They’ve gone dark: Afghans who helped the U.S. military, trained as American-style journalists and rode the wave of women heading to higher education are destroying the diplomas, transcripts and résumés that prove how they built civil society in the country that the U.S. has left behind.
A city square, a global conflict
Maidan Nezalezhnosti — the Ukraine’s “Independence Square,” the heart of Kiev and the focus of protests beginning in November 2013 and ending in February 2014 — was the focus of two of Sequoia’s student groups.
A website created by one student group includes an annotated photo of the square, plus explanations that probe the historical sources for what happened there. They include a look at Maidan’s importance as a gathering place within Kiev, plus the Ukraine’s geography and ethnic Russian population, two key reasons for the Ukraine’s troubled relationship with Russia and the West’s response to Russia’s military move into the Ukraine.
A second student group produced a timeline of protests in Maidan Square.
While the protests were sparked by a decision in November 2013 by then-President Victor Yanukovych to reject closer ties with Europe in favor of Russia, Sequoia students were drawn to a particularly violent series of demonstrations triggered by the so-called “anti-protest” laws passed by Ukraine’s parliament on “Black Thursday,” Jan. 16, 2014. Those laws restricted freedom of speech and of assembly.
Ultimately, “both the novel and the protest in Ukraine lead the viewer or reader to question who has the right to assert power over another,” students wrote.
—the editors
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