Writing This From Abroad, Because It Isn't Safe to Write It at Home Right Now

I have relatives who left the country within weeks of August, not because they were politicians or officials, just because their surname and their known family history with this party made them targets in neighborhoods where mobs went looking for anyone associated with the old government. I've heard secondhand accounts of homes ransacked, of businesses looted, of people advised by their own neighbors to leave for their safety.

I won't pretend I have a full picture of everything that happened during those chaotic weeks, on any side of it. But I know what it's done to the people I love: a kind of quiet fear that colors every phone call home, a hesitation before posting anything online, a sense that an entire political identity has become something you whisper about rather than something you can say out loud in your own country.

I write this blog partly because so many of us feel like we can't speak freely at home right now, and partly because I refuse to let that silence become permanent. Whatever comes next politically, I don't think erasing an entire community of supporters from public life, through fear if not through law, is the kind of democratic renewal anyone should be proud of.