters converged on Yerevan’s central Freedom Square Tuesday to urge the government into action to help beleaguered Karabakh. Many blame the prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, for losing the war and then selling out Karabakh by formally agreeing the territory is a sovereign part of Azerbaijan.

“The protesters are demanding action to help the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh,” says Alexander Iskandaryan, director of the independent Caucasus Institute in Yerevan. “I don’t see how that would be possible in any practical way. Armenia and Karabakh are physically separated, and I can hardly imagine a military operation from Armenia that might try to break through.”

Mr. Strokan, who has been talking with officials in Baku in recent days, says that Azerbaijan will probably continue squeezing Karabakh until its self-declared regime collapses and accepts Azerbaijani sovereignty.

“The present Azeri goal is to dismantle the military potential of the Armenians, which they will probably accomplish in a few days. They might stop at that, leaving the Karabakh administration toothless,” he says. “Or, they might press on to dissolve the local authorities, and replace them with new Azeri ones. In any case, it doesn’t look like anyone is going to intervene to try to stop it.”

Astrig Agopian contributed reporting from Paris.

While the rest of the country’s schools were losing ground in math during the COVID-19 pandemic, students in a small rural Alabama school district soared. 

Piedmont City schools landed in the top spot among all school districts nationwide in a comparison of math scores in 2019 and 2022.

Other Alabama school districts fared well, too, but Piedmont, a 1,100-student district where 7 out of 10 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, stood out. Nationwide, students are on average half a year behind in math, researchers say.

Schools across the United States are scrambling to find ways to recover unfinished learning over the past three years. They are using federal relief money to hire interventionists to work with students, and placing students in high-dose tutoring sessions after school and during the summer. 

Piedmont has pursued an approach it began before the pandemic: It focused on changing its regular school day and working with its current staff. 

Superintendent Mike Hayes says two keys for success have been giving teachers more regular time to dig into student data and increasing instructional time where math teachers can focus on specific skills.

“We made a total transformation about five years ago,” he says, “where we decided that we were going to let data make every decision as far as instructional changes were concerned. And that we were going to involve the teachers, and that it was going to be a collaborative effort and we were going to drill down as minutely as we could.”

Trisha Powell Crain/AL.com

Piedmont City School District includes Piedmont Elementary School. Superintendent Mike Hayes says his team knew that they needed to give teachers more time to analyze student math data. The district made the school day longer and freed up enough full days to allow for “data days,” he says.

Rebecca Dreyfus, with TNTP, a national nonprofit devoted to helping schools improve student learning, helps teachers apply best practices from research to the classroom.

Ms. Dreyfus says targeted instruction for small groups of students has years of research and evidence to back it up as an effective way for teachers to teach and students to learn. Pinpointing what skills need shoring up – and using systematic and explicit instruction – makes it even more effective.

“The short answer is that using data effectively and efficiently to plan and monitor instruction is always going to make instruction better for kids,” she says. 

Because math is a subject that builds on itself year after year, teachers need to make sure students, even those who are struggling, are keeping up with grade-level learning. 

“You’re not just pulling kids to teach them a skill that they should have had a few years ago that is not coming back,” she says. “We’re trying to teach them something that will ensure they have access to the grade-level rigor.” 

A look at math scores for spring 2022 shows the district ranked 12th in the state on math proficiency, with 57% of students reaching proficiency. Statewide, 30% of students scored proficient in math.

That’s a lot of progress over the last five years; in 2017, when Mr. Hayes took over as superintendent, Piedmont students ranked 35th in math proficiency.

“Once we made that decision and stuck to it and made changes and allowed our teachers time to look at the data and dive into the data, it paid off,” Mr. Hayes says.

Data days 

The superintendent says his team knew that if they wanted teachers to use student data well they needed to give them more time to dig in and analyze the numbers. 

So they made the school day longer and freed up enough full days to allow for “data days,” Mr. Hayes says.

Every four weeks, teachers get together to examine student data. 

“I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction,” says Cassie Holbrooks, who teaches fourth grade math. “We’re able to take those small groups and adjust all our instruction based on the data that we look at.”

Trisha Powell Crain/AL.com

While math teacher Cassie Holbrooks meets with students, the rest of her class works independently. “I think the data days give us an opportunity to really dig in to where the weaknesses are and adjust instruction,” says Ms. Holbrooks.

Sixth grade teacher Lisa Hayes, who has taught for 35 years, says when she joined the district five years ago she was surprised to see how hard teachers worked during those data days.

“When I came here and we had a workday,” she says, “you don’t sit in your room. You’re in here [the media center] most of the day, digging through test scores.”

Understanding student data is the main ingredient when it comes to knowing what to do next.

Getting small group instruction right

After thoroughly examining student data, in addition to making plans for classroom lessons, teachers decide how to use targeted small group instruction – where a teacher works directly with a small number of students to target particular skills.

Grouping two to six students together to work on an identified, specific skill has been used for reading instruction and in younger grades for a long time. 

There is less research on the use of targeted small group instruction in math and in middle grades. But researchers like Ms. Dreyfus say that the same principles of correctly identifying students that need extra help on certain skills, rather than simply pulling out children who are “behind,” applies.

“We’ve always done small groups in reading,” third grade teacher Windy Casey says “But [doing small groups in] math is really just the last few years.”

Math specialist Keri Richburg oversees all training for middle school math teachers statewide through the Alabama Math Science and Technology Initiative, or AMSTI. She’s working to help more middle grade educators use small group instruction effectively.

“For a long time,” Ms. Richburg says, “it is something our K-5 friends have done a lot better at implementing in their classrooms than our sixth through eighth grade.” 

Ms. Richburg says that research supports the use of regular testing, called formative assessments, to help teachers figure out which students need personalized help.

“The idea is that we’re using evidence of student learning and making in-the-moment decisions about our instruction for each of our students within those small groups,” she says. 

Personalized instruction in practice

Throughout Piedmont’s elementary and middle schools, soon after the start of the school year in August, students worked busily on their devices playing learning games or finding solutions to math problems while their math teacher worked with a small group in a space designed for up-close instruction. 

Trisha Powell Crain/AL.com

Elementary Principal Brigett Stewart (left) and middle school Principal Chris Hanson pause for a photo. To accommodate small group instruction, the district expanded math and English language arts to 80 minutes every day in the middle school and 120 minutes each day in the elementary school.

Those who weren’t using an iPad to work on their individualized learning plans, created from assessments of what a student needs or wants to learn, wrote in their math journals.

In Ms. Holbrook’s class, she worked with four students in a small group on how to subtract 278 from 4,000, borrowing from the “0” in each place. Each student had a white board, and Ms. Holbrooks modeled the steps they needed to take, working with anyone who needed additional attention.

Superintendent Hayes says when Piedmont’s math teachers first expanded small group instruction beyond reading in elementary grades five years ago, teachers said they didn’t have enough time in a regular class to do small group instruction well. So the district expanded math and English language arts to 80 minutes every day in the middle school and 120 minutes each day in the elementary school.

High school math teacher Landon Pruitt – who taught at the middle school until four years ago – says moving to 80-minute math classes made a big difference in his ability to work with students in small groups. 

“In a 52- or 53-minute class,” Mr. Pruitt says, “there’s no way you can consistently do [small groups] and work on getting through the standards that you have to cover.” 

The school also had to help teachers adjust classroom management techniques so that small groups and independent work could both occur effectively. Mr. Hayes says giving teachers a program to monitor each students’ screen simultaneously was the solution.

“I think our teachers will tell you that they have better control of the classroom and are able to see what’s going on in the classroom and address that immediately,” he says. 

Ms. Dreyfus says getting targeted small group instruction right is hard. “What it comes down to is: Are teachers being given the support, the resources, the time and development and space to do a hard job really well?”

Those are the pieces Mr. Hayes says the district wants to make sure are in place.

“I’m not sure we have a secret sauce or anything earth shattering,” he says, “but we do have teachers and administrators committed to being intentional with data and letting that data drive small group instruction. Changing instruction in real time to meet our students where they are, may be the most important step in our data driven instructional process.”

Editor’s note: The paragraph about using systematic and explicit instruction for small groups has been updated to remove a reference to the “science of math.”

This piece is part of The Math Problem, an ongoing series documenting challenges and highlighting progress, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight diverse newsrooms: AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

Laidlaw Peringanda walks solemnly across the sand, where rocks mark the gravesites of victims killed and left unidentified in what is today considered the first genocide of the 20th century.

It was at this site, on the edge of the Namib Desert in Swakopmund, where Mr. Peringanda collapsed the first time he visited.

The genocide, carried out by Germans between 1904 and 1908 when they controlled the colony of South West Africa, was directed at the Herero and Nama peoples of modern-day Namibia.

Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother had told him stories about her time as a prisoner in a concentration camp in this coastal city. But those accounts – how their people’s traditions were stamped out and how their lands and way of life were stolen – suddenly became real in that moment in 2015. They ignited in him an activist’s drive for justice.

“Everything I do is to keep the memory of my family alive,” Mr. Peringanda says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Historic photos from the genocide era hang on the wall of Laidlaw Peringanda’s Genocide Museum of Swakopmund, July 20, 2023, in Namibia. During the German colonial era, thousands of Herero and Nama people died in concentration camps and were buried in unmarked graves. Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother lived in a concentration camp where she was raped and forced to mutilate the skulls of her relatives.

Ever since, he has been at the forefront of a truth-seeking mission, creating the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, pushing to have the graves investigated with radar-penetrating technology, protesting replicas that glorify Germany’s colonial past, and defacing those that still stand in this town.

So when Germany and Namibia announced they’d reached a joint declaration on the genocide in 2021 – Germany apologized and offered to pay €1.1 billion over 30 years – one would think that Mr. Peringanda would have been among the first to support it. Instead, he is one of thousands of Herero and Nama people who have rejected the deal – taking the Namibian government to court over it this year.

The attempts at restitution come as Europeans have faced calls for more accountability for colonial injustice. But for many descendants in Namibia, the process of negotiation between the governments of Germany and Namibia failed at reconciliation because the deal was signed without the approval of members of the Herero and Nama peoples, in some ways doing more harm in reinforcing their powerlessness.

“You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without talking to me. You cannot say, ‘I apologize,’ without specifically stating what you are apologizing for,” says Sima Luipert, who sits on the Technical Committee on Genocide of the Nama Traditional Leaders Association in Namibia, one of the groups suing the government. “And therefore, the money is a token in order for Germany to cleanse itself from its colonial guilt. It is not meant for me, the descendant. It is meant to soothe the ego of Germany.”

The “scramble for Africa,” and what it wrought

Between 1870 and World War I, European colonization of Africa increased from 10% to 90%, in what is known as the “scramble for Africa.” German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in his imperial pursuit, acquired South West Africa in 1884. But that left the Herero people, ancient cattle herders who revere the animals, destitute. They and the Nama farther south rebelled for their pastureland, killing about 150 Germans.

Colonial forces quickly quelled the rebellions. On Oct. 2, 1904, the German supreme commander in the colony, Gen. Lothar von Trotha, issued his first “extermination order” against the Herero.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Herero activist Laidlaw Peringanda unlocks the door to the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, which is in a room of his home, July 20, 2023, in Swakopmund, Namibia.

Over the following four-year period, up to 100,000 people were massacred or left to starve in the deserts across Namibia – including 80% of the Herero and half the Nama. The concentration camps of forced labor that Mr. Peringanda’s great-grandmother endured are now widely considered among historians to be the precursor to those used in the Holocaust.

Yet although the country has offered reparations for atrocities the Nazis committed against Jews during World War II, modern-day Germany has not as fully grappled with its role in Africa. It’s a double standard that some believe German society must examine more closely.

“The plan for the Holocaust, the model of the concentration camps, was invented [in Namibia] during the German colonial period,” says Alexander Karn, a Holocaust historian at Colgate University. “And, so, if that violence is understood to be compensable in the case of the Nazi Holocaust, then surely we should think about addressing it in its first instance, its originary context.”

In 2021, the German government, already among Namibia’s largest bilateral donors, agreed to compensation over three decades to help fund projects in communities affected by the killings. Yet in the agreement language, Germany tempered the wording, calling the events “what they were from today’s perspective: a genocide,” and left out the words “reparations” and “compensation” to avoid setting a legal precedent that would open the door to similar claims elsewhere.

How the two sides see negotiations

There is a chasm between the German negotiators of the 2021 agreement, and the Herero and Nama who want to be at the table. While the governments sought descendants’ voices through an advisory committee for the negotiations, members of the Herero and Nama traditional leadership say they seek direct dialogue. Instead, they feel Germany is just trying to quickly close the chapter.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has condemned the negotiations for lack of transparency, leading to the gap in perception about whether justice was served.

Germany has stood firmly by its process toward restitution. Ruprecht Polenz, the lead negotiator appointed on the German side, participated in all nine rounds of negotiations and visited Namibia four times.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Sima Luipert and her husband, Fred Goeieman, are of the Nama people. Ms. Luipert says the German government needs to apologize first, and then they can talk to Indigenous peoples directly about how to make amends.

Mr. Polenz says Germany had no choice but to negotiate directly with the government of Namibia.

“As a former colonial power, as the country who wants to beg” for forgiveness, Germany cannot make prescriptions for how Namibia “should behave. This is a no-go,” says Mr. Polenz. “If we would not negotiate with the Namibian government, we would have behaved like former colonialists, because we would pick and choose whatever we think are the legitimate representatives of Herero and Nama.”

Ms. Luipert, of the Nama Traditional Leaders Association, categorically rejects this line of argument. She maintains that under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Nama and Herero have the right to dialogue with any government.

“They make themselves subjects and make us objects, forgetting that we are subjects,” she says. The process denied Indigenous people their agency. “A subject thinks; a subject interprets. A subject is conscious – and understands and cries and laughs and mourns and feels.”

Opposition leaders and representatives of the Herero and Nama have sued the government in Namibia’s High Court. A key issue is that many Herero and Nama distrust Namibia’s ruling party, South West Africa People’s Organization, led by Namibian President Hage Geingob. They feel that the country as a whole doesn’t understand the generations of marginalization they’ve endured because of the genocide.

Germany’s forgotten genocide

In parallel, while Germans have grappled with issues around reparations for the Holocaust for decades, too few Germans even know what happened during colonial rule in Africa – a space overshadowed by the violent historic acts of France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom.

Filmmaker Lars Kraume aims to set the record straight with “Measures of Men,” a haunting film about a young German ethnologist’s conflict in his role in the study of human skulls, one of the darker chapters in the genocide.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Historic photos from the genocide era hang on the wall of the Swakopmund Genocide Museum, July 20, 2023, in Namibia. During the German colonial era, thousands of Herero and Nama people died in concentration camps from starvation, forced labor, sexual abuse, disease, fatigue, and weather, and were buried in unmarked graves.

Mr. Kraume was a history major, but he says he never once learned of German colonialization in class. The genocide is “completely underrepresented in our cultural world,” says Mr. Kraume, whose first impressions of Namibia came when he was a teenager traveling with his father. The lanky Italian-born German with light hair realized, “They’re everywhere, people who look like me. We left a big footprint there – the shape of the country, the water supply, the architecture, the street names.”

Yet educating the German public about yet another genocide is tough when the historical canon has what he categorizes as “near-amnesia” about the Herero and Nama. That’s partly because Germany lost its colonies in 1919. Namibia was colonized by South Africa and was later subject to its system of apartheid. Africa’s famous liberation struggles that began in 1960 against colonial rule – which ultimately led to independence for a number of countries including Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Ghana, Guinea, Somalia, and Nigeria – thus missed Germany.

Namibia was instead trying to liberate itself from South Africa. “The Germans could say, ‘You know the South Africans have this racist system. What do we have to do with it?’” explains Mr. Kraume. “No one recalled that [apartheid] was the offspring of German colonialism.

“The Germans have dealt [with] so much, to such a great extent, with the guilt of the Holocaust, the Third Reich, and the Second World War,” says Mr. Kraume, “and somehow blocked their view [of] things that happened before that.”

“The money is not enough”

Claudia Kavita, a Herero woman selling bone and beaded bracelets in the center of Swakopmund, says her life is a testament to what happened before. The mother of three is not from the city, but with no way of making a living in the rural northwest, she was forced to move here to make ends meet. Far from the quaint colonial architecture of this city along the Atlantic coast, the family lives in an informal settlement where thousands of homes made of corrugated steel sit precariously in the desert with no electricity or running water. “We want more. The money is not enough,” she says.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Claudia Kavita, who is Herero and in traditional dress, sells bracelets to tourists downtown, July 20, 2023, in Swakopmund, Namibia. During the German colonial era, thousands of Herero and Nama people died in concentration camps. The German government apologized and is offering reparations.

Ever since German colonialization, the arable land the Herero used to graze cattle has been privatized. Today, those of German descent own 53% of private agricultural land in Namibia, although they make up just 2% of the Namibian population. “What we want is land, and to buy cattle,” she says, “to have a better life to survive. I’d go anywhere that I can farm. That’s the better way of life.”

In Swakopmund, Norbert Sadlowski, a Namibian of German descent, expresses frustration at the “woke” politics of Germany driving this debate in his homeland, he says. He is an owner of the popular Altstadt Restaurant, where he erected in 2019 a replica of an equestrian monument honoring German soldiers and civilians killed between 1904 and 1908. That monument, originally put up in 1912 in the capital, Windhoek, but taken down in 2013, has stirred controversy.

But he says it’s a monument of war, not a celebration of genocide. His intention, he says, is to preserve history. “Germans in Germany have distorted history,” he says. “It’s all liberal shouting.”

Mr. Peringanda, who says he is personally offended by that replica, says that most of the opposition he faces in his work indeed comes from those of German descent at home. However, he says that the international community is starting to pay attention.

Many Germans – and other Europeans – visit his budding museum, built on the side of his house. Academics from Germany and the U.K. have supported his efforts to have artifacts returned and graves identified.

“Things are changing,” he says. “The pressure is becoming too much.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.

AP

Migrants arrive at Lampedusa island in Italy, Sept. 16.

The number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea en route to Italy has more than doubled this year. Spain, France, and Greece have seen smaller increases. That rising tide has added momentum to the most significant overhaul of immigration policy in Europe in decades.

On Sunday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen joined Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Lampedusa, a speck of an island where nearly 12,000 migrants have arrived in just the past week. Their visit highlighted two key issues: how northern European countries should help their southern neighbors cope with the newcomers while their claims of asylum are considered, and whether the European Union can work better with undemocratic regimes in North Africa to stem the exodus.

Embedded in that debate is the idea that an individual’s dignity must remain intact as immigration law is applied. “European migration policy is always built on humanitarian spirit,” Manfred Weber, leader of the European People’s Party, told Euronews. “But on the other hand, we have to fight against illegal migration.”

Globally, the population of international migrants is nearing 300 million. Many are driven from their homes by conflict, climate change, and political instability. For recipient countries, a key challenge is separating genuine refugees seeking asylum from those simply looking for better economic prospects.

The European Parliament is now debating whether to ratify a pact reached in June between states along the Mediterranean coast and the rest of the EU’s 27 members to share the burden of migration. It’s about more than cost or national identity. According to a Eurobarometer poll last year, 69% of Europeans said helping legal immigrants integrate was an important investment.

Concern for a shared well-being is widespread in Europe. One resident of Lampedusa told The Guardian that the reason she is dismayed over the influx of immigrants is that they “deserve respect, and so do we.” Far to the north, in the French Alpine city of Briançon, volunteers at a hostel for immigrants expressed similar frustration. “We’re saturated to this day,” a board member of the nonprofit Solidarity Terraces told Le Monde last month. “It’s no longer manageable, neither in terms of the dignity of the welcome nor the tensions it generates.”

If the EU pact is formally adopted, it will require northern European countries to accept an agreed-upon number of migrants each year or, if they choose, pay southern states roughly $22,000 per individual. This “mandatory solidarity,” Ms. von der Leyen said, strikes a balance between protecting borders and protecting people. It shows “that Europe can manage migration effectively and with compassion.” The challenge of migration has pushed the EU to better apply the values that hold the bloc together.