Binyam Mohamed: Foreign Office attempts to file ‘secret evidence’

Index on Censorship has learned that government lawyers are attempting to submit secret evidence on the treatment of former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, as the Foreign Office continues to attempt to prevent the release of potentially damning information about his detention.

In a letter to the judges presiding over the case, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, the Treasury Solicitor has claimed that a Public Interest Immunity certificate could be necessary for any further evidence submitted by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. This would allow the Foreign Office to supply evidence to the court in secret, on a basis not open to challenge or scrutiny.

The government is fighting an application by international media organisations, including Index on Censorship, to obtain the release of seven paragraphs that were redacted from an earlier judgment concerning Mohamed’s treatment at the hands of US officials. The Foreign Office had claimed that any release would endanger future intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US, a claim Mohamed’s lawyer, Dinah Rose QC, has described as ‘seriously misleading’.

Read the government letter here (pdf)

Tiananmen twenty years on

Twenty years ago this week, Chinese students began their occupation of Tiananmen Square, a protest that ended in a massacre. In an exclusive extract from the next issue of Index on Censorship, Wang Dan, a leading figure in the 1989 movement, talks to writer Xinran about the fallout and the legacy

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Not in my backyard

The Internet threatens to make US obscenity law unworkable, says Marjorie Heins

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Obama: a fresh start

Barack Obama has promised to run the most transparent administration in history. He could make a good start by opening the government’s files on torture, says Jameel Jaffer

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Sir John Mortimer, 1923 - 2009

Author and barrister Sir John Mortimer died this morning at the age of 85. Sir John was a great champion of free expression, defending many writers and publishers against obscenity charges in the 1970s.

In one of his last interviews, he talked to Index on Censorship about the notorious Oz trial of 1971, as well as Gay News and Inside Linda Lovelace, two other publications he defended. Here we reproduce that interview.

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Editor’s pick 2008: Matthew Bown

A return to law and order, national pride and upright morals is colliding with Russia’s exuberant and scandal-seeking art world, writes Matthew Bown for Index on Censorship magazine’s Amnesty award-winning ‘How Free is the Russian Media’ issue.

Read here

Editor’s pick 2008: Aryeh Neier on Skokie

In this exclusive article for Index on Censorship magazine, Aryeh Neier (right) recalls the controversial Skokie First Amendment case –– still a landmark in the history of free expression after more than 30 years

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Editor’s pick 2008: Kenan Malik

The twentieth anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Salman Rushdie (right) takes place in February 2009. In this article for Index on Censorship magazine, Kenan Malik looks at the changes in liberal attitudes to free expression and offence from the Satanic Verses controversy to the present day.
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Regardless of frontiers

In this celebration of the 60th anniversary of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, AC Grayling says freedom of speech is the most precious of rights - giving us the chance of being fully human

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Emblem of darkness

Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie marked a new era: a retreat from the ideal of tolerance and the spirit of the Enlightenment, says Bernard-Henri Lévy in this exclusive article from the new issue of
Index on Censorship

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Index on Censorship: Articles of terror

Hammaad Munshi has been sentenced to two years for downloading jihadist materials, the latest conviction under the Terrorism Act 2000.

In an article in the current issue of Index on Censorship, human rights and criminal lawyer Imran Khan argues that terror legislation has been so widely drafted that no one is sure what is permissable.

Read ‘Articles of terror’ here (pdf)

The Big Chill

This week’s convictions of three British men on terrorism offences showed that there is still much to learn about jihadist groups in the UK and internationally. In an article in the new issue of Index on Censorship, Newsnight’s Richard Watson argues that journalists must be allowed to investigate terror networks freely if they are to be understood.
Read article here

The view from Iran

This week, four feminist bloggers were sentenced to imprisonment in Iran. In an exclusive preview of the new issue of Index on Censorhip (out next week), Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi discusses the prospects for free expression in her country.

Read Shirin Ebadi’s ‘View From Iran’ here (pdf)

China: Index on Censorship writer detained

Blogger Zhou ‘Zola’ Shugang, known in China as the ‘nailhouse blogger’, was placed under house arrest last week by Chinese authorities seeking to prevent him travelling to Beijing. Zola has frequently drawn attention to issues hushed up by the Chinese authorities.

Read ‘Notes on the Net’, Zola’s article on Internet activism for Index on Censorship’s ‘Made in China’ issue here (pdf)

Countdown to Beijing, part 4

Continuing our series of articles from Index on Censorship’s ‘Made In China’ issue, Internet pioneer Isaac Mao explains why freedom of thought is what China needs most.

Read here (pdf)

Countdown to Beijing, part 3

Continuing our series of articles from Index on Censorship’s ‘Made In China’ issue, Rebecca MacKinnon discusses how online pioneers are changing Chinese culture

Read article here (pdf)

Countdown to Beijing

In the lead up to the Olympic Games in China, Indexoncensorship.org will be publishing articles from our journal. This week, an interview with Ai Weiwei, the artistic genius behind Beijing’s ‘bird’s nest’ stadium.

Read Ai Weiwei interview here (pdf)

Pakistan: reporter freed

Wiqar Kiyani, the kidnapped Guardian stringer who was kidnapped on Sunday night was freed on 7 July. Kiyani was thrown from a vehicle near Mianwali after alleged torture with a warning not to pursue a story about a British national or tell anyone about his ordeal. He had disappeared shortly after he returned to Islamabad from a reporting assignment in Karachi. Read more here

Four journalists freed by Burundi appeal court

Four journalists who were jailed for alleged violations to the national security of the Burundi have been acquitted by the appeals court of Bujumbura.

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Philippines: reporter sentenced

Ninez Cacho–Olivares of the Daily Tribune has been sentenced to at least six months imprisonment after allegedly libelling a prominent lawyer in the Philippines. The charges related to a 2003 article that included purported transcripts of conversations between lawyer Arthur Villaraza and a German building company seeking an airport terminal contract. Cacho-Olivares is set to appeal the decision. Read more here

New curbs on Russian media

The Russian State Duma voted 339-1 today to tighten media rules on slander and libel.

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New issue of Index on Censorship out now

Index on Censorship: I know it when I see it

From Ulysses to Last Exit to Brooklyn, obscenity trials are a benchmark for the limits of cultural tolerance. As the first prosecution of the written word in more than 30 years takes place in the UK, Index on Censorship assesses the landscape.

Are we becoming less permissive than our parents? Is the Obscene Publications Act fit for purpose? Should governments control what we see online to protect our children? Leading commentators on the subject give their verdict.

Anthony Julius and Julian Petley: a discussion on art, obscenity and the law
Read exclusively free here!

John Ozimek: the technology revolution is redefining the boundaries

Tony Bennett: comic books are not just for kids

Julian Petley on the prospects for free speech online
Read exclusively free here!

Marjorie Heins says the Internet is making the law unworkable

Anne Higonnet on why artists are heading for a collision course
Read exclusively free here!

Elena Martellozzo and Helen Taylor assess the impact of child pornography

Seth Finkelstein on the censoring of obscenity online

BBFC film examiner Murray Perkins gives the lowdown
Read exclusively free here!

Also in this issue

INDEX IN IRAQ
Rohan Jayasekera on Iraq’s year of elections

DISPATCHES
Shahvalad Chobanoglu says independent press in Azerbaijan is struggling to survive

Sanjuana Martinez exposes a culture of censorship in Mexico

Sanjana Hattotuwa explains the chilling effect of legislation in Sri Lanka

THE ART OF OFFENCE
Martin Rowson says breaking taboos is the heart of satire

FICTION: CUBA
Ena Lucia Portela ‘The last passenger’

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Britain: unfinished business

More than four years after the invasion of Iraq, the full truth of the infamous September 2002 dossier is yet to come out. This was the dossier central to Tony Blair’s case for war, claiming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes. This was the dossier that BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan famously reported had been ‘sexed up’. Coalition forces found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction – weapons whose existence Blair had claimed was ‘established beyond doubt’. Yet the former prime minister survived a number of inquiries by falsely claiming that the dossier was written solely by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Getting to the bottom of who really wrote the dossier remains as important as ever: the lies that have been told to cover it up are almost as damaging as the lies that took us to war in the first place.

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Don’t incite censorship

One of the most pernicious means by which restrictions on free speech have grown tighter in recent years has been through the use of incitement laws, both incitement to hatred and incitement to violence and murder. In some cases, as in the outlawing of incitement to religious hatred through the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, the law is being used to censor genuine debate. In other cases, incitement law is being used to shut down protest, as in the recent convictions of Muslim protestors Mizanur Rahman and Umran Javed for inciting racial hatred and ‘soliciting murder’ during a rally in London against the publications of the Danish cartoons.

Over the past decade, the government has used the law both to expand the notion of ‘hatred’ and to loosen the meaning of ‘incitement’. Much of what is deemed ‘hatred’ today is in fact the giving of offence. And the giving of offence should be viewed as a normal and acceptable part of plural society.

But what of cases where someone has clearly crossed the boundary between causing offence and fomenting hatred? Such speech should not be banned either.

Free speech for everyone but bigots is no free speech at all. The right to transgress against liberal orthodoxy is as important as the right to blaspheme against religious dogma or the right to challenge reactionary traditions. In any case you cannot challenge bigotry by banning it. You simply let the sentiments fester underground.

Hatred, of course, exists not just in speech, but can have physical consequences. The law can and should criminalise the planning and instruction of acts of violence. But there has to be both a direct link between speech and action, and intent on the part of the speaker that that particular act of violence be carried out. In ordinary criminal cases, incitement is, rightly, very difficult legally to prove. The burden of proof should not be loosened just because hate speech may be involved.

Muslim protestors who chant ‘behead those who insult Islam’ may be moronic and even offensive. But the idea that they are inciting murder is equally moronic and offensive to our intelligence.

People do not respond to words like robots. They think and reason, and act upon their thoughts and reasoning. Bigots are, of course, influenced by bigoted talk. But it is the bigots who must bear responsibility for translating talk into action. In blurring the distinction between speech and action, incitement laws blur the idea of human agency and of moral responsibility.

Laws that prohibit incitement to hatred should be scrapped. As for incitement to violence or murder, the law in relation to hate speech must be as tightly defined as it is in ordinary criminal law.

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Positive action

Freedom of expression in the United Kingdom is still defined negatively. The freedom not to be offended, abused, plagiarised or blasphemed against outweighs in most legislative terms the freedom to engage in any of these potentially enjoyable and fulfilling activities. What is forbidden dominates the debate, whilst the right to free speech is on the retreat. This was not what we expected when the Human Rights Act (HRA) introduced a specific commitment to free expression into British law. The Act’s incorporation of Article 10 of the European Convention should have sent out a very clear message to anyone seeking to constrain free speech – a dearly held right in British public life.

Yet the opposite has happened, and free speech is eroded with almost every new piece of legislation. Freedom of Information is protected in its own Act, whilst Freedom of Expression struggles in the margins of hostile legislation. While freedom of information is a post-facto freedom, a way of checking up on government and other public bodies, freedom of expression is a fundamental right, without which there would be no way to publicly enforce or police any other rights. Yet it languishes in the relegation end of the rights table. With every new public debate on ‘the limits of free speech’ our rights recede. Why not, instead, launch a public debate on the limits of censorship? Why not, indeed, lobby for a Freedom of Expression Act with the same monumental force as the First Amendment to the United States Constitution? Such an Act should include details of penalties for eroding others’ rights to free expression. This would give the police the guidance they need when dealing with violent protesters. It might also set out the balance between the right to free expression and the (developing) right to privacy, copyright protection and public order, in a way that would disable future governments from placing more emphasis on the constraints than the

fundamental freedom.

Such an Act would in no way merely repeat the terms of the HRA, which for all its good intentions has gifted the government a Get Out of Jail card. The exemptions to the free expression clause are so numerous, yet so ill-defined, that a government can always appeal to public order, public morality or national security when they seek to simplify the challenges they face in managing an increasingly complex society. A new, tough FOE Act would set out precisely how and when such constraints might be applied, and would place oversight of this universal freedom in the hands of an independent scrutinizing body – the public.

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Public nuisance

Trying to remember when all this started, I rooted out from my shelves the other day a copy of a book I wrote as a young reporter on the Guardian. Its front cover is cracking and a bit faded with the passage of 27 years, but the cartoon by John Kent that we commissioned is still legible. It shows Mrs Thatcher making the imperious demand, ‘What’s our biggest state secret?’ The cabinet secretary, then Sir Robert Armstrong, replies wittily: ‘Our incompetence!’ The book’s theme was the disgraceful way successive governments, both Labour and Tory, had colluded to fend off a freedom of information act, regarded elsewhere in the civilised world as a key component of a decent democracy.

In my little polemic, I laboriously traced the controversy all the way back to the 1960s – a weary trail larded with memos from senior civil servants about ways they could head off this ‘formidably burdensome’ idea, and with evasions from such politicians as the Labour premier Jim Callaghan. He complained heartrendingly that ‘the business of government is difficult enough as it is’. The problem, as I saw it then, was that Whitehall and Westminster were at bottom very undemocratic places, which had never abolished the prerogative powers of the monarchy, but simply inherited them to use for their own purposes. The rest of us were regarded not as citizens, but as subjects – and indeed, ‘British subject’ was how we were still oppressively described on our passports in those days.

The young Tony Blair put it well when he was in opposition in 1996: ‘Information is power, and any government’s attitude about sharing information with the people actually says a great deal about how it views power itself, and how it views the relationship between itself and the people who elected it.’

Where I went wrong, back in 1980, was in naively imagining that an anachronistic democratic deficit was bound to be very shortly corrected. Instead, it took until 1997 before the Blair government came to office, saddled with an unavoidable commitment to introduce a freedom of information act. For all his fine words, Blair too did his very best to wriggle out of it, with the result that it was three years before a much watered-down version finally reached the statute book. Even then, few people noticed the small print, which allowed a theoretical maximum of five years before the Act actually had to be implemented. I don’t think a single one of the campaigners imagined the government would have the brass neck actually to delay implementation for the full five years. But they did.

As passed, the Act has an array of exemptions. The most noxious is a ministerial veto. Any minister can certify that disclosure of a piece of information would ‘prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs’. As the original drafts circulated round Whitehall, civil servants and politicians in every department wrote themselves further exemptions – for ‘commercial confidence’, ‘international relations’, ‘policy formation’, ‘ministerial discussions’, ‘parliamentary privilege’, dealings with the royal family, anything to do with the intelligence services. Exemptions can be claimed (and have been, interminably) in bogus attempts to delete all civil servants’ names from documents, allegedly under the privacy rules of the parallel Data Protection Act.

Our efforts to make use of the Act on the Guardian soon established that quite a few civil servants were unwilling to operate it in good faith. It takes a month at best to get an answer (‘20 working days’). Within a short time, departments were exploiting a piece of small print to claim an extra minimum of 20 further days ‘to consider public interest factors’. Many officials take a timid and precautionary approach, refusing to release anything for which an exemption can plausibly be claimed. An internal appeal then takes as long as the ministry can get away with.

A second appeal to the Information Commissioner, hopelessly overloaded, understaffed, and banished to a provincial office in Wilmslow, generates a result, often of mixed quality, after an inordinate delay of up to nine months. Only then is it possible to go to the Information Tribunal, where – at last – a degree of lawyerly rigour can be found.

Many applicants give up, disheartened, after weeks of slogging through the mud to gain a few inches in what feels like a bureaucratic battle of the Somme. This is no accident: delay and obstruction are time-honoured tactics in Whitehall, whether designed to wear down a transient minister who has too many bright ideas, or to see off importunate members of the public. Matthew Parris recently pointed out, in a column in the Times: ‘I do know what it is like to be a civil servant in Whitehall, because for two years I was one. There is a culture there that sees the public as a damn nuisance. The culture is endemic and needs to be stamped on very hard indeed.’

One of the first acts of Charles Falconer at the Department of Constitutional Affairs was unhelpful to the cause of openness. He set up what he called a ‘clearing house’. Under this, all requests that were at all interesting, or that came from the media, had to be sent off to the DCA for vetting instead of being promptly answered. Individual departments such as the Home Office also set up a rigmarole of internal filters, providing for reference up to the top; weekly submissions to ministers of forthcoming disclosures; and prolonged meetings with press officers and private secretaries in the interests of news management. There was a neurotic fear of loss of control. Rather than the hoped-for culture change, parts of Whitehall have instead been showing signs of a nervous collapse.

Of the 62,852 requests made to central government since 1 January 2005, 36,558 have been granted. Seven departments, including Lord Falconer’s own, refused to give answers to more than half the requests they received. The Act badly needs to be strengthened.

Nonetheless, some results did start to come through at different levels. Many councils began to routinely publicise restaurant health inspections. This followed an exercise in which our requests uncovered an entertaining spat with Heston Blumenthal, owner of the upmarket Fat Duck at Bray, about the most appropriate temperature for his celebrated pork cooked in brine. More significantly, MPs were forced to disclose at last their expenses claims, revealing wild variations between neighbouring politicians, some of whom definitely seemed to have their snouts in the trough. The identities also came to light of the recipients of millions in EU agricultural subsidies, including Prince Charles. The minutes of the BBC governors’ meeting were disclosed, in which they got rid of Director-General Greg Dyke, remarking that the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell didn’t like him.

And then, a bare 18 months after the Act came in, a counter-attack began. The new bid for censorship involved the old collusive framework of ministers and civil servants – the politicians resenting their loss of information control, backed up by officials saying they objected to the amount of work involved in making disclosures.

In July 2006, Falconer circulated a private paper to cabinet colleagues, outlining a subtle and bureaucratic scheme to enable ‘the most difficult requests – generally received from determined and experienced, rather than casual, requestors – to be refused on cost grounds’.

What Falconer called ‘serial requesters’ were, of course, the very people on whom the public rely to dig out important material – the media, pressure groups, opposition MPs.

Falconer’s plan was to push through apparently minor changes to the small print of the regulations, by means of secondary legislation. He would effectively restrict organisations such as the BBC or Oxfam to four requests a year per department. This would be done by ‘aggregating’ all the requests from different journalists, or individual campaigners, and claiming that, taken together, they breached cost limits.

A second arm to the scheme was to make it even easier to reach those cost limits, by adding in notional charges not just for extracting the information but also for what lawyers in their bills call ‘perusing’. (Falconer is a commercial lawyer by trade.) And on top of that, he wanted to charge for all the time that ministers and top officials spend meeting each other to debate ways to block awkward requests. In other words, the more significant the request, the easier it would be to refuse to answer it.

This scheme to block access to FOI only to those who seek to make use of it has a certain Kafkaesque quality. Falconer accurately predicted that opponents would say that ‘the government is seeking to undermine the Act by underhand means in order to shield itself from legitimate scrutiny’. To meet this image problem, he proposed to commission a supposedly independent cost-benefit analysis.

Frontier Economics, a small consultancy with former cabinet secretary Andrew Turnbull on the board, was accordingly paid £75,000 to knock out a quick study. They produced a sheaf of dubious statistics, purporting to show that FOI cost Whitehall £24m a year, and that much of the demand came from a handful of media – mainly the BBC, the Guardian and the Sunday Times. The small print revealed that the time of ministers had been costed at a purely imaginary £300 an hour. The time taken in consultations had been arrived at by taking the numbers of hours logged by officials – and then blithely doubling the figures. The figures for newspaper use were extrapolated from a single week. Nowhere was it pointed out that the initial years of the Act would be far more expensive than subsequently, because every issue was a precedent. Nor was it explained that the government spends far more – £300m a year – on hundreds of press officers to pump out its own propaganda. And nor was it said that £24m a year is in fact fantastically cheap.

Armed with this threadbare study, Falconer sought to act quickly. It is possible that he will not get away with it in the end. The FOI Act does not actually allow discrimination between requesters. But the omens are bad. An Act that ought to be strengthened is proving instead to be, day by day, under an insidious attack.

MPs themselves, smarting no doubt from the revelations about their own expenses, have not risen up against this plan. Instead, they have cooked up a private member’s bill of their own, promoted by former Conservative chief whip David Maclean, to exempt themselves entirely from the Act. The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill is said to be designed to prevent disclosure of letters from MPs to public bodies on behalf of their constituents – or, of course, on behalf of other, less salubrious, interests. Ostensibly, the concern is for privacy. But the Act already protects constituents’ identities. The real effect of the bill would be to enable politicians not only to mis-spend the taxpayers’ money but also to lobby under cover. This is the very opposite of accountability.

Along with the Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, Leader of the Commons Jack Straw is backing the bill, which is being given a fair wind by the government. Straw says privately, ‘Many members on both sides of the House would welcome it.’ And how do we know that he says that? Through the old-fashioned means of a leaked letter. Perhaps we shall all be forced to go back soon to much more traditional methods of trying to penetrate the secretive parts of government.

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Secrets and sources

For four months at the end of 2005, I was given access to an extraordinary series of Foreign Office documents concerning the government’s strategy to tackle the threat of radical Islam at home and abroad. Literally dozens of emails, position papers and policy discussions came my way. It became clear that someone within Whitehall was deeply disturbed about the direction of British foreign policy, especially the strategy of engagement with groups and individuals on the Islamist extreme right. At one point I was receiving so many documents that I barely had time to read their contents, let alone judge whether there was a story in them.

But stories there were. The documents showed that senior figures in the Foreign Office believed that Britain’s policy in Iraq had led to an increase in radicalism among young Muslims, something the prime minister was denying at the time. I published the story in the Observer, where I was working as home affairs editor. But that was just the beginning.

The leaks provided me with a further news story for the Observer about plans to infiltrate extremist groups, and with features for the New Statesman on CIA rendition flights, diplomatic engagement with Egypt’s banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the panic that had engulfed the Foreign Office as a result of the disclosures. The documents also formed the basis of a Channel 4 documentary on the government’s troubled relationship with radical Islam and an accompanying pamphlet, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, for the think tank Policy Exchange. The leaks were a journalistic goldmine. The revelations about the compact between the Foreign Office and radical Islam also went some way towards changing government policy towards the self-appointed representatives of Britain’s Muslim community, such as the Muslim Council of Britain.

It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose. Decisions being made in the Foreign Office, with a direct effect on the British people, were taking place with little or no consultation. In particular, the Foreign Office had embarked on a detailed strategy of engagement with Islamists at home and abroad without reference to Parliament or even, it seemed, the prime minister himself.

owever, at the end of January 2006 my source was arrested under suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act. I have not heard from him since. The latest news is that he has been bailed until June, while investigations continue. By then, his life will have been held in suspension for 18 months: this at a time when Labour politicians complain that the ‘loans for peerages’ investigation has dragged on for a mere 12 months with no charges being brought.

If, and when, the case comes to trial it will provide a fascinating test of the secrecy laws. The documents, many of which have been collected in the Policy

Exchange pamphlet, are also available online. They provide a unique insight into government thinking on Islam between 2001 and 2006, a period that encompasses the suicide attacks on New York and the bombing of London. Reading through them again, it is difficult to imagine how national security can have been seriously compromised by the disclosures, which contributed considerably to the national debate on one of the most important issues of our time. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly is known to have been influenced by the disclosures in making her decision to seek new grassroots Muslim partners in the battle for hearts and minds. The Policy Exchange pamphlet has also helped inform the Conservative policy group on national and international security headed by Pauline Neville-Jones, a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee who also served as political director in the Foreign Office. It would be a delicious spectacle to see Kelly and Neville-Jones called as witnesses for the defence in any

trial that results from the Foreign Office leaks.

However, it is not difficult to see what motivated the arrest. The leaks were proving intensely embarrassing and coincided with a crackdown across Whitehall against unauthorised disclosures. This had been sparked by a separate leak of a memo said to outline plans by President George W Bush to bomb the Arabic television station Al Jazeera in April 2004. Following the publication of the claims in the Mirror, Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh and parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor were charged under the Official Secrets Act.

In opposition, the Labour Party had fought the introduction of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, arguing that a ‘public interest’ defence should be inserted

into the legislation to give protection to genuine whistleblowers. During the parliamentary debate, Shadow Home Affairs spokesman Roy Hattersley said that the definition of harm to national security ‘is so wide and so weak that it is difficult to imagine any revelation which is followed by a prosecution not

resulting in a conviction’. Frank Dobson, who went on to serve in Tony Blair’s first cabinet, added: ‘Surely we as a Parliament have not sunk so low

that we want to introduce new laws to protect official wrongdoing.’

Once in power, the Labour Party had no such qualms. The Blair government has wielded the big stick of the Official Secrets Act with alarming regularity since it came to power. In August 1997, just months after winning an election on a promise of new openness and transparency in government, the new government faced a serious predicament in the person of David Shayler, an MI5 officer whose revelations about the intelligence service were published in the Mail on Sunday.

These included details of files kept on senior Labour politicians such as Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman. More seriously, Shayler later claimed that officers from Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, had participated in a plot to assassinate Colonel Qaddafi of Libya.

Despite the fact that Shayler’s claims referred to a period before Labour came to power, the new government pursued him relentlessly, requesting his

extradition from France, where he had set up home after leaving the security service. This pursuit extended to journalists who wrote about Shayler, and in

2000 I found myself in court after publishing an article in the Observer about the Libya plot, in which I said the newspaper had been given the names of the spies allegedly involved in the plot, but had been prevented from publishing them for legal reasons. (The officers’ names, David Watson and Richard Bartlett, have since entered the public domain, but they have never been prosecuted for their

alleged crimes.)

The Observer successfully fought an order to hand over all documents relating to my dealings with David Shayler and established an important precedent in media law that has made it more difficult to seize journalistic material. But it did not help David Shayler, who returned to Britain in 2000 to face trial. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in November 2002 for breaching the

Official Secrets Act, after more than five years of fighting for his claims to be investigated by the government.

David Shayler did not succeed in his own case, but his lawyers did establish an important precedent for future whistleblowers. In 2002, the House of Lords had decided that Shayler’s lawyers could not use a public interest defence. It also decided that the 1989 OSA was compatible with human rights legislation.

However, it did establish that in certain cases a ‘defence of necessity’ could be used if a whistleblower had acted because there was an imminent threat

to human life.

Less than six months later an opportunity arose to test the legislation. In March

2003 as the military preparations for war in Iraq gathered pace, a young woman in her late 20s walked into her boss’s office at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, and admitted to leaking a document of the highest possible classification of secrecy. Katharine Gun, a junior Mandarin Chinese translator, knew her career was at an end and that she could face a long prison sentence. But she believed the contents of an email she had received in the course of her work could stop the war. She believed her action could save lives.

The email, dated 31 January 2003, was from Frank Koza, head of regional targets at the National Security Agency in the United States, and asked for British help in spying on the United Nations, which was immersed in an intense debate about whether to authorise an attack on Iraq. Britain was arguing for a second UN resolution to specifically sanction the invasion, without which many thought the war would be illegal.

Key to any vote were the so called ‘swing’ nations, Chile, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Guinea and Angola, temporary members of the Security Council,

whose votes were essential in gaining legal cover for the war. Koza was demanding a ‘surge’ in spying activities to give the US an ‘edge’ in the negotiations.

He was desperate to know the voting intentions of the ‘swing six’, but also hinted that private information about individual diplomats should be amassed in case blackmail was necessary.

I ran the story about the leaked email in the Observer on 4 March 2003, three weeks before the outbreak of war. It had taken nearly a month from leaking the document to its appearance in the press and Gun was in a state of almost unbearable tension. She immediately owned up to being the source of the leak and was arrested by the police for a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act. Gun believed that when the UN discovered what was going on, they

would never allow the war to go ahead. What she didn’t realise at the time Katharine Gun after charges against her were dropped, London February 2004

was that George W Bush had already decided on regime change in Baghdad, with or without the United Nations.

However, when the case finally came to trial in February 2004, the prosecution failed to present any evidence and the case was dropped before it had begun. At the time, speculation suggested that the government had decided to drop the case because it would have led to the publication of the attorney general’s legal advice on the legality of the war, which was initially equivocal. But the Crown Prosecution Service always said that the reason was far more banal: that it had become clear that it would be impossible to fight Gun’s defence that she had acted

to save lives.

Although it is impossible to know precisely why the government dropped the Gun case, it is probably fair to say that the ‘defence of necessity’, established by David Shayler, helped save Katharine Gun from prison. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the government has indicated its intention to close down the defence in future cases. Last July, The Times reported the intention of the new Home Secretary, John Reid, to remove the necessity defence and suggested that he would present the necessary legislation in last autumn’s Queen’s Speech. This did not materialise, due to a lack of parliamentary time. But the Home Office has confirmed that it is keeping the OSA under review and will revisit the defence of

necessity as soon as it can.

Campaigners still believe an amendment to the 1989 Act is imminent. Julie-Ann Davies, who was arrested in connection with the Shayler case in 2000, has

spent the past seven years researching Britain’s secrecy laws and is currently studying for a PhD at Glasgow University. She said: ‘I have no doubt the government intends to act. Whenever a window of public interest opens up, they close it.’ Former senior BBC journalist Nick Jones is now chair of Reform the Official Secrets Act (Rosa), which campaigns for a public interest defence for whistleblowers in national security cases. He said the Al Jazeera trial marked an intensification in the drive for government secrecy: ‘There does seem to be a new push, triggered by the war on terror, to restrain journalists who want to write in this area. Meanwhile, all talk of protecting whistleblowers has disappeared in a puff of

smoke.’

The paradox is that in the present circumstances the more serious the disclosure, the more chance of running a successful defence. My source, for example, who could only be accused of leaking ‘confidential’ rather than ‘secret’ documents, would not have recourse to the necessity defence. He would have to fall back on a defence that said he had acted in the public interest, something of which Labour seems to have lost sight after ten long years in government.

Martin Bright is political editor of the New Statesman

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Midwife to a reborn Russian nationalism

On 4 November 2005, more than 3,000 activists of nationalist organisations, making Nazi salutes and with stylised swastikas on their banners, marched through the centre of Moscow to Slavianskaia Square between the Kremlin and the headquarters of the FSB (KGB). If the aims of the marchers had not been clear enough from the line of drummers and young people wearing quasi-military uniform, they were soon evident from their slogans: ‘Sieg Heil!’, ‘Hail Russia’, ‘Russia for the Russians’, ‘Who owns Russia? – Russians!’, ‘Russia is All, All Else is Nothing!’

The organisers of the march had been given official permission for the demonstration. Several radical nationalist and fascist organisations, including the skinheads’ movement, made no secret of the fact that their main aim was to drive all ‘non-Russians’ out of Moscow. Anti-Semitic utterances were also to be heard at the meeting.

On that same day, 4 November, the traditional ‘grey briefing’ took place in the Kremlin for the directors of federal television companies, at which officials of the administration of the President of Russia distributed a ‘list of terminology’. The document advises against ‘distorting’ the Russian language and the employment of ‘correct terminology’ in television news programmes.

The enemy were no longer to be described as separatists, but always as Chechen terrorists or at Chechen fighters; their actions were not to be described as military operations, but as terrorist actions or outrages, and so on. At first sight, these events seem unrelated, but there is one very important detail to note: not one of the nationwide federal television stations screened a report on the march of the nationalists and fascists. In all likelihood, that decision was taken that same day in the Kremlin.

The fourth of November started a new page in the history of Russia: the rebirth of nationalism. This rebirth was initiated by the government, beginning in 2000, after both personnel changes in the Kremlin administration and the revival of the traditions of Soviet propaganda and xenophobia became a component of official and unofficial ideology.

It is manifest in the colourful expressions frequently used by Vladimir Putin, for example: ‘beat the crap out [of the Chechen resistance] in the shithouse’; or about men becoming ‘circumcised radical Muslims’. Xenophobia is endemic both among the leaders of political parties ideologically close to the Russian government and among those that comprise its opposition.

Russian xenophobia has gradually evolved from being anti-Semitic into being anti-Caucasian and anti-Islamic. The development of xenophobia is encouraged, not only by the public speeches and acts of politicians, but also by the mass media: the state-owned media because it is obliged to broadcast the comments of politicians, and the non-state-owned media because it reflects the general nationalistic mood of society.

Only a small proportion of the liberally minded mass media resists the spread of xenophobia. Unfortunately, the influence of a few Moscow newspapers and a few dozen provincial newspapers cannot significantly alter the situation.

Neither can the Internet, despite being completely uncontrolled by the government. The freedom of the Internet has made possible not only the uncontrolled delivery of alternative news, but also the appearance of a large number of nationalistic and fascist websites.

There are several reasons for this reappearance of Russian xenophobia. Researchers usually link Putin’s coming to power with the renewed outbreak of the war in Chechnya: the population wanted to see someone with a firm hand in the Kremlin. This is entirely plausible, because many Russian opinion polls in the late 1990s, the last two or three years of Boris Yeltsin’s rule, pointed to disillusionment after the first war in Chechnya ended in 1996. Many described the peace treaty with the Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov as a ‘shameful defeat’.

The ‘news war’ against Chechnya intensified immediately after the signing of the peace treaty in 1996, and the Russian state-owned mass media increasingly began to refer to ‘Chechen bandits’ and ‘Chechen terrorists’. During this period, however, the independent television company NTV was still functioning, and the Echo of Moscow radio station was developing.

The Internet had become widespread and independent newspapers were being published. It was possible to discuss and debate the problem of Chechnya. The levels of xenophobia in the mass media could be seen as a manifestation of popular nationalism unrelated to government policy. Only radical politicians and the military claimed that the only way they could resolve the Chechen problem was by means of military force.

This situation began to change in August 1999 after the Russian army’s campaign in Dagestan, a federal republic adjacent to Chechnya where Chechen and Dagestani separatists were organising resistance. This was the first military operation conducted under a news blackout. Almost nothing was known about it, because journalists were stopped at the approaches to Dagestan. Only a few journalists working for independent publications managed to report on the operation and its consequences, and their information differed markedly from officially approved news.

Almost as soon as Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, he started to woo journalists. Newspaper editors and the directors of television companies began to receive frequent invitations to the Kremlin. After the first few such meetings, a number of heads of independent newspapers began to publish commentaries on their conversations with Putin. When Putin was elected President in March 2000, he continued to socialise with the heads of the mass media, but in recent years only ‘reliable’ journalists, who keep their mouths shut and don’t give away secrets, are invited to the Kremlin.

When two blocks of flats were blown up in Moscow in September 1999, there was no investigative journalism from the Russian media. Within a few hours, all the television channels were broadcasting interviews with politicians who spoke of ‘clear signs of Chechen involvement’, but since then, neither the official enquiry nor any other investigation has come up with evidence to suggest the leadership of the Chechen republic was involved . In spite of this, the television channels did what the government needed them to do: they created a public consensus on who was behind the Moscow atrocities.

The Kremlin’s policy on news was finalised when, in September 2000, Putin signed a strange document titled ‘Doctrine of Information Security’. This is neither a law nor a legally binding document, but is rather a government action programme. The Doctrine refers to the leading role of the state press and makes mention, several times more often than it mentions freedom of speech, of ‘news war’ and the ‘news weapon’.

The provision of news in Russia began to change from 2000 as persecution of the independent television company NTV and of journalists on independent newspapers began; this was accompanied by the creation of new state-owned television companies, newspapers, agencies and websites. Government bureaucrats began routinely to bandy about a new concept, ‘unified news provision’ which, on closer inspection, proves to be none other than the familiar Soviet concept of propaganda.

The main aim has been achieved: Russian society now hears what is going on in Chechnya only from official sources. The government has introduced rigorous controls on Russian journalists, restricting visits to territory where the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ is being conducted, that is, to Chechnya. Similar controls have been applied to foreign journalists.

Journalists who wrote extensively about the First Chechen War have been neutralised by being refused visas and accreditation by the Russian ministry of foreign affairs.

News about events of any description in Russia is now strictly controlled by the government: all the national television companies and radio stations are state-owned. Only a small proportion of news sources, newspapers and the Internet are in a position to deliver alternative news, and their influence on public opinion does not compare with that of radio and TV.

The essential conditions for spreading the language of enmity have been created in Russia. Television is free: it is financed out of the state budget and by advertising revenue. Anybody living in Russia has only to press the button on their remote control to access five national channels, only one of which is dedicated to culture, while the others include news bulletins or news analysis.

There is at present no public service television network in Russia and, to judge by the Duma’s postponement of discussion of the legislative proposal, there is unlikely to be one in the near future. Public control of the programming of television companies would be detrimental to the government, since the Kremlin would lose its principal disseminator of propaganda.

Only subscribers to cable television packages can access non-official news from Euronews, BBC or CNN programmes translated into Russian. In 2002, however, there were only 12 million users of cable networks in Russia out of a population of 145 million. Accordingly, more than 90 per cent of the population is dependent on news from programmes broadcast by state television.

The independent television companies in the Russian provinces have their own news and news analysis programmes, but are subjected to pressure by the local authorities. For the most part, they try to avoid dealing with topics which might cause trouble.

The situation with radio is much the same. The only independent news radio station is Moscow Echo, which is able to rebroadcast its programmes in 41 Russian cities. This gives it a potential audience of 22,400,000, but obviously not all of them listen to the station’s programmes. Probably, as in Moscow, only 8 per cent to 9 per cent tune in. The other independent radio stations (of which there are about 1,000) broadcast music and devote 3-6 minutes in the hour to news. Foreign radio stations broadcasting in Russian – Radio Liberty, the BBC, Deutsche Welle – continue to have a modest following.

The other source of news is, of course newspapers. Traditionally those published in Moscow are considered the most liberal, but their circulations are not large enough to sway public opinion in Russia as a whole.

Of course, several dozen liberal newspapers are published in the provinces, but the standard of living and hence the purchasing power of the population is lower than in Moscow, in consequence, the print run of these newspapers is several times less than those in the capital.

The government is unwilling to give up its control of television since TV news bulletins and news analysis programmes are crucial in forming public opinion. Statistics for February 2004 on the database of the Public Opinion Institute (Fond Obshchestvennoe mnenie), reveal that ORT (the First Channel) is received by 95 per cent of the survey’s respondents, RTR (the Rossiya Channel) by 93 per cent. The figures for the remaining television companies are much lower: NTV 69 per cent; TVTs 48 per cent.

The only area of news provision over which the government has no control is the Internet. As yet there is no law in Russia regulating Internet activity and no statutory obligation to register websites. A large number of nationalist and fascist websites have been created on the Russian Internet (RuNet). Almost every organisation preaching racial or national hatred and intolerance has its own website. RuNet is developing rapidly and is used by 10 per cent to12 per cent of the population, but only a small number of users appear interested in political information.

Russian legislation makes it an offence to publish materials instigating or aggravating national and religious discord. Russia also has a Public Prosecutor’s Office whose job it is to monitor the observance of laws and punish those who flout them. Despite this, hundreds of newspapers daily publish articles whose xenophobic content falls within the provisions of these articles of the Criminal Code: it is extremely rare for cases to be brought on these grounds. The courts deal leniently with those accused of distributing jingoistic publications.

Xenophobic materials are to be found not only in nationalistic publications, but primarily in the popular press, in newspapers like Komsomolskaya Pravda and Moskovsky Komsomolets with huge circulations of 2-3 million. It is clear that anti-Chechen xenophobia has been whipped up by the authorities, both military and political, who are eager to ensure that society continues to believe in the necessity of the military campaign in Chechnya.

The state’s bureaucrats did use propaganda during the First Chechen War, but from the beginning of the Second Chechen War all rhyme and reason disappeared from the news they distributed. Official sources appeared totally unconcerned whether the news they were releasing was subsequently discredited, or was seen to be totally ridiculous, even by those without specialist military knowledge.

For example, on 6 October 1999, the ITAR-TASS news agency, quoting one of the leaders of the North Caucasus Military District, announced: ‘The Chechen bandits are themselves mining residential blocks and, when federal aircraft appear in the sky, blow them up. This is being done in order to turn the Chechen population against the actions of the federal authorities in the northern Caucasus. At the same time, military sources state that the civilian population is being increasingly disaffected by the actions of the bandit formations.’

Hatred of Chechens is always encouraged, in particular by the Russian military, whose press centres disseminate absurd ‘news’. For example, after the Kursk submarine disaster in 2002, ITAR-TASS, citing an anonymous FSB officer, reported that Chechens were planning to hijack a submarine. A year earlier, the intelligence services disseminated a story that the blueprint had been discovered in a cave in the mountains of Chechnya of a Boeing similar to one used by terrorists to destroy buildings in New York on 11 September 2001.

Anti-Chechen propaganda is spread not only via news or news analysis programmes. In the last five years, Russian television channels have shown a large number of feature films in which, as in Indian cinema, the heroes, their characteristics and the ending are already familiar to the audience. These are films about the Chechen war, in which the good guys are invariably Russian soldiers and officers and the bad guys are Chechens or, more generally, Caucasians.

State control of the mass media is the principal cause of the growth of xenophobia in Russia, with television the main ‘weapon’ in the armoury of Russian state propaganda.

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Running on empty down to the poll booths

Even though there are no cars passing through, the little mining town of Kamituga, on the fringes of Southern Kivu and Maniema provinces, is full of noise as soon as the sun is up. The hubbub comes from the market, where people hurry to buy cheap goods imported from China: radios and cassette players playing at full blast.

The young men who deliver the gold to Bukavu rev their gleaming motorbikes to warm them up – and to show off. And nagging away in the background, like the obstinate jingling of cow-bells, from dawn to dusk there is the steady tap tap of the mallets wielded by the women. They have replaced the machines that long ago rusted away; all day long, seven days a week, the women of Kamituga, who have given up farming and abandoned their fields on the edge of the forest, break stones brought to them by the diggers.

They reduce them to little heaps of grey dust which will then be sieved and washed until the gleaming specks appear: the much sought-after gold dust that is at once the wealth and the misery of this region. These women are paid by the diggers on whom they depend; their pay is no more than US$1 a day.

But they don’t complain, explaining that at least by staying in the town, they enjoy some level of security and are not at risk of being carried off or raped by the Interahamwe, the Rwandan Hutus still hiding in the forests of Maniema province.

But once across the parish boundary the noise of Kamituga gives way to an atmosphere of study. Beside the office of Father Jean-Claude, the parish priest, women get together several times a week with Dévote. It is not a catechism class or charity work, even though these women are often single mothers who have nothing and, just to survive, have to work at breaking stones like everybody else. The reason for the meetings is at once simple and ambitious: they want to learn to read and write as quickly as possible, explains Dévote, in order ‘to be able to do their electoral duty to the best of their abilities’.

Dévote, who works as a nurse at the nearby hospital, one that international charities seem to be unaware of and that continues to run on voluntary contributions from patients, is happy to explain what her fellow-citizens have to say. These women have no identity papers, their births were not registered and they know that if they can get themselves onto the electoral register they will be able to get identity papers.

But above all, these women have come to understand that the elections will allow them for the first time in their lives to choose who is going to govern them. That applies at every level: local, national and presidential. ‘Here, in the east,’ they stress, ‘we have known occupation, exploitation, looting. The people responsible for all our misfortunes are still there and tomorrow they will put themselves forward for election.

But we know that there will also be other candidates, people from the basic levels of society, former trade unionists, patriots, people who personified the idea of resistance. We want to be able to choose, to be able to act as observers in the polling stations and to prevent electoral fraud.’

They were already watchful when the electoral roll was being drawn up and made sure that ‘non-Congolese’ – foreigners smuggled in from Rwanda or Burundi – were not able to register as nationals. They scrupulously monitored the electoral rolls displayed outside the polling stations.

Father Jean-Claude is simultaneously running literacy courses for the women and the preparations for the elections. He has loaned the parish school premises to the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI). His optimism is based on determination: ‘In the capital Kinshasa and even more so outside this country, people underestimate the ability of the Congolese to mobilise. The people want to vote and they got organised a long time ago to make sure that this election would happen, and that means in the most remote areas as well. People also tend to forget that this ability to organise goes back a long way, all the way back to the time of Mobutu who abandoned us.’

To underline the ability of his flock to mobilise, the priest talks of the Justice and Peace groups that have been set up in all the parishes, of the constant presence of grassroots Christian communities, of ‘diaconates’ all over the country. He speaks with pride of the high level of collaboration between all the religious denominations: ‘When our Protestant neighbours were short of teaching materials we passed on to them the leaflets that Justice and Peace had given out to us, which had been printed thanks to funding from Belgium.

These little brochures explain, in a very practical way, how to go about voting and how to spot any cheating. They used them for their own educational meetings.’ The funds that support the grassroots organisations in the Congo were raised in Belgium by a campaign led by the Flemish Catholic organisation Broederlijk Delen, by Justice and Peace and by other Christian NGOs.

On the ground, the agreement between Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and the ‘revivalist churches’ – the sects that are springing up all over the country – has become a reality: all religious denominations have agreed to abstain from efforts at conversion and to devote their energies to educating their followers in readiness for the elections. An agreement of this kind is of prime importance in a country where every citizen, almost without exception, would lay claim to some kind of religious affiliation.

It seems likely that this determination on the part of grass-roots organisations will be maintained despite contradictory messages from parts of the hierarchy. Indeed, relations between the president of the CEI, Father Malu Malu, who has a powerful grass-roots following, and the bishops’ conference have been somewhat strained.

Father Malu Malu, a small man with eyes that twinkle in an expressive face, has become a central character in Congolese politics. He originates from Butembo in the Nande area of Eastern Congo. After his doctorate in political science from Grenoble University he was appointed rector of the Graben University in Butembo, an institution that is 100 per cent privately financed and regarded as the best in the region.

After his appointment as head of the CEI, he maintained his links with the grass-roots Christian communities and, working on the fringes of the state and of international organisations, can call on an impressive network of contacts at parish level. This popular power base means that he can take a philosophical attitude to any sideswipes from the episcopal crosiers.

What has actually happened is that the Congo Bishops’ Conference, under the chairmanship of Monsignor Monswengo, formerly head of the Supreme National Conference (1991-1992) and a man who has retained his taste for active politics, has remained somewhat aloof from the president of the CEI, ensuring that Malu Malu could not involve the Church as an institution.

This sort of reluctance has worried Western governments which are spending large sums to finance the electoral register and the eventual election – for the EU alone, the bill comes to US$149 million – and discreet pressure has been exerted on the Congolese hierarchy through the Vatican to persuade it not to withdraw its support from the electoral process.

The registration of 20 million electors, which took place across the country despite all the logistical problems and calls to boycott the process issued by certain parties such as the UDPS (Democratic Union for Social Progress) led by Etienne Tshisekedi, also shows the extent to which the people have managed to stand their ground, in spite of the breakdown of the Congolese state. Ordinary citizens have maintained their desire to become a nation; they have organised themselves to survive and to resist foreign aggression, and the vast majority of them are determined to go and vote. For many, their only frustration has been that they could not get to the electoral registration offices in time.

This ability of the Congolese people to organise themselves is often beyond the control of UN organisations and humanitarian teams, who are not happy about it: they would prefer to feel that they were dealing with a clean slate, starting from scratch and rebuilding from the ground up.

On the ground, for example, teams from Médecins sans Frontières turn up intending to hand out medicines and offer medical aid free of charge to an extremely poor population and find themselves clashing with the Congolese health workers. The arguments offered by both sides make sense. MSF argues that the policy of recovering health costs prevents the vast majority of the population from having access to dispensaries, whereas the ‘local’ doctors and nurses point out that the only reason why the shaky health provision, which dates from the Mobutu era, has survived in spite of there being no official support, is that the local population got into the habit of being self-supporting.

In the dispensaries and health centres, including those dependent on religious institutions, patients are asked to make a contribution, even if it is no more than symbolic. Many of these are worried that by reintroducing a free system, foreign aid will destroy this long and deeply-established sense of self-reliance.

It is true that the citizens of the Congo long ago learned to do without the state. The Mobutu regime, which had been in an economic crisis since the end of the 1970s and which was principally concerned with holding onto power and lining the pockets of its ruling class, had long since handed over ‘social care’ to foreign voluntary organisations. It was the more easily able to disregard the needs of the people since there was no free, democratic election that might hold it to account.

From the beginning of the 1990s, the regime, which was in its end phase and disgraced, was penalised by Western governments which, by withdrawing all their direct aid were, in effect, leaving the population to their own devices. After the collapse of the Mobutu regime, the Congolese suffered five years of bloody warfare and then, after the 2002 Sun City peace accords, a two-year transitional period in which social affairs were the least of the worries for their leaders, who had won their positions by force of arms.

Despite all this, and even though they sometimes have the feeling that they have been abandoned by God and Man, the Congolese have faced up to adversity. Right across the country, whether in the bush or in the townships, if you ask them, ‘How’s it going?’ their reply, clear yet evasive too, will be, ‘We’re still here. Things are going sort of OK, just sort of OK.’ You can take this to mean, ‘Times are hard but we’re hanging on, we’ve stood firm, we’re hoping that things will go better.’ In other words, they are trying to get through their difficulties.

The key to their resourcefulness is family solidarity, the support of relatives who live in the town or, better still, have managed to move abroad, from where they send back money to their relatives who have stayed behind in the country. It is impossible to put a figure on the sums transferred in this way but they far exceed international aid budgets.

Church networks have also played their part and, despite the fact that foreign priests are aging, the mission circuit has remained intact, with all that this implies: the dissemination of news, which, when re-transmitted via the Missionary Service News Agency has often been the first to expose the massacres committed in the east of the country, the possibility of collecting funds abroad, unseen networks enabling the transfer of capital, the distribution of aid outside official structures and so on.

The Congolese have also helped themselves by developing professional associations and committees of all kinds to an extraordinary extent. Even in the most remote villages, you are fooling yourself if you think that you can talk, without further introduction, to market women, to the cyclists who act as taxis (the tolekas of Kisangani) or the young people who walk around listening to their transistor radios: all of them are members of a committee or an association and will require any stranger to talk first to their ‘representative’ or their ‘chairman’. Such a person will speak on their behalf, sum up general feelings and, without further ado, will present the visitor with ‘the list of requirements’.

Whilst the Catholics, Kimbangists and Protestants have set up major support networks, which long ago replaced non-existent international aid or the bankrupt state, the so-called églises de réveil – the revivalist churches – have also become established on a huge scale. Katanga, for example, is now home to the Kitawala, a variant of the Jehovah’s Witnesses that came from Zambia; prayer groups have sprung up in large numbers throughout the country.

In the large towns it is noticeable that one of the effects of the crisis has been the disappearance of the ngandas (cafés or restaurants) and their replacement with little local churches set up with massive publicity efforts by their pastors, who have found them to be at one and the same time places for contemplation and a means of getting rich by asking for financial contributions from the faithful.

These revivalist churches are also linked to the appearance of the new phenomenon of ‘child-witches’. Families become convinced that the source of all their problems is a spell cast on them by one of their children. Sometimes the child itself is convinced that s/he has supernatural or malign powers. Breaking the spell is the job of the pastor, who is paid by the family, and it can happen that the ‘guilty’ child is thrown out of the house and joins the hordes of street children, or is taken away by the preacher, who will not hesitate to use physical violence and abuse.

This explosion of ‘cults’ and religious magic reflects the fundamental social breakdown as a result of the years of war, the flight from the countryside and the uprooting of entire populations. If the country manages to find the road to development, we can only hope that the Congolese will succeed in preserving the best of their religious practices and the ‘solidarity economy’ while getting rid of all such deviant practices.

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Chernobyl’s children struggle to live

Today is a special day for me, a happy one, I am going to a meeting with a former oncology ‘prisoner’. It is almost 15 years since we last saw each other, since the time I photographed him in the Baraŭlany clinic, one of many seriously ill boys and girls, tied to a drip-feed, bald-headed, wrapped in a padded quilt. Then he was dying of leukaemia.

‘Chernobyl children’ we used to call – and still do – the ones like this sick lad. Some of them, worn out and exhausted by illness, never went outside those walls again. But this one was more fortunate. So today I shall see a completely different person, a tall, dignified lad, full of joie-de-vivre, with sparkling eyes, good-looking, with no trace to be seen of all he has lived through. He is a student at Mahiloŭ University, a future engineer, with plenty of friends – and in love.

An ordinary lad, like many others, one of the new generation who have been given the chance to build their own future. Of course, I am happy when such meetings take place. But I am also unhappy. For in them there is a sense of my years of wandering the gloomy corridors of hospital cancer units, where children were dying in agony. By tens and hundreds.

They justify my intervention in that strange life and strange sorrow to which even their nearest were not admitted. Did I ever think, did I ever hope, that such a day would come? It is difficult for me to acknowledge this now, but at that time I had no such belief…

A smallish room with one window. Four beds, and beside each a drip-feed with bottles of fluid. Many people in the room. A child in each bed. A mother beside it. But an unnatural silence in the room. For the children, their faces pale and puffy from hormone treatment and the veins in their arms damaged by the needles, lie motionless.

The mothers watch how the drops of chemical solution run down the transparent tubes. In their bowed, exhausted figures one can see resignation and weariness. Their heads are full of frightening and heavy thoughts, and this can easily be read in their eyes – sad eyes, filled with tears. But hope, even the last hope, gives them strength. I have seen this, too, in the neighbouring ward, through the wall, and in the next one, and the one opposite. …

While in the surgical block they were starting to remove the kidney of a three-year-old boy. Children doomed to death. Doomed by something unseen and unknown. The doctors are fighting for their lives with all their ability and knowledge and the mothers hope for the best. Once I happened to be an involuntary witness to how a young mother was kissing her little daughter, not believing the doctor’s words that the little girl’s days were numbered.

This family from a remote Chernobyl village in the ill-equipped ward of an old hospital became for me a symbol of an unshakeable and insuperable faith in resisting the Chernobyl tragedy.

Strange and incomprehensible was the post-Chernobyl time in Belarus. For a full ten years, in the country which received 70 per cent of the fallout, people suffering from thyroid cancer were not recognised as victims of a nuclear catastrophe, in particular, the sick children born before or after the accident. Society still needed to assert its right to justice and truth. And it asserted it with patience and suffering.

Nothing was said about other illnesses. Oncology units were full to overflowing. Today we are a little more experienced and are not afraid to speak of the adverse effect of radiation on people’s heath. But at that time, the Chernobyl factor was deliberately ignored. But a threat existed – not only to the individual victims, but to an entire generation. And the first innocent victims of this war were the children. How could one feel this, see this and then pretend that nothing had happened?

Even today, 20 years on, the Belarusian Thyroid Cancer Centre, set up shortly after the Chernobyl accident is full of patients, adults and children. The director and founder of the Centre, Doctor Jaŭhien Dziamidčyk, is one of the first in Belarus to warn people on the harmful effect of the Chernobyl fallout on human health. In Belarus in the period following the accident, the number of children suffering from thyroid cancer rose 50-fold. In the 13 years before the accident only eight such cases were recorded in Belarus, in the next 13 years there were 726. As before, those who fell ill were mainly young people up to 35 years old.

Nadzieja Klimovic was born two years after the Chernobyl catastrophe. In her seventh year, the doctors diagnosed her as suffering from cerebral oedema and she was admitted to the haematology unit in Minsk to which children diagnosed with leukaemia were sent from all over Belarus. The treatment was long and difficult: for a whole year she was confined to a hospital bed.

Here, for the first time and before she could read and write, she heard strange and incomprehensible words – Chernobyl, radiation, strontium, thyroid gland, puncture, biopsy, cancer, chemotherapy, intensive care. Her mother was constantly at her side. But for some reason, she did not want to explain to the little girl what these words meant. Nor did she tell her why Nasta, her neighbour in the ward, ‘went home’ without saying goodbye. Just the day before she had been playing with her in the long corridor, swapping dolls, and she had said nothing. And Vitalik, in the next room, who was just her age, also vanished somewhere. They took him away one evening on a gurney and she never saw him again.

But she did see Nasta’s Mummy; she was crying and burying her face in her hands. This upset Nadzieja very much and she clung to her own Mummy. And Mummy’s presence helped the little girl get better more quickly. And they went home together happily – there was no tumour or metastasis, the analyses were good. They were dreaming that at last Nadzieja would cross the threshold of the school.

There were joyful encounters with the world outside, with home, and relatives. But their joy was short-lived: soon there was a recurrence of the disease, her condition deteriorated sharply and once again an urgent journey to Minsk. The familiar hospital, the intensive care unit. Only this time the doctors’ efforts were in vain.

Nadzieja’s death was one more on the list of the oncology victims and made me even more aware that we are living in a country of dying children. Many more, just like Nadzieja, will become sacrifices to modern civilization. And this thought alone is terrifying. For no one knows if their son or daughter will be next. I could not but attend Nadzieja’s farewell, I had no moral right not to go. I had become her friend, and while she was undergoing treatment, I had photographed her many times.

I did this in the certainty that this little girl must get better, that she would grow up interesting and pretty, and would have a happy destiny. And I looked forward to taking more photographs to bear witness to her happy path through life. The doctors often called Nadzieja a photo-model and the trusting little patient gratefully responded to the smiles of the people in white coats as a sign of hope in her rapid recovery.

Often she did not understand her mother’s tears when the doctors said such nice things to her! But nothing could save this little girl, not the profound symbolism of her name, which means ‘Hope’, not her parents’ prayers, not radiotherapy, not chemotherapy. No miracle happened. And the terrible illness once again confirmed its essential nature: that it cannot be cured.

Often I felt a desire to finish all this. And at this time, especially, I wanted to take my camera away far beyond the walls of this oncology clinic and to weep like a sick man myself. But I knew that Nadzieja’s death must not stop the course of this sad chronicle. I had to tell the world what my country was being forced to endure because of the disaster at this shoddily built nuclear station.

And so I went back to Baraŭlany, to the Oncology Centre, which by now had become known throughout Europe. The Centre where pain and death intersect and coexist in some strange way with hope and rescue. Every year, some 300 children with various oncological diseases of the blood and body pass through Baraŭlany. Not all of them are destined to survive; not all of them have equal chances, but every one of them has the chance to strive, take the risk and try.

This is, as it were, the site of an uninterrupted struggle, sometimes unpromising, hopeless and with no result. But while a mother believes, hopes and prays, this unequal struggle will continue. I should like to put up a monument to the Chernobyl mother, who so heroically treads this via dolorosa beside her mortally sick children.

Meanwhile in Belarus, almost 2 million people, including half-a-million children, still live in the areas contaminated by radioactive fallout. In the affected counties, the public health registers testify that the incidence of endocrine disorders and diseases of the nervous system has doubled. Diseases of the respiratory system are up by 76 per cent, of the alimentary organs by 79 per cent, congenital defects are up 80 per cent, oncological illnesses by 27 per cent and thyroid cancers by 30 per cent.

For 38 specific diseases the child morbidity rate has increased; child mortality generally has trebled. Population growth in Belarus has been halted. Of course, the aftermath of Chernobyl is not the only factor responsible for these gloomy indices, but radiation has been the catalyst.

No one can now remember exactly when the first premonition of this great sorrow entered the home of 11-year-old Natasha. It was certainly not when the little girl’s leg began to grow more and more painful: in a big peasant family no one pays much attention to childish complaints. Nor was it when the pain made it impossible for her to sleep at nights.

They thought: this is temporary, it will pass. They took her to the provincial hospital, and – just in case – she was put in plaster. Maybe it was then she began to feel frightened and felt trouble coming when her nine-year old neighbour died of leucosis. Only in the Minsk accident and emergency hospital did her mother suddenly experience the shock of hearing where they were sending her daughter. For who in Belarus has not heard of Baraŭlany? And there they reached the terrible diagnosis. Cancer.

If they had amputated her leg straightaway, maybe today there would be no regrets. But what mother would not take the risk, would not struggle to the end? Two years went by with the hard struggle for survival, full of suffering, grief and tears. And the oncologists did everything possible.They used chemotheraty and radiotherapy, they operated on the liver and lungs to destroy the metastases, and in place of the diseased sections of leg-bone they implanted a plastic brace. Perhaps an operation abroad, where medicine is at a significantly higher level, would have helped, but who is there to help simple, penniless peasants. Amputation of the little girl’s leg was unavoidable.

And now? Natasha is a different person. In a certain sense, a new and free one. She learned to walk again with prosthesis and to swim and ride a bicycle. To go to school again, help in the house, look after the younger ones. She is not only reconciled to her condition but has accepted it as part of her life. And only rarely now does a look of sadness appear on her face.

But her earlier fear of the unknown future remains insurmountable, for she knows literally everything about her illness. And not only from the five years she spent in Baraŭlany. How could she not be aware that recently in her own fairly small village several people have died of cancer? And who can tell her what is happening to her and the rest of them now? She knows only that there was nothing like this before Chernobyl. On the collective farm in another village the whole herd of milch-cows went down with leucosis. And their calves, too, are born with it.

I have long since ceased to ask myself what point there is in this terrible chronicle of children’s suffering and deaths, whether it is worth continuing or whether enough has been said, written and done about it already. When these questions first came to me, I wondered if it would be right to ‘change course’; enough sadness. But our society is strange. Many people already consider the Chernobyl catastrophe belongs to the past. After all, the inhabitants of the contaminated areas areas have been resettled, so why go on worrying and spending unending sums of money? That is well-known. But somehow it seems to me that these people have not come into contact with the sorrow that has consumed thousands of children and their parents.

Twenty years after, it is no longer so urgent to seek Chernobyl in the evacuated zone, long-since robbed by looters and blackened by fires. But Chernobyl lives on in our bodies, blood and bones; research on the Chernobyl problem should be directed first and foremost at the physical state of the population: at the health of individuals and of the nation as a whole. The uninhabited zone, like it or not, will demand our attention for a long time yet. I go there from time to time seeking strange, exotic, sharp sentiments.

The Zone remains a symbol of this greatest of catastrophes. But not the main one, not the principal one. It is, indeed, a visible part of the tragedy. But there is another one, one with a face and and a future that are not apparent to everyone.

And I know that I am seeking for that invisible wall that separates us, the healthy and happy, who know neither sorrow nor suffering, and those who have already reached the very edge of the fatal borne. And what do I want to say in the photographs of these child patients and of medical research establishments?

And why, for so many years, have I read in mothers’ eyes the reproach that I am, so to speak, ‘recording’ their children and felt I was guilty? No one ever forced me to do this, no one asked, and certainly no one planned it – no one has forbidden it. Why is it so important to know this, to see and to photograph, to show others?

The photographs taken in oncology units, cannot leave one unmoved: they arouse anxiety and alarm and trigger many new, complex questions, one of which cannot go unasked: is this Chernobyl? Even two decades has proved too short a time to answer exactly what it is that is happening to us, and what awaits in the future. Where are the limits to Chernobyl in space and time?

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The corrosive evil of a forgotten war

Just before my last trip to Chechnya in mid-September (2002) my colleagues at Novaya Gazeta began to receive threats and were told to pass on the message that I shouldn’t go to Chechnya any more. If I did, my life would be in danger.

As always, our paper has its ‘own people’ on the general staff and the ministry of defence - people who broadly share our views. We spoke to people at the ministry but, despite their advice, I did go back to Chechnya, only to find myself blockaded in the capital, Grozny.

The city was sealed off after a series of strange events. Controls were so tight you couldn’t even move between different districts within the city, let alone make your way out of Grozny on foot.

On that day, 17 September, a helicopter carrying a commission headed by Major-General Anatoly Pozdnyakov from the general staff in Moscow was shot down directly over the city. He was engaged in work quite unprecedented for a soldier in Chechnya.

Only an hour before the helicopter was shot down, he told me the task of his commission was to gather data on crimes committed by the military, analyse their findings, put them in some order and submit the information for the president’s consideration. Nothing of the kind had been done before.

Their helicopter was shot down almost exactly over the city centre. All the members of the commission perished and, since they were already on their way to Khankala airbase to take a plane back to Moscow, so did all the material they had collected. That part of the story was published by Novaya Gazeta.

Before the 19 September issue was sent to the printers, our chief editor Dmitry Muratov was summoned to the ministry of defence (or so I understand) and asked to explain how on earth such allegations could be made. He gave them an answer, after which the pressure really began. There should be no publication, he was told.

Nevertheless, he decided to go ahead, publishing a very truncated version of what I had written. At that point, the same people at the ministry who had claimed our report was false now conceded it was true.

But they began to warn of new threats: they had learned that certain people had run out of patience with my articles. It was, in other words, the same kind of conversation as before my last trip to Chechnya.

Then we heard that a particular officer, a ‘Lieutenant Larin’, whom I had described in print as a war criminal, was sending letters to the newspaper and similar notes to the ministry. The deaths and torture of several people lie on his conscience and the evidence against him is incontrovertible.

Soon there were warnings that I’d better stay at home. Meanwhile, the internal affairs ministry would track down and arrest this self-appointed military hitman, and deputy minister (Vladimir) Vasilyev would himself take charge of the operation. I was supposed to remain at our apartment and go nowhere.

But they made no progress in finding ‘Larin’, and I began to realise that this was simply another way of forcing me to stop work. The newspaper decided I should leave the country until the editors were sure I could again live a normal life and resume my work.

The paper was forced to omit from my story the sort of detail that is vital to the credibility of an article like this, which suggested the military themselves had downed the helicopter.

All my subsequent difficulties began with those details. If these details surface, the ministry of defence warned our chief editor, that’s the end for you . . . In fact, since I was moving around the city at the time, I can personally testify to what happened, as can others who were there with me.

And these were no ordinary citizens: among them were Chechen policemen and Grozny Energy Company employees who, like me, were trapped inside the city. FSB (former KGB) General Platonov was also there. Currently, he is a deputy to Anatoly Chubais, chief executive of United Energy Systems, a key Kremlin player throughout the 1990s and a hawk on Chechnya.

All these saw and knew exactly what I know. Platonov is not only Chubais’s deputy but remains a deputy to FSB director Patrushev (in early 2001, the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in Chechnya was transferred from the military command of the Combined Forces Group to the FSB and its director Patrushev in Moscow placed in overall charge).

No one else saw and knew as much about what happened as Platonov - he couldn’t help but see it. Not one person was allowed into the city centre after 9.00 am that morning. And yet a helicopter was downed there. Different branches of the military are split over future policy in Chechnya.

There are good reasons why the recent public statements of defence ministry spokesmen all repeat the same phrases: ‘We deny the possibility of negotiations’; ‘It’s out of the question’;

“We are just doing our job.” Indeed they are: their ‘sweep and cleanse’ operations have become even more brutal. Let us suppose that those representing certain other branches of the military on the ground in Chechnya are pursuing a rather different policy.

That is where you should seek the reason for the deaths of all the commission members. I’m just a small cog in that machine - someone who happened to be in the thick of events when no other journalists were around.

Those who want to continue fighting seem to have the upper hand; they represent the more powerful section within the so-called CFG, the Combined Forces Group.

To avoid repetition of the disastrous lack of coordination between ministries of defence and internal affairs and the FSB during the first Chechen conflict in 1994-96, overall command of army, police and other paramilitary and special units in the present war was given to the military.

Although the FSB supposedly now exercise overall control of the ‘anti-terrorist operation’, the military are too strong for them. On the fateful day the helicopter was downed and the commission perished, not even servicemen and officers were permitted to enter the central, cordoned-off area of Grozny.

Only defence ministry officials were allowed through. Even FSB and ministry of justice people were kept out; that was extraordinary. No one was permitted to enter the area where the helicopter was about to fall: representatives of other military bodies and organisations, even ranking officers, had no right to go there.

I don’t think we should expect too much from the defence ministry, nor from President Putin (in the light of the US-led campaign in Afghanistan. Editor). He has received carte blanche to take the measures and employ the forces he considers necessary in Chechnya.

I’m thinking of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent activities and words spoken by Chancellor Schroeder when Putin was visiting Germany. As you know, it was then said that Europe should re-examine its stance on Chechnya.

Their position was already pretty feeble and bore no relation to the real state of affairs in Chechnya and the abuse of human rights there. If, however, they are going to alter their position, then it’s clear what will happen. In practical terms they’ll support Putin.

Whatever he does will be fine by them. I think he’s been working steadily and persistently towards that end for some time. And I’m sure he’ll make good use of it now. Not for the first time in the present war, there’s been a battle to see whose nerve is stronger.

Putin held back (over the West’s post 9/11 War on Terror) for some while: we shan’t support the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, he said, but we’ll offer them back-up. Then he agreed to supply them with arms and, evidently, advisers. In exchange he received a free hand in Chechnya.

That’s the way things are likely to go, I’m afraid. I can’t say when it will happen, but whatever happens there will be a more intensive ‘liquidation of Chechen partisans’. As always in Russia, however, it all depends on the methods to be used. What will the ‘liquidation of Chechen bandits’ amount to this time?

Will they herd everyone else into concentration camps or hold repeated sweep operations in all the population centres in Chechnya? I can’t answer for Chechen President Maskhadov, but will offer a brief analysis of his actions.

In my view, he is doing nothing whatsoever. He has retreated into his shell and is thinking, to the exclusion of all else, about his own immediate future - he’s forgotten the Chechen nation. Just as the federal authorities in Moscow have abandoned the Chechens, so now have the other side.

The nation has to fend for itself, with no leadership or protection. It survives as best it can. If people need to take revenge for their tortured and murdered relatives, they will. If they need to say nothing, they’ll keep their mouths shut.

In such circumstances, which are the equivalent of a civil war, and under continuing pressure from the federal forces, no one today can say whom the Chechen nation would vote for if elections were held. No one now has any idea whom they’d elect and in that respect everyone has committed the same enormous mistake.

Maskhadov has obviously been driven into a corner. But the struggle for independence has become an obsession with him: he will hear of nothing else. I don’t really understand what use independence will be to him, when he, Shamil Basayev and his immediate bodyguard are all that’s left.

The first duty of a president is to fight for the well-being of his nation. I have my own president and it makes no difference that I personally did not vote for Putin. He remains the most important figure in the Russian state.

And I’d like him to enable me, and everyone else, to live a normal life. I’m referring to the laws that should govern our existence. I find myself in a situation, however, where no one gives a damn how I survive.

I’m cut off from my family. I don’t know what will happen in the future to my two children. It is not law that rules Russia today. There’s no person and no organisation to which you can turn and be certain that the laws have any force.

I have no thoughts about my future. And that’s the worst of all. I just want everything to change so I can go back and live in Moscow again.

I can’t imagine spending any length of time here. Or in any other place, for that matter. I must do all in my power to return to Moscow. But I have no idea when that will be. If people in my country have no protection from this lawless regime, that means I survive here while others are dying.

Over the last year I’ve been in that position too often. People who were my witnesses and informants in Chechnya have died for that reason, and that reason alone, as soon as I left their homes.

If it again proves the case, then how can I go on living abroad while others are dying in my place?

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