The New York Times 2024-09-09 09:41:26


Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines

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Hannah Beech

Reporting from Davao City, Philippines

The Appointed Son of God, as his followers call him, favors satiny white suits. The young women who surround him in photos are often clothed in the same virginal hue.

Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, the 74-year-old founder of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, The Name Above Every Name, is a charismatic doomsday evangelist who claims millions of followers in about 200 countries. His sermons have drawn the faithful in Ukraine, Hong Kong, Brazil and New York. He served as spiritual adviser to Rodrigo Duterte, the powerful former president of the Philippines.

And now Mr. Quiboloy, who is also known as The Owner of the Universe, is in custody after a manhunt in the southern Philippines that enlisted thousands of security forces. On Sunday evening, Benjamin Abalos Jr., the interior secretary of the Philippines, announced that the fugitive preacher had been caught. The pastor’s lawyer said that Mr. Quiboloy had voluntarily surrendered. The police said that security forces had negotiated the surrender from the pastor’s compound.

Mr. Quiboloy is on the F.B.I.’s most-wanted list. He faces charges in the United States and at home of masterminding a human trafficking and child sex abuse ring. He has been accused of rape, including of minors. Through his lawyers, Mr. Quiboloy has denied all the charges.

The search for the fugitive pastor, to serve him a Philippine arrest warrant, is also about a megachurch that American and Philippine prosecutors say has depended on labor exploitation and the deception of people least able to afford the financial burden placed on them.

And Mr. Quiboloy’s fate exposes an array of rifts in Philippine society: between a Roman Catholic majority and a growing evangelical population; between a moneyed elite from the Philippine capital and power brokers from the country’s periphery; and between the president of the Philippines and his vice president.

For more than two weeks, rows of police officers had stood guard behind riot shields on the perimeter of a sprawling church compound in the southern Philippine city of Davao, some fanning themselves with laminated wanted posters of the pastor. Police officers swarmed the campus, searching for Mr. Quiboloy. Police helicopters circled over a cathedral, a college and a stadium with 75,000 seats, which, when finished, was to be one of the biggest megachurches in the world.

With thousands of police officers, many heavily armed, descending on the church campus, Mr. Quiboloy’s followers responded with a kind of siege mentality, fortifying themselves with reruns of the preacher’s sermons playing on a giant screen. Amid the unrelenting heat, they sat on plastic chairs, gazing upward. They clapped and sang and swayed.

On social media, they continue to assail what they believe is a politically motivated effort to dethrone their king, a plot many believers still say is orchestrated by malign forces in the United States.

Top security forces came to believe that the pastor had hidden himself in an underground bunker in the nearly 75-acre compound, which the flock calls New Jerusalem. In the days before his capture, the police told The New York Times how thermal imaging and radar technology had recorded, deep in the earth, the warmth and heartbeat of a human body.

Mr. Quiboloy’s critics call him a Rasputin whose ability to harness large voting blocs for favored politicians made him a kind of spiritual kingmaker. His flock considers him a descendant of God who can stop earthquakes and says he is being unfairly targeted by the Philippine establishment and its American patrons.

In 2021, an American federal grand jury indicted Mr. Quiboloy and other church officials operating in the United States on charges that include conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, the sex trafficking of children, and smuggling huge amounts of cash. Girls as young as 12 worked as Mr. Quiboloy’s personal assistants, or “pastorals,” the 74-page indictment alleged.

The pastorals, including two girls who were 14 and 15, were forced to perform “night duty,” a euphemism for sex, with Mr. Quiboloy, the indictment said. Female victims wrote “commitment letters” in which they devoted their lives and bodies to Mr. Quiboloy, the indictment said, risking “eternal damnation” if they demurred.

Two former pastorals told The Times of the psychological hold Mr. Quiboloy had on them and how guilty they were made to feel if they tried to reject his sexual advances. Female aides who were deemed to have sinned were sent to a property on the outskirts of Davao City called Prayer Mountain. One of those former pastorals said her head was shaved and she was made to wear orange clothes, like a prisoner. She was beaten with a wooden paddle, she said.

The pastor was placed on the F.B.I.’s most wanted list, which described his aliases as “Sir,” “Pastor” and “The Appointed Son of God.”

Despite the seriousness of the charges, an American arrest warrant was never served in the Philippines. Mr. Quiboloy continued to preach from the church’s headquarters in Davao City, where representatives of the Kingdom, as the sect is known by its followers, also ran a college, law school, airline and a McDonald’s franchise. The Kingdom controlled an influential media network, too.

At the time, in 2021, the Philippines was led by Mr. Duterte, who is now being investigated by the International Criminal Court for allegedly ordering thousands of extrajudicial executions. Mr. Duterte called Mr. Quiboloy his spiritual adviser. He also counted on the pastor’s vocal support for his political campaigns.

With Mr. Quiboloy on the run, the former president, who served as Davao City’s mayor for more than 20 years, took on duties as the administrator of the Kingdom’s properties.

On a wall outside the church compound, Mr. Duterte’s support for the pastor is printed on a blocklong banner.

“Our country has never been in a more tragic state as it is today,” Mr. Duterte’s statement reads. And he accuses his successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., of turning the Philippines into a police state.

Mr. Marcos assumed the presidency two years ago and chose Mr. Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, also a former mayor of Davao City, as his running mate in a union of two powerful political clans. Known familiarly as Bongbong, Mr. Marcos is the son of an American-backed dictator who in his two-decade rule plundered state coffers and ordered his own extrajudicial killings, according to human rights groups.

The Dutertes have positioned themselves as gritty, populist counterpoints to a soft, moneyed, pro-American political class exemplified by the Marcoses. The two families’ political alliance in 2022 was awkward from the start.

In April, members of the Philippine Senate pushed for the arrest and detention of Mr. Quiboloy for having failed to appear at hearings into the trafficking and sex abuse charges against him and other church leaders. In June, the police tried to serve an arrest warrant but failed to find the preacher and several others at the Kingdom’s campus. On Aug. 24, about 2,000 police officers descended.

The police say dozens of their officers were injured by church members wielding rocks and other objects, while the Kingdom’s representatives said it was dozens of their members who were harmed by the security personnel, some in full battle gear.

“Just because there is a warrant of arrest, that is not a license to trample on the human, property, religious, academic rights and property rights of other persons,” said Israelito Torreon, the chief legal counsel for the Kingdom.

On Sept. 1, the 39th anniversary of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ’s founding, Vice President Duterte flew to Davao City to show her support for Mr. Quiboloy. On the oversized screen in the compound, a church-affiliated news network excoriated her boss, Mr. Marcos.

When asked by the news media the whereabouts of Pastor Apollo, as Mr. Quiboloy is known, Ms. Duterte answered with a smile.

“He’s in heaven,” she joked, vowing to the sect’s believers that “I will always be with you in your darkness.”

With New Jerusalem heaving with heavily armed police officers, their places of worship off limits, the Kingdom’s followers turned a fast food eatery owned by the church into their command center.

Until April, the shop was a McDonald’s. But the charges against Mr. Quiboloy spooked the international company. Now it has been rebranded as Waxi’s, offering Davao specialties like rice burgers and durian coffee.

Crowding the tables every day were the Kingdom’s members, mostly women and mostly dressed in funereal black. On their phones, they watched newscasters from Sonshine Media Network International, or S.M.N.I., a popular radio and television broadcaster that is majority owned by the church and its representatives.

The network’s YouTube channel has been shut down because of the charges against Mr. Quiboloy, and the Philippine House of Representatives has approved a bill revoking its franchise. But S.M.N.I. continues to stream online. Last month, the Philippine Court of Appeals ordered Mr. Quiboloy’s assets frozen, including bank accounts connected to S.M.N.I.

Sophia Argentine, a purchasing manager for the Kingdom, runs Waxi’s. Before that she was a “volunteer manager” of the McDonald’s. Ms. Argentine, who asked to be only identified by part of her name, is one of about 2,000 faithful known as “workers,” who live in the compound and donate their earnings to the church, according to former and current members.

Ms. Argentine said she joined the Kingdom 20 years ago, when she was in college, after her mother was swayed by Mr. Quiboloy’s televised preaching. The church later financed her study in Japan, although Mr. Quiboloy was so worried about her being alone abroad that he called her back home before she earned a degree, she said. Ms. Argentine said she does not collect a salary and has no savings.

“Everything is free in the Kingdom,” she said.

Today, the Kingdom claims anywhere between three million and seven million parishioners around the world, depending on which church official is doing the talking. (Former members say the global congregation is far smaller.) But when Ms. Argentine first began living in the compound in Davao City, she said, the sect was so impoverished that she would buy fruits and vegetables rejected by markets to feed the growing congregation.

American and Filipino law enforcement say the church grew rich soliciting donations from people who could barely afford it and from the forced labor of its members. Ms. Argentine’s mother, an ophthalmologist, sold her properties and gave her life savings to the church. In Davao City, children roamed the streets, selling trinkets and handing their earnings to the Kingdom, former churchgoers said.

To remain in good standing, worshipers had to meet increasingly onerous monetary quotas by soliciting donations or selling whatever small items they could, American and Filipino prosecutors said. The U.S. indictment alleges a roll call of abuses: In the United States, church workers were forced to raise money nearly every day, often sleeping in cars at night. Those who neglected to raise enough cash were often locked in rooms and denied food. The church arranged sham marriages to import workers to the United States.

Michael Jay Green, an American lawyer and global general counsel for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, rejected any wrongdoing by the church. He said the charges against Mr. Quiboloy resulted from a grudge held by a corrupt former church official who made up lies about sexual abuse and persuaded 14 others to falsely testify.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to change the loyalty of the people in the compound that were educated, fed and clothed by this Kingdom for years,” Mr. Green said.

Mr. Green acknowledged that the sect’s workers sign vows to raise money for the poor, a similar structure to the Church of Scientology, he said.

The Kingdom is particularly popular among members of the Philippines’ large overseas work force. On the streets of Singapore, Dubai, Los Angeles and beyond, they raise money for the Children’s Joy Foundation, which is supposed to aid underprivileged children. But at least one branch of that charity was bogus, the American indictment alleges, its money used not to help orphans but to fund the lavish lifestyles of Mr. Quiboloy and other church elders.

Mr. Quiboloy traveled in a private jet. One of his birthdays was celebrated in a chandeliered banquet hall at a Shangri-La Hotel in Hong Kong, three attendees confirmed. Four former church members told The Times that he particularly liked to choose young “pastoral” aides from Ukraine because he found them fair-skinned and beautiful.

In the Philippine Senate hearings, former members accused the church and Mr. Quiboloy of labor exploitation and sexual abuse. Two Ukrainian women said in video testimony they were raped by Mr. Quiboloy while serving as pastorals. A Filipino woman told senators that Mr. Quiboloy raped her when she was a minor. The pastor ignored a subpoena to appear at the Senate hearing, prompting the order for his arrest. His representatives say that he is innocent of all charges against him.

Ms. Argentine said she worked for a time as a pastoral, but she denied the job required dispensing sexual favors. The church, she said, was both moral and conservative, forbidding women from wearing revealing clothes. Mr. Quiboloy had to sign off on marriages between the Kingdom’s workers, she said. The pastor had high standards for prospective husbands, and consequently many women, including her, did not get married, Ms. Argentine said.

As the manhunt dragged on, the Kingdom’s representatives said they hoped the Duterte political clan would save the church and its founder. Some police officers stationed at the compound who were from Davao City said that their allegiance was with Mr. Duterte, not their bosses from the capital, Manila. Ms. Argentine, the purchasing manager for the church, said the local police told her, “Don’t worry, madam, we will not hurt you or the pastor.”

Mr. Green said that Mr. Quiboloy and Mr. Duterte were “very, very close friends.” The former president, he noted, first gained prominence and popularity in the Philippines because he “was executing drug dealers.”

“President Duterte was as serious and law abiding as any person in the Philippines,” Mr. Green said. “Do you think that he would embrace a pastor that was molesting children?”

Ms. Argentine said that when Mr. Duterte, then Davao’s mayor, was running for president, the Kingdom gave him “unlimited flights” in an Apollo Air helicopter because he didn’t have any money. A former employee of Apollo Air confirmed Mr. Duterte’s reliance on the airline. The Kingdom’s compound has a taxiway that connects to the Davao City airport.

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While president, Mr. Duterte steered relations away from the United States, which once colonized the Philippines, and embraced China instead. The Duterte family has intimated that the United States is orchestrating a character assassination campaign against Mr. Quiboloy.

For days, representatives of the Kingdom had insisted that Mr. Quiboloy was not in the compound, and that even if he were, the church would not give him up unless the Philippine Department of Justice promised not to extradite him to the United States. The Philippine government said it could not honor such a request.

“He wants to clear his name here,” said Mr. Torreon, the church’s chief legal counsel, referring to Mr. Quiboloy.

And his followers maintained their conviction in their pastor. Ms. Argentine said she thought Mr. Quiboloy was initially able to escape the pursuit of the regional police chief because “the pastor passed through walls.”

That a nonbeliever police chief was the only witness to such a miracle, rather than the faithful who had dedicated decades of their lives to Mr. Quiboloy and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, was, she admitted, a cause of regret. The security presence in the compound, day after day, had worn them all down.

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“It’s a spiritual test that we have to overcome,” she said. “We have to humble ourselves. But it’s hard.”

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After a Century and a Half in Sweden, Finnish Skulls Return Home

About 150 years ago, Swedish researchers dug up dozens of human skulls and remains from graveyards across Finland and took them to Sweden to study their racial characteristics as part of an effort that they said was to understand how the Nordic region had been populated.

On Sunday, 42 of those skulls were returned and reinterred in Palkane, a small community in Finland about 80 miles northwest of Helsinki, the capital, where residents hailed their homecoming as the righting of a historical wrong.

“They are our own people, even if they lived hundreds of years ago,” Pauliina Pikka, a local official, said in an interview before the ceremony. “They deserve, now, to come back here. They deserve to get rest.”

The skulls were taken in the summer of 1873 by three researchers working for the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Sweden, who dug up graves in four communities in Finland. They returned to Sweden with human remains from the exhumations and measured and studied them. For decades until 2015, human remains taken by researchers were housed in various Swedish institutions before being returned to Karolinska.

Since then, the university has been researching the origins of some of the remains and repatriating them.

On Sunday, under clear blue skies and balmy temperatures, residents of Palkane gathered to watch the return of the skulls to the church — which has been in ruins for centuries — from which they had been taken in 1873.

As a military band played, the skulls arrived in a horse-drawn carriage driven by people in old-fashioned clothing. Four men carried each coffin before lowering it into a grave. Some community members cast dirt and sand over the graves.

“People feel that they are participating in something meaningful,” said Marketta Pyysalo, the cultural coordinator for Palkane. “This is a handshake with the past.”

Most of the skulls brought back to Palkane were probably buried between the 1500s and the 1800s, said Ulla Moilanen, an archaeologist at the University of Turku. But their identities remain unknown, and she hopes to analyze DNA samples she had taken from the skulls to find out more about them.

“When we find out more about these people, their lives, they really become part of history, not just as skulls, but as human beings,” she said.

Hanna-Liisa Anttila, 90, whose family is from elsewhere in Finland and who came to the ceremony dressed in a national costume, said it was possible the ancestors of her husband, who is from Palkane, might be among the taken skulls.

She said the remains’ removal was a “desecration” of the graves.

The Swedish researchers who exhumed the graves wondered whether Finns were a different race from Swedes, noting that the Finnish language is more closely related to Estonian and Hungarian than Swedish, and believed that an examination of the skulls would answer their questions.

For many people in Finland, those questions about whether they are a different race sounded a lot like an effort to prove that they were an inferior one.

“They kind of wanted to put us down and thought maybe that they could do whatever they like with our skulls and remains,” Ms. Pikka said, “that those people weren’t important.”

Many said the research on the Finnish skulls made them think of eugenics, a discredited scientific theory that was used to justify atrocities including the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, segregation in the United States and the forced sterilization of people in Sweden and Finland and other Nordic nations, and countries including the United States.

“Research developed down this rabbit hole of physical measurements to try to prove the superiority of one race over another,” said Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, a professor of Scandinavian and comparative literature at University College London.

“It had a huge international following,” added Dr. Stougaard-Nielsen, who chaired a 2021 seminar titled “The Legacy of Eugenics in Scandinavia.”

In 1921, Sweden’s Parliament established the State Institute for Racial Biology, where scientists tried to prove differences among races and track what they saw as the “degeneration” of Sweden’s gene pool. Researchers also performed medical experiments on the Sami, who are indigenous to the region, from the 1920s to the 1950s.

In 2019, the Karolinska Institute apologized “unreservedly” for the 1873 grave exhumations, which were conducted by Gustaf Retzius, a leader in the field of “racial science,” and his colleagues. (An activist group had requested the repatriation a year earlier.)

Today, the institute said, the exhumation methods would be “unethical or illegal.”

“It wasn’t a crime then, because there was no real jurisdiction,” said Maria Josephson, a historian of science and medicine at Karolinska who works on archives and repatriations.

But, she said, “I think they also knew when they did it that they were in the absolute outskirts of what was a reasonable and morally OK thing to do.”

For now, Palkane residents are grateful that their ancestors are, finally, allowed to rest again.

“People are pleased to see their bodies made whole again,” said Jari Kemppainen, the local vicar before the ceremony, “in their home soil and in their home cemetery.”

Struggling to Stem Extremism, Tajikistan Targets Beards and Head Scarves

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Valerie Hopkins

Reporting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, and across the country

People in Tajikistan were expecting a government crackdown after Tajik men were arrested and charged with a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall in March.

But it still seemed excessive to Nilufar, a 27-year-old education professional, when she saw local authorities with scissors outside a K.F.C. in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, trimming beards that were deemed too long.

Excessive, but not so surprising. In the span of a month, Nilufar herself had been stopped three times by the authorities for wearing a hijab in public.

“Nowadays, as soon as you go outside, you can actually feel how the raids have intensified,” Nilufar said in a recent interview in Dushanbe, providing only her first name because of fear of retribution.

With a population of 10 million, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, Tajikistan has many challenges that counterterrorism experts say make it an incubator for extremism: poverty, poor education, high unemployment and grievances against an autocratic government that severely restricts the practice of religion.

In the face of these challenges, critics say, Tajikistan has continued to restrict how Islam can be taught and practiced and increasingly implemented superficial policies regulating head scarves and beard lengths.

The country came under global scrutiny after four Tajik men were charged as the assailants in the worst terrorist attack in Russia in two decades, which killed 145 people and injured more than 500 at the Moscow concert hall. Other Tajiks were later arrested in connection with the attack.

American officials have said that Islamic State Khorasan Province, a branch of ISIS known as ISIS-K, was responsible for the attack, and radicalized Tajiks have in recent months caught the attention of governments and counterterrorism experts around the world.

Tajik adherents of the Islamic State have also been involved in terrorist attacks in Iran and Turkey, as well as thwarted plots in Germany, Austria and elsewhere. Last month two Tajiks helped stage a mutiny at a Russian prison, the state news agency TASS reported, adding that they claimed to be motivated by radical Islam.

The attacks have tarnished the country’s image abroad, especially in Russia, where about one million Tajiks — 10 percent of Tajikistan’s population — toil in low-skilled jobs to send money home.

The government’s response, overseen by President Emomali Rahmon, an authoritarian leader who has been in power for more than three decades, has been to crack down.

“In Tajikistan, authorities are getting frustrated by the international stigma they’re receiving and the blame they’re getting for all these attacks,” said Lucas Webber, the co-founder of Militant Wire, whose research focuses on the Islamic State. “So they’re just doubling down, being heavy-handed.”

Tajiks have long been accustomed to restrictions that would surprise many Westerners, with legislation governing conduct at weddings, birthdays and even funerals (“extravagant emotions” are banned at memorials). Hijabs — head scarves that cover a woman’s neck and generally don’t reveal any strands of hair — have been banned in schools since 2007 and public institutions since 2009.

But in June, the Parliament passed a law banning “clothes alien to Tajik culture,” a term the government often uses for clothing it considers Islamic. Hijabs are a target.

The law imposes fines of between 7,000 and 15,000 somoni, or about $660 and $1,400, in a country where the average monthly salary is just above $200.

The rationale appears to be that stamping out public signs of conservative Islam will help tamp down conservative Islam itself — and potentially reduce Islamic extremism.

But Mr. Webber said the government’s reaction only added fuel to the fire.

“The terrorists who planned the Moscow attack could not have asked for better responses from the Tajik government,” he said. “Because they want to stoke tensions, they want backlash.”

Several Tajik government bodies responsible for implementing the laws declined to meet with The New York Times in Dushanbe or respond to emailed requests to comment.

Tajikistan is a mountainous country in Central Asia bordered by Afghanistan, China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It is heavily reliant on Russia economically and its leaders maintain a very close relationship.

Outside the K.F.C., several women who were with the men trimming beards approached Nilufar and a friend. The women said they were from the Committee on Women and Family Affairs, a government body that advises on and implements state policy. They asked the two women to remove their head scarves.

Nilufar tried to explain that she did not normally wear a head covering, but was mourning her mother’s death.

“The women told me, ‘All this is being done for a reason,’” Nilufar said. Many Tajiks had been involved in terrorist attacks, they told her, adding that fundamentalists from Afghanistan had come to the country.

“They sport long beards and their wives wear head coverings,” she said the women told her, and it had become difficult for the authorities to catch them, “because we also dress like them, and it’s hard to tell the difference.”

The women wanted to fine Nilufar. She called an uncle with government connections, who told them to leave her alone.

But when she was stopped in June a third time, she said, this time by the police, she had to spend the night in a cell because she refused to sign a document accepting that she had broken the law.

“When I got to the station, there were already about 15, even 17 women wearing head scarves sitting in the cell, including an older woman who was at least 50,” she said.

In the morning, the station chief arrived — an acquaintance from her university course — and released her. “My husband was angry with me, and worried,” Nilufar said. But he understood what she had been through: He had previously spent five nights in jail before agreeing to trim his beard.

After the experience, Nilufar finally decided to stop wearing her hijab, because she was worried that a stain on her record could hinder her ability to work.

That kind of policing has been a focus of ISIS-K propaganda published in Tajik, among other languages, said Riccardo Valle, the research director of The Khorasan Diary, a research and media platform about the terrorist group.

The propaganda also makes much of crackdowns on Tajiks in Russia, where the authorities have conducted raids on migrant dormitories that house Central Asian guest workers, and have requested documents from people in public places, effectively racially profiling them.

Experts interviewed by The Times said that the strategy of strictly monitoring physical appearance was not an effective way to combat extremism, because it bred resentment. It was also ineffective, they said, arguing that radicalized extremists might try to remain inconspicuous by avoiding outward signs of religiosity.

Family members of two of the men accused of carrying out the Moscow attack said neither had shown any external signs of religiosity.

“My son was never a practicing Muslim,” said Gulrakat Mirzoyeva, 59, the mother of Dalerjon Mirzoyev, one of the men charged in the assault. “Sometimes he prayed, but not really.”

All four of the accused attackers had been working in Russia for at least several months, some making repeated trips in and out. Many experts say that it is not only crushing poverty at home but degrading experiences of migration that drive Tajik citizens into the hands of militants.

Tajiks who join groups like ISIS-K “are almost all Tajiks who were migrant laborers and were radicalized outside Tajikistan via social networks,” said Bruce Pannier, a Central Asia fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Mr. Mirzoyev had done four stints of six to eight months working in Russia to provide for his wife and their four children. Their home, in a dusty village on the Tajik steppe, has no running water.

Shamsidin Fariduni, another man accused in the attack, had become an observant Muslim after time in prison. His mother, Muyassara Zargarova, insisted he was not an extremist.

He went to work in Russia repeatedly because of financial pressure, she said. First he needed to pay for his wedding, then for medical help when his wife developed pregnancy complications. And when the baby was born with breathing problems, he and his brother went back to look for work once more.

In the aftermath of the concert hall attack, the Tajik authorities have increased security cooperation with Moscow. Mr. Rahmon has also increased ties with Beijing, though China has denied media reports that it is building a base in northwestern Tajikistan.

The United States and Tajikistan signed an agreement in May to use software that will notify U.S. authorities in real time if travelers who are considered suspicious enter Tajikistan.

But the state needs to be doing more, said Larisa Aleksandrova, a Dushanbe-based expert on human rights.

Instead of tackling substantive problems like corruption, poverty, and social inequality, she said, the state was focusing on “where to put a comma in a sentence, what to name a particular ministry or what clothes, for example, women or men should wear.”

“It distracts us by talking about problems which, in my opinion, are not so relevant,” she said.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

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North Korea Launches New Salvo of Balloons, but the South Barely Shrugs

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Hong Yoongi was walking near South Korea’s Parliament building in Seoul when he spotted the interloper from North Korea.

The trespasser on Thursday was a balloon that had floated dozens of miles across the inter-Korean border and the Han River in the South to land near the National Assembly complex. But the authorities were on the case, and on the scene. Some military personnel wore white protective gear, masks and gloves to deal with the trash that had scattered on impact.

Over the past five days, North Korea has sent hundreds more drifting toward the South with payloads of trash like waste paper and used plastic bottles. This salvo follows a barrage of thousands of similar North Korean balloons earlier this summer. Pyongyang has said it was provoked by North Korean defectors in the South, who launched their own balloons carrying leaflets criticizing the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and USB sticks with K-pop music and K-dramas.

The South’s military has said that the North’s balloons do not carry “harmful substances.” But they have become a nuisance, landing in farms, public parks in the capital and in residential areas. In July, some came down inside the grounds of the presidential office in Seoul.

Mr. Hong had seen another one of the balloons a few months earlier, near his home in Bundang, south of Seoul. But, he said, “the balloons haven’t affected my daily life at all.”

Living next to a nuclear-armed adversary is the reality for millions of South Koreans, who often shrug off provocations from the North.

“The most annoying part about the balloons is the countless warning texts I get from the government,” said Ahn Jae-hee, a resident of Seoul.

In recent days, officials in the South have sent more than a dozen safety alerts, warning residents to inform the authorities about the balloons and not to touch them. The alerts, sent to mobile phones across the country, give the general location of the balloons.

The South’s military has said it waits for the balloons to land before inspecting them, rather than blast them ​— and scatter their​ suspicious payloads ​— from the sky. Seoul has responded by blaring anti-North Korean propaganda and K-pop across loudspeakers stationed near the Demilitarized Zone between the two countries.

“The balloons are low-intensity provocations from the North, and South Koreans have no real reason to react to them,” said Wooyeal Paik, the deputy director at the Yonsei Institute for North Korean Studies. So far, he said, there has been no indication of espionage, unlike the balloons from China seen over the United States last year, nor did they seem to carry weapons.

Propaganda balloons also flew on the Korean Peninsula during the Cold War. Each side used them to scatter leaflets condemning the other’s governments. Those tactics had largely faded until their revival this year.

“The balloons have become the new normal,” Mr. Hong said.

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In Rural China, ‘Sisterhoods’ Demand Justice, and Cash

The women came from different villages, converging outside the local Rural Affairs Bureau shortly after 10 a.m. One had taken the morning off from her job selling rice rolls. Another was a tour operator. Yet another was a recent retiree.

The group, nine in all, double-checked their paperwork, then strode in. In a dimly lit office, they cornered three officials and demanded to know why they had been excluded from government payouts, worth tens of thousands of dollars, that were supposed to go to each villager.

“I had these rights at birth. Why did I suddenly lose them?” one woman asked.

That was the question uniting these women in Guangdong Province, in southern China. They were joining a growing number of rural women, all across the country, who are finding each other to confront a longstanding custom of denying them land rights — all because of whom they had married.

In much of rural China, if a woman marries someone from outside her village, she becomes a “married-out woman.” To the village, she is no longer a member, even if she continues to live there.

That means the village assembly — a decision-making body technically open to all adults, but usually dominated by men — can deny her village-sponsored benefits such as health insurance, as well as money that is awarded to residents when the government takes over their land. (A man remains eligible no matter whom he marries.)

Now, women are fighting back, in a rare bright spot for women’s rights and civil society. They are filing lawsuits and petitioning officials, energized by the conviction that they should be treated more fairly, and by the government’s increasing recognition of their rights.

In doing so, they are challenging centuries of tradition that have defined women as appendages to men: their fathers before marriage, their husbands after. That view has persisted even as the country has rapidly modernized, and women have gone to school and sometimes even become their families’ breadwinners.

They are also exposing a gap between the ruling Communist Party’s words and its actions. Many courts, which are controlled by the party, refuse to take on the women’s lawsuits. Even when women win favorable rulings, local officials have refused to implement them, fearing social unrest. Women have been harassed, beaten or detained for pursuing their rights in these cases.

Not long after a colleague and I met the Guangdong women and accompanied them to the rural affairs bureau, several told us they had been contacted by officials or would no longer be able to participate in this article. The Times is identifying the women only by their family names and omitting their exact location for safety reasons.

Often, married-out women staking claims are simply dismissed. Inside the Guangdong rural affairs office, which oversees land payouts, a middle-aged male official in a blue polo shirt tried to shoo the women away.

“This is your own villages’ problem, not our problem,” he said. When the women accused the government of ignoring their plight, he warned: “Don’t talk nonsense.”

One woman shot back: “How can you leave it entirely to the village? Then what are you all for?”

Chinese women have long suffered discrimination, but the financial implications of that inequality came into sharper view after the Chinese economy’s breakneck expansion.

As China embraced market reforms starting in the 1980s, the government began taking over rural land for factories, railways and shopping centers. In exchange, villagers received compensation, often in the form of new apartments or certificates entitling them to dividends from the land’s future use.

The government mandated that female village members be given equal compensation. But it left the definition of “members” to the male-led village assemblies. And to many of those assemblies, one group didn’t qualify: married-out women.

It is unclear how many women have been denied land rights because of marriage, but the number has grown as the population has become more mobile, with people marrying across provinces, not just villages. Government-backed surveys indicate that as many as 80 percent of rural women — hundreds of millions of people — are not listed on their villages’ land documents. That makes it hard for them to defend their claims if disputes arise, such as if they marry outsiders.

For decades, women in this situation had little recourse. Some accepted their deprivation as normal. But there are signs of a quiet resistance unfolding as women have become more educated and found more ways to connect with one another. The number of court rulings involving the words “married-out women” jumped to nearly 5,000 five years ago from 450 in 2013, according to official data.

Many villages, though, have clung to tradition.

Rebutting a lawsuit from 2019, a village in Nanning, a city in southwestern China, claimed that women who married outsiders did not live off the land anymore, and thus did not qualify as village members. (Men who leave are not held to that standard.)

A village in Shandong Province, in China’s east, was more direct in its response to a 2022 lawsuit. “Married-out daughters do not receive our property benefits,” it said in court papers. “This is how we have done things for the last 20 years.”

There are no authoritative estimates of the financial losses women have incurred. But especially in prosperous coastal areas, the sums could be enormous. In the port city of Ningbo, the apartments that married-out women were denied during village demolitions in 2022 were potentially worth upward of $550,000, according to official documents and average housing prices there.

Women who cannot prove their land rights also have a harder time investing or securing loans to start businesses, scholars have noted.

I wanted to see firsthand how women were fighting for their land rights, and a legal expert suggested going to Guangdong. One of the earliest provinces to urbanize, it has also seen some of the most active mobilizing by married-out women.

In the city I visited, signs of economic transformation abounded. A high-speed rail station abuts the lush rice paddies that once sustained the local economy. Two-story village homes have given way to gated apartment complexes.

When I arrived, several married-out women were gathering in one of their living rooms to plan their visit to the rural affairs bureau the next day. One attendee was a woman surnamed Ma, whose overalls and ponytail gave her a youthful air, though she was retired.

Her village had started distributing payouts several decades ago, after contracting its teeming fish ponds to a private company. But Ms. Ma was cut off in 1997, after she married an outsider. Even when she divorced and moved back home several years later, the village continued to refuse her.

Ms. Ma had no experience with the law and didn’t know whom to ask for help. Other villagers accused her of trying to claim what didn’t belong to her. Her brothers told her not to make a fuss.

She bought a copy of China’s civil code to educate herself. She repeatedly called and visited government offices, though they refused to accept her case. “If I waited until others came forward, I wouldn’t have anything,” she said.

Then, gradually, more women began taking similar steps — not just in Guangdong, but across China. At times, they found sympathetic officials, and some won their cases.

As news spread, Ms. Ma and several dozen other women nearby found each other by word of mouth. They had no leader, and only sporadic meetings. They represented a fraction of the thousands of women they estimated had been denied land rights in their villages.

Still, their growing numbers put pressure on local courts. Ms. Ma’s case was accepted in 2020, as were those of other women.

“Now, many courts have so many cases that they’re overwhelmed,” grinned another woman in the living room, surnamed Li.

Ms. Li had remained in her village after marrying a factory worker from Hunan Province, to the northwest, whom she had met while he was working nearby. She now balances her job making rice rolls with trips to the courthouse, where she is suing for about $7,000 in payments she has been denied since her marriage five years ago.

The older women spent years searching for the right avenue for their complaints, but younger women said hearing about others’ experiences gave them a road map of sorts. A woman in her 20s, surnamed Huo, sued her village as soon as she learned that it had cut her off in 2020. (She found out when, after delivering her first child, the hospital said she no longer had village-sponsored health insurance.)

Ms. Li’s and Ms. Huo’s stories also reflect the greater say that younger women have over where they should live. Traditionally, women moved to their husbands’ homes; older generations of married-out women returned to their villages only after divorcing or becoming widowed. Younger ones have embraced bringing their husbands to their own villages, in part to assert their independence.

“It’s a woman’s backup plan,” said Ms. Huo, now working in construction. “In case anything happens, you at least have your own home.”

On paper, the women’s legal chances look good. Scholarly analyses have found that many court rulings in these cases favor married-out women.

But those are the cases that make it to court, not those that judges throw out or officials force into out-of-court mediation. And villages often refuse to recognize rulings against them — as was the case for several of the Guangdong women.

Government agencies often say they cannot force the assemblies to comply, citing respect for village self-governance, the nominal guarantee in Chinese law of some democratic rights for villagers. (In reality, the party retains control.) When some of the Guangdong women staged small demonstrations outside government offices, they were physically pushed away, they said.

The law itself has loopholes. A top legal body last fall urged prosecutors to protect the rights of women who marry outside their villages, in line with constitutional guarantees of gender equality.

But in June, China passed a law reaffirming that village assemblies can continue to decide who counts as a member of their village collectives, and is therefore eligible for land rights. Women’s rights advocates had called for the law to say definitively that women are members, regardless of their marriage status.

Because married-out women are still a relatively small group, the government has little incentive to risk angering the village majority, which also includes women who married fellow villagers and thus remain eligible for benefits, said Lin Lixia, a legal advocate at Qianqian Law Firm in Beijing who has worked on women’s land rights for 20 years.

“From the perspective of maintaining social stability, local governments or courts are definitely more inclined to protect the benefits of the majority,” said Ms. Lin. She said she received 40 to 50 inquiries a year, and that about 90 percent of her lawsuits were unsuccessful.

Amid the difficulties, the women have also found community.

In the living room, as they planned their visit to the bureau, some of the women referred to each other as “sisters.” Over bowls of lychees, a local specialty, they laughed darkly about their treatment by fellow villagers, who piled trash at their doors. They competed over whose village assembly was worse. When Ms. Huo said that people in her village had not abused her, Ms. Ma teased her: “They’re so good to you.”

Ms. Huo replied: “I always say, you all aren’t mean enough. I’m mean, so nobody dares treat me like that.”

They debated tactics. If they wrote a letter about their situation to a higher-level government office, should they lay out all the details, or keep it general? Some were skeptical about going to the bureau, given how many times they had been rebuffed. But others said the point was documenting every step, successful or not, to bolster their case.

Several women emphasized that they were not a unified movement. They speculated that some among them had been threatened or bought off into becoming government informers — a sign of how surveilled and fractured civil society has become in today’s China.

But the women have faced intimidation before, and they said it would not put them off.

At the bureau the next morning, the women seemed to be a familiar presence for the officials, who required little explanation of their grievances. For nearly two hours, the women laid them out anyway.

Finally, shortly after noon, they emerged, triumphant. They hadn’t secured their payouts — far from it. But an official had agreed to give them written acknowledgment of their visit, which they could now bring to the next government office they visited.

“We take it one step and one place at a time,” one of the women said.

They piled into cars, to head to lunch, and to plan their next move.

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

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