Longform’s Picks of the Week

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

Once a Cop, Now an Outcast: A Chinese Tale of Abuse and a Craving for Justice, by William Wan, the Washington Post.

In China, a petition system has been set up for the millions who flock to cities each year alleging abuse and seeking intervention.

China’s legal system is so broken that a separate government agency — called the petition system — has been set up just to handle the millions like Tian who flock to its cities each year, alleging abuse and begging for intervention. An appeal of last resort, the petition system draws China’s most desperate and bitter. The clearest-eyed among them include those who share Tian’s fall from official position — former judges, court officials and police officers, now reduced to hopeless rounds of petitioning. They know how China’s secretive legal system works but have experienced the painful ways in which it doesn’t. They describe a system in which arrests are arbitrary, prosecutions are motivated by special interests and court rulings are dictated by political leaders.

The Limits of Jurisdiction, by Erin Siegal McIntyre, Guernica.

For the past six years, Karen has lived in Missouri with her adoptive parents. But a Guatemalan couple are convinced the child is their kidnapped daughter, Anyelí.

In 2006, Timothy and Jennifer Monahan, an American couple from Liberty, Missouri, began the process of adopting a boy from Guatemala. They already had one biological daughter. To adopt, they used the Florida adoption agency Celebrate Children International (CCI). Like many CCI clients, the Monahans shared a deep Christian faith with the agency’s director, Sue Hedberg. The adoption proceeded with ease, despite CCI’s checkered history of complaints alleging unethical business practices.

When the Monahans visited Guatemala, they found the poverty there overwhelming, according to a chronology of events written by Jennifer Monahan and later obtained by criminal investigators in Guatemala. “…[O]ur family is burdened with the vision of ‘street toddlers’ and reports of children not having enough to eat or drink, and even being incarcerated with their mothers in jail,” Monahan wrote, upon returning to Missouri. “We pray for the opportunity to adopt another child.”

Diary: I Was a Greek Neo-Fascist, by Alexander Clapp, the London Review of Books.

On the rise-again of Greece’s Golden Dawn.

Golden Dawn has done its best to reactivate Greece’s mid-century tensions. Dawners everywhere have attempted to rehabilitate Metaxas – when they discovered a statue of the dictator in a sewer on Kefalonia in 2012 they tried to haul it to the central square of Argostoli. They’ve rallied more effectively around the Civil War. Last autumn columns of Dawners in black shirts and boots marched into the cemetery at Meligala, a small Messenian village where a ceremony was being held to honour the Partisans. They entered in military step, shoved the mayor from his podium, called him a karagiozis – ‘jackass’ – and delivered their own version of events. ‘Those who govern us now are traitors to the fatherland,’ Kasidiaris announced. Dawners have wreaked havoc on other Civil War ceremonies and hold an annual rally for Georgios Grivas, the Cypriot commander of the ‘Chi,’ a Civil War militia that patrolled the Peloponnese knocking off suspected communists. When party thugs file into Athenian neighbourhoods to crack leftist skulls, it isn’t dressed up as ‘street cleaning.’ It’s called emphulios, ‘civil war.’

ISIS at the Border, by Robin Wright, the New Yorker.

A Turkish city on the frontier of Syria’s war.

Gaziantep is particularly important to the United States. Washington closed its Embassy in Damascus in early 2012, and most American aid operations involving Syria are now directed from southern Turkey. The American effort includes three billion dollars in humanitarian assistance, such as food and medical aid, not only to refugees but also to Syrians inside the country. The United States has spent two hundred million dollars on everything from garbage trucks and ambulances to communications gear in order to prop up local councils struggling to provide essential services in rebel-held areas. An additional ninety million dollars has gone to equip armed opposition groups with nonlethal matériel, from trucks to ready-made meals. But there is no U.S. consulate, or even rented diplomatic office space, for American officials in Gaziantep, because of perceived dangers.

Pentagon in Denial About Civilian Casualties of U.S. Airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, by Chris Woods, Foreign Policy.

U.S. and allied forces may have killed dozens of civilians in airstrikes while bombing the Islamic State. But the defense department refuses to take responsibility.

Unlike United Nations-sanctioned operations in Afghanistan, the allies in the anti-Islamic State campaign are not part of any formal alliance. It is more a loose “coalition of the willing,” according to one U.S. defense official — an echo of the original Iraq invasion back in 2003. Although the United States has established “coalition standards on targeting and the appropriate use of lethal force, which always must account for the possible risk of civilian casualties,” these are for guidance only, said a Centcom spokesman.

Instead, “each nation participating in the coalition may modify or supplement this coalition guidance, including rules of engagement, with its own ‘caveats,’” the Centcom spokesman told FP. Every one of the 12 countries involved in the air campaign operates “in accordance with its own legal requirements,” according to the spokesperson. Britain’s Defense Ministry, for example, confirmed to FP that “we will not undertake missions [in Iraq] if they do not fall within U.K. [rules of engagement].” Britain’s rules of engagement, like those of all other countries in the alliance, remain classified.

Milos Bicanski, Gokhan Sahin, Johan Ordonez, Feng Li, Ozan Kose, Bulent Kilic