Assa Traoré has been fighting for justice ever since her brother Adama died in the custody of French police on his 24th birthday four years ago. And she’s determined to keep fighting until “the end,” she says: until someone is convicted for his death.
But recently, her goal has grown larger. She’s now at the forefront of a new movement for Black rights, to wipe out systemic racism in policing and to challenge France’s official vision of itself as a colorblind society.
“We became soldiers in spite of ourselves,” Assa Traoré, whose family is of Malian origin, told The Associated Press this week. “There’s a movement today. We call it the Adama generation, these people who are not afraid anymore, and these youth who will not shut up.”
The 35-year-old, who gave up her job as a special education teacher in a small Paris suburb to lead a movement demanding justice for her brother, has renewed purpose since George Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police.
“George Floyd is our brother here in France, too,” Traoré said in an interview ahead of a demonstration Saturday marking the anniversary of Adama’s death — her speech determined, her energy palpable. “When you see George Floyd’s death, you imagine the death of my brother Adama Traoré.”
It is not the first time that France has reckoned with its colonial history and relationship with its Black and North African citizens. Deaths involving police often lead to protests, most memorably in the form of nationwide unrest in 2005 sparked by the deaths of two boys who were electrocuted while hiding in an electric substation after fleeing police.
But now France is seeing a growing pushback against police violence, and against racism that many activists say is exacerbated by the country’s official doctrine of colorblindness, which encourages immigrants to integrate and bans the government from collecting census data on race.
While four officers involved in Floyd’s arrest have been charged — including one with murder who is behind bars — no one has been charged in Adama Traoré’s death. It wasn’t filmed, and the cause of death is still the subject of fierce debate.  
On July 19, 2016, police approached Adama and his brother for an identity check in the town of Beaumont-sur-Oise north of Paris, where the large family grew up. Adama fled on a bike because he didn’t have his ID. Gendarmes caught up with him and arrested him. Within hours he was declared dead.  
One gendarme initially said three officers jumped on Traoré to pin him down, according to early police reports. The gendarme later denied any of them pinned him down.  
The exact cause of death is not even clear. A dozen court-ordered medical reports found various cardiac diseases were responsible. The Traoré family countered those with an independent autopsy and medical reports pointing to asphyxiation instead. The case is still under investigation, and lawyers for the officers deny police were at fault.
In her quest for justice for her brother, Assa Traoré has met with families of those who died at the hands of police, toured struggling French suburbs where most of the population is immigrant or non-white, and organized activists across racial, geographical and economic lines.
In June, as France was reopening from virus lockdown and videos of Floyd’s killing circulated around the world, she rallied tens of thousands of protesters to call attention to French racial minorities’ own problems with police.
“We have to change everything, this systemic racism, we need to break it,” Traoré said. She called for banning dangerous techniques that police use to immobilize people that “overwhelmingly kill Black, Arabs and non-whites.”
She also thinks France needs to scrap the police oversight agencies, which are currently composed of police themselves, in favor of independent bodies.
In 2016, France’s top official for defending citizens’ rights reported that Black and Arab French people were 20 times more likely to be stopped by police than others were. In 2020, Jacques Toubon published a study detailing systemic racism in the Paris police. The government has pledged to root out racism in police forces but blames the problem on a few bad apples.  
Traoré has built bridges with other social movements — like the yellow vest one against economic injustice and the climate crisis movement.
“It’s been four years of going to every poor neighborhood in France,” Traoré said. “We’ve been in the most remote places in France, in small villages, it’s been four years of alliances with domestic workers, undocumented people, yellow vests, climate groups.”
This Saturday’s march was organized with climate activists under the slogan: “We want to breathe.”
“Today the fight for Adama Traoré does not belong to the Traoré family anymore,” Traoré said. “It’s representative of a big unease and dysfunction of the French state, so it’s a struggle we take on together.”
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The leaders of the European Union hold their first face-to-face summit in five months on Friday, but the reunion seems unlikely to bridge their divide over a post-virus economic rescue plan.Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel turns 66 on the day that she and her 26 colleagues return to Brussels, not to celebrate but to test whether in-person negotiations can answer a 750-billion-euro question.The EU has been plunged into a historic economic crunch by the coronavirus crisis, and EU officials have drawn up plans for a huge stimulus package to lead their countries out of lockdown.But a determined band of northern capitals, led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s Netherlands, are holding out against doling out cash to their southern neighbors without strict conditions attached.Friday’s talks are expected to run into Saturday and perhaps even Sunday, but few here are confident of a breakthrough, despite the tight timetable, so another summit may well follow later this month.’A deal is essential’Summit host Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, has tried to create a sense of momentum after previous coronavirus-era videoconferences served only to underline the leaders’ differences.”Finding agreement will require hard work and political will on the part of all. Now is the time. A deal is essential,” he wrote in his letter inviting the leaders back to Brussels.”We will need to find workable solutions and come to an agreement, for the greater benefit of our citizens.”But optimism was in short supply as the leaders gathered in the Belgian capital, some arriving early on the eve of the summit to hold private discussions ahead of the main event.European diplomats said the Netherlands would continue to insist that member states retain the right to veto any joint borrowing by the European Union to finance loans to members.And they want any loans or grants to come with strict conditions attached to ensure that heavily indebted countries like Spain and Italy carry out reforms, under European Commission oversight.This is furiously opposed by the south. Both Michel and Merkel, whose country has just taken on the rolling six-month presidency of the EU, will struggle to broker any compromise.”We’re open to reaching an arrangement this weekend, but if there won’t be an agreement, we are open to more negotiations later on,” Dutch foreign minister Stef Blok said on Wednesday.Loans or grants?The Netherlands has emerged as the most likely hold out, but Rutte’s position is backed to varying degrees by fellow members of the so-called “Frugal Four” — Sweden, Denmark and Austria.Michel’s draft plan foresees a 750-billion-euro recovery package, made up of 250 billion in loans and 500 billion in grants and subsidies that would not have to be repaid by the recipient member states.The Frugals oppose grants and want any loans to come with conditions attached.This package is in addition to the planned 1,074 billion-euro seven-year EU budget from 2021 to 2027 that the leaders must also agree in the coming weeks or months.”An agreement is not at all guaranteed. On the contrary, there remain large differences to get over,” a senior European official admitted.Aside from the governance of the recovery package, the leaders may also clash over efforts to make EU budget support contingent on member states respecting the rule of law.Hungary and Poland, which have been targeted by the European Commission over their alleged drift into authoritarianism, will fight to stop such a rule being written into the budget.  
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Saying Spain showed “strong resolve” that “changed the course” of the country’s coronavirus outbreak, the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) said while paying tribute to the onetime COVID-19 hot spot for reversing “the trajectory of the outbreak.”WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that “Spain has shown that with political leadership and action, backed by community support, that the coronavirus can be controlled, no matter at what stage virus transmission is at in a country. … From being greatly challenged, Spain has reversed the trajectory of the outbreak.”In late March and early April, Spain was reporting as many as 10,000 new cases a day.Tedros gave credit to both the Spanish government and people for adhering to tough restrictions including what the WHO says has been robust surveillance, testing, contact tracing, treatment and isolation.While hailing the success, Tedros also remembered the Spaniards and others worldwide felled by COVID-19 and warned that it remains a threat even where the emergency appeared to have abated.The coronavirus shows no sign of easing in Brazil, where the health ministry is reporting more than 2 million cases and more than 1,000 deaths a day.Brazilian health experts blame the federal government for the high toll.“The virus would have been difficult to stop anyway. But this milestone of 2 million cases, which is very underestimated, shows this could have been different,” said Dr. Adriano Massuda, a health care professor at Sao Paulo’s Getulio Vargas Foundation university. “There’s no national strategy for testing, no measures from the top … too little effort to improve basic care so we find serious cases before they become too serious, no tracking.”A health worker disinfects empty coffins that will be used to take the bodies of recently deceased residents of the San Jose nursing home in Cochabamba, Bolivia, July 16, 2020.Although the number of cases appears to be ebbing in some of the larger Brazilian cities, it is now starting to hit places that had been spared.Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who spent months minimizing COVID-19 as “a little flu,” has tested positive for the virus twice on the last two weeks.Bolsonaro has encouraged businesses to reopen and pushed local leaders to ease restrictions, saying the lockdowns and other measures are costing Brazilians their jobs.The government says lockdowns aimed at combating the spread of the virus have forced nearly 523,000 Brazilian businesses to temporarily or permanently close their doors in the first two weeks of June.Brazil trails only the United States in the number of cases and deaths. The A man is seen through a display of fun face masks for sale at a roadside stall in Jakarta, Indonesia, July 16, 2020.The country’s two largest brick-and-mortar retailers – Walmart and Kroger – announced the policy earlier this week.Without a national mandate from the White House to wear face coverings in public, it is up to states, cities and businesses to come up with their own policies.“To be clear, we’re not asking our store employees to play the role of enforcer,” CVS executive Jon Roberts says. “What we are asking is that customers help protect themselves and those around them by listening to the experts and heeding the call to wear a face covering.”Another trial of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine has proved to be ineffective as an early treatment for mild cases of COVID-19, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine have concluded.“There is not convincing evidence that hydroxychloroquine can either prevent COVID-19 after exposure or reduce illness severity after developing early symptoms,” said Caleb Skipper, lead author of the study. “While disappointing, these results are consistent with an emerging body of literature that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t convey a substantial clinical benefit in people diagnosed with COVID-19, despite its activity against the coronavirus in a test tube.”President Donald Trump hyped hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment early in the pandemic and said he took the drug himself. He has tested negative for the coronavirus.After initially approving it as an emergency treatment, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reversed itself after doctors warned of potentially deadly side effects.The National Football League’s Players Association says 72 NFL players had tested positive for the coronavirus as of earlier this week.Team training camps are set to open July 28 with the first games of the season scheduled to be played September 10.Baseball, soccer, hockey, and basketball teams plan to resume or open their shortened seasons within weeks.But the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has said it is impossible to predict if NFL teams can play a full 16-game season.Former TV game show host Chuck Woolery, who tweeted late Sunday that “everybody is lying” about COVID-19, including doctors and the media, now says the coronavirus is real after announcing that his son has the disease.Woolery says he feels for “those suffering and especially for those who have lost loved ones.”In his Sunday tweet, Woolery said that the news about the coronavirus is “all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.”Trump retweeted it.Woolery was the original host of the TV game shows “Wheel of Fortune,” “Love Connection,” and “Greed” and has since become a conservative activist.  
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Military clashes between Armenia and neighboring Azerbaijan continued Thursday, further raising tensions between Turkey and Russia, which back opposing sides in the conflict.   The fighting erupted after a day of calm that had raised hopes of an end to the confrontation. At least 16 people have been killed since clashes started Sunday. What sparked the latest violence was not clear, but the two sides have blamed the other for the trouble. The two former Soviet Republics have been at odds for decades over Azerbaijan’s breakaway, predominantly ethnic Armenian region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In the 1990s, Armenia and Azerbaijan went to war over the disputed territory. Armenian servicemen transport used tires in the back of a truck to fortify their positions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border near the village of Movses on July 15, 2020.According to the Reuters news agency, Armenia’s defense ministry accuses Azerbaijan’s army of moving positions and using people in one village as human shields. Azerbaijan denies the allegation and has made similar accusations against Armenia. The latest clashes indirectly pit Turkey against Russia. Turkey backs Azerbaijan, while Russia supports Armenia. “Turkey will never hesitate to stand against any attack on the rights and lands of Azerbaijan,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday. Erdogan suggested a wider conspiracy lay behind the latest fighting.  “This is not a border violation and conflict but a deliberate attack on Azerbaijan. Undoubtedly this attack shows Armenia is punching above its weight.” Turkish pro-government media have been quick to accuse Moscow of encouraging Armenia to attack Azerbaijan, albeit without substantiating the allegation. Moscow dismisses such accusations, with Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov on Tuesday calling for restraint on both sides and offering Russian mediation. Ankara and Moscow are already involved in proxy confrontations by backing rival sides in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars.  “Armenia and Azerbaijan are faced with the challenge of becoming the next spot, like Syria and Libya. The Russian military is already deployed in the region,” said Zaur Gasimov, a Russia expert at the University of Bonn.  “Turkey is the only player in the [Caucasus] region representing to a certain extent Western values and interests, and can prevent domination by Russia and Iran,” Gasimov added. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 2nd right, and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, 2nd left, along with Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic, right and Bulgaria’s PM Boyko Borisov left, symbolically open the TurkStream pipeline, Jan. 8, 2020.Energy interests Where the latest fighting between Armenian and Azeri forces is occurring is in itself cause for suspicion among observers.  “The location is very strange,” said Gasimov, referring to Azerbaijan’s remote Tovuz region, adding, “Normally fighting occurs in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh.”The Tovuz region is close to Azerbaijan’s crucial South Caucasia pipeline. The SCP channels natural gas to Turkey’s TANAP pipeline and is a key component of Ankara’s efforts to decrease its dependence on Russian energy. “Turkey is heavily dependent on Russia for gas supplies,” said Mehmet Ogutcu of the London Energy Club policy group.  “Turkey is paying almost twice the price of EU buyers for [Russia’s] Gazprom gas,” Gasimov said.  “Turkey is now trying to reduce its intake from Russia,” he added. “Azeri gas is coming through TANAP (pipeline), which is cheaper than Russian gas that Turkey is buying. Turkey depends on 98% of its gas on imports and 92% on oil. It’s a national security issue.” Azerbaijan, one of the major oil suppliers to the European Union, is Turkey’s biggest foreign investor — mostly in the energy sector. The Azeri-Turkish partnership could deepen further as a new opportunity arises in 2021, when a major gas deal between Turkey and Russia is up for renewal. The 25-year-old deal has obliged Turkey to buy a set amount of Russian gas annually, ensuring Russia’s dominance of the Turkish energy market.  “With the contract coming to an end, Turkey will use this opportunity to rebalance its energy relations with Russia,” said Ogutcu. Russian concerns  Leaders in Russia worry their country is losing ground in Turkey’s energy market.  “Russian-Turkish talks in April on gas prices ended without success,” Gasimov said. “Azerbaijan, Iran, and Qatar are set to become as prominent as Russia as gas providers [in Turkey].” Analysts say Ankara’s energy diversification efforts play favorably for the U.S. administration.  Washington has been intensively lobbying its European allies to curtail energy cooperation with Russia as part of the Trump administration efforts to curb the Kremlin’s economic leverage over Europe. The United States is also threatening sanctions over Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline serving Germany and TurkStream, opened in January by Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin. U.S. administration officials say both pipelines violate the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017.   FILE – Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaks during a news conference at the State Department, July 1, 2020, in Washington.In remarks Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the two projects as “the Kremlin’s key tools to exploit and expand European dependence on Russian energy supplies” that he said “ultimately undermine transatlantic security.” “It is a clear warning to the companies aiding and abetting Russia’s malign influence projects. Get out now, or risk the consequences,” Pompeo said.  The rift between Turkey and Russia has coincided with a rapprochement between Ankara and Washington, but analysts are not rushing to declare an end to the Russian-Turkish partnership.   While Ankara seeks to reduce its dependence on Russia’s energy, both Erdogan and Putin are aware of a mutual dependency between the two countries. “Turkish-Russian relations are not based only on Russian gas,” said Ogutcu.  “It’s a package. You have a [Russian] nuclear energy plant being (built) in Turkey, you have a security issue in Syria. Turkish construction exports to Russia and Russian tourists coming to Turkey,” Ogutcu said.  As some observers see it, Moscow is likely to avoid a rupture with Ankara and they warn the latest tensions in the Caucasus could be a message to Turkey that there is a cost to rebalancing ties with Russia. 
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