Three months before the start of the Syrian revolution in March last year, Ali Ferzat broke with his own satirical convention: he stopped using symbolism in his cartoons to criticise the regime and began to target identifiable individuals, including the president himself. He describes the shift as pushing through “the barrier of fear”. The first cartoon in Ferzat’s new series showed President Bashar al Assad agitated at seeing the traditional day of mass demonstrations against the regime, Friday, marked on a wall calendar. Another had him hitching a lift from Gaddafi making his own getaway in a car. The third featured the “chair of power”, one of Ali Ferzat’s iconic symbols, with the springs popping out of the cushion and Bashar hanging onto its arm.

Drawing the president, Ferzat admits, was a personal and political breakthrough — if not foolhardy. “It is quite suicidal to draw someone who is considered a godlike figure for the regime and the Ba’ath party, but still I did it and people respected that courage and started carrying banners with caricatures in the protest to show how they feel about things.”

Ferzat must have anticipated that his actions might lead to violent repercussions. Last August, pro-regime forces viciously assaulted him and broke both his hands. During the attack, one of the assailants yelled at him, “Bashar’s shoe is better than you.” Article 376 of the Syrian penal code makes it an offence to insult or defame the president, and carries a six-month to three-year prison sentence.

The most lauded cartoonist of the Arab spring, Ferzat has won countless international prizes — including this year’s Index Freedom of Expression Award for the Arts. For more than 40 years, he has been delivering his own scathing messages to dictatorship. Published daily in al Thawra (the Revolution) newspaper in Damascus for a decade, he was a thorn in the side of Hafez al Assad. In the early noughties, the launch of his satirical newspaper al Doumari (the Lamplighter) was considered a hopeful sign in the nascent presidency of Hafez’s heir. Last December, when Bashar al Assad was asked about the attack on Ali Ferzat by the American news commentator Barbara Walters, he responded, “Many people criticise me. Did they kill all of them? Who killed who?’”  Such comments made little sense and attest to Ferzat’s power, whether convalescing in a hospital bed or through his drawings.

There are two cartoons by Ferzat embedded in my own visual consciousness of Syria during years of visiting and writing about the country. The first is a drawing of a man whose head has been sliced and popped open at the airport. Instead of searching the luggage on the rack, a uniformed authority figure inspects the contents of the man’s brain. The other is of a dismembered prisoner hanging in a cell, body parts everywhere, while the jailer sits on the floor, sharp implements to hand, crying over a television soap opera. Both of them were a comment on the secret life that routinely takes place in Syria, the self-censorship that is sometimes needed to survive and the ongoing activities inside prisons that are rarely officially acknowledged in the state media.

Speaking the truth

In a recent exhibition of Ali Ferzat’s work at the MICA gallery in London, there were numerous examples of his coded messages: the armchair of salat (representing ruling power), the shortened ladder to suggest the gulf between the political elite and the nobodies (sometimes in a hole) or the ever busy authority figure waving a roll of toilet paper like a flag. The messages are inescapably clear but their target is not always what one might expect. In one colourful drawing, a man is trying to pluck fruit from a tree, but the three ladders on which he is standing have been laid horizontally, not vertically. Pausing beneath this picture, Ferzat points out: “Yes, I always speak truth to power. Sometimes it’s not only the president to be blamed but the people too.” The gallery, usually closed at the weekend, was filled with Syrians and their families within minutes of its unscheduled opening. Everyone, from grown men to children of all ages, photographed the cartoons on the walls with their mobile phones.

Ferzat’s unique visual vocabulary, developed in extreme circumstances, has had an unexpected reach:

To survive and get around censorship, my caricatures had to be speechless and rely instead on symbols. That gave them an international aspect I did not intend in the first place. So I managed to get the voice of people inside Syria to the outside, through channels of common human interest.

During his stay in London in the spring, Ferzat received good news. There is an interest in reviving al Doumari, with plans to publish it in exile in Dubai and, ultimately, hopefully back home as well. One gets the impression that no matter where Ferzat is — he currently resides in Kuwait because his family thinks it is too dangerous for him to be in Damascus — living away from the revolution has been frustrating. He spends most nights watching the Arabic news channels and drawing until the early hours. His right hand, which was fractured in the attack last summer, remains a little stiff, although that is not evident in the first two cartoons he drew when he was able to move his fingers. One shows an armoured Trojan warhorse with marauding tanks for hooves. The second is, again, a tank poised on its back wheels, ready to crush a lone green shoot sprouting from the ground.

False springs

The Syrian people are a major influence on his work. “Drawing is first of all a means and not a purpose in itself,” he says.

The artist is always the one who produces an idea, but if that person is not living within his community then how can he reflect what his community is going through? Art is about being with your own people and having a vision of what they need. You can’t sit in your room isolated behind your window and draw about life — it doesn’t work like that.

The revolution was sparked in March 2011 when young graffiti artists in Deraa, between the ages of nine and 15, were arrested and tortured for writing government slogans on the walls. The sale of spray paint is now banned in Syria unless ID papers are shown.

There have been many false springs in the country’s turbulent political history. A decade ago, and just a few months after Bashar al Assad assumed the presidency, Syrian artists and intellectuals were hopeful that change was possible in their country, a sentiment that began in Ferzat’s case when Bashar al Assad, a “tall dude with a large entourage”, walked into his exhibition filled with censored cartoons. (Ferzat always shows banned cartoons in his exhibitions.) When the new president asked Ferzat how he might be able to gauge popular opinion, the cartoonist urged him to simply talk to the people. Eventually Bashar telephoned him and said he was having a Pepsi with ordinary folk in the street. This was during the so-called Damascus spring of the early noughties, when the regime was courting artists and intellectuals. Imbued by optimism in 2001, Ferzat started his satirical newspaper al Doumari, but as the mood of the political elite reverted to tried and trusted methods, so did the fortunes of his weekly. By the time it closed in 2003, 105 issues later, he had survived two assassination attempts that were never investigated. Thirty-two court cases had been filed against the newspaper and advertisers had stopped advertising.

An incredible heritage: satire in the Middle East

Historically, cartoonists have been astute in their circumvention of censorship. As Fatma Müge Göçek has shown, under the Ottoman press laws of the early 1900s, they sent erasable drawings to the censors and, after approval, substituted other images in their place. Newspapers at that time also appeared with black boxes where a cartoon had been censored. As the gap widened between official pronouncements and reality – or as Václav Havel once said, ‘People know they are living a lie’ – caricatures became an important means of expression in the Middle East. Now cyberspace provides a comparatively safe haven for pictures and ideas that cannot be expressed in print.

Editorial cartooning, like journalism, is considered a western invention, but the convention of satire in the Middle East is as old as the stories of Alf Laila wa Laila (A Thousand and One Nights). Ferzat’s peers include the Egyptian Baghat Othman, who parodied Sadat, Palestinian Naji al Ali, creator of the Palestinian barefoot boy Hanzala (with his back always to the reader in rejection of the world around him) and Algerian Chawki Amari, now in exile in Paris after serving a three-year sentence in his country for drawing the country’s flags in a cartoon that was seen as ‘defacing’ a national symbol. The Syrians also bring something new to the mix, which springs from a sense of humour coloured by the experience of dictatorship, coupled with sexual innuendo. This blend is nicely demonstrated by a joke from the 1980s that is still pertinent, as recently told to me by a political activist.

A guy used to talk about the president. The mukhabarat, secret police, picked him up and started beating and torturing him. They told him, ‘Stop making jokes about the president. Stop talking about the president. You can tackle whatever issues you want, but in the end you always have to say: this has nothing to do with the president. The president is not aware of this.’ So the minute the guy is released, he sees his family waiting by the door and says, ‘Have you heard, the wife of the president is pregnant and the president has nothing to do with it. He’s not even aware of it.’

Even in his comic strips for juveniles, Ferzat has challenged traditional sensibilities in Syria, a country known for channelling propaganda through state-sponsored children’s publications. Ferzat was 26 years old when he created ‘The Travels of Ibn Battuta” for the popular Usama magazine, published in 1977. In the strip, the famous medieval Arab traveller Ibn Battuta is depicted with a moustache and beard, wearing a turban in the shape of the globe. Ferzat demystifies Ibn Battuta by drawing Muhammad Ali, Omar Sharif and the pop singer Abdel Halim Hafiz, with a turban globe on their heads; as avatars of Ibn Battuta, they respectively box, hug a leading lady and sing. Later in the strip, as the historic traveller pulls his donkey into the present day, his size shrinks, suggesting he is overwhelmed by modern life.

A letter sent to the editor of Usama complained about this portrayal of Ibn Battuta. Ferzat did not use one of the traditional Arab figures of ridicule such as the poet Abu Nuwas or the folk character Juha as his fumbling protagonist, but instead a notable historical personage, which the letter writer found highly insulting. This was at a time when the magazine was already starting to change, and was publishing less controversial material, as Allen Douglas and Fedwa Malti-Douglas show in their study of Arabic comic strips.

Self censorship, survival and living without boundaries

Originally from a Sunni Muslim family in Homs, Ferzat describes freedom of the press as “a responsibility”. He stresses:

It’s not as if I should do whatever I feel like doing, regardless of the consequences. It is a matter of moral commitment at the end of the day and varies between countries, depending on the culture and civil liberties. You have to find the right balance. Some newspapers have no obligation, not even morally, and they refrain from nothing and then call it ‘freedom’. Meanwhile other newspapers censor human interest stories. I see both as bad — whether too much suppression in the name of commitment, or too much unethical commitment in the name of freedom. They are both the same.

During prolonged periods of dictatorship, there have been unexpected chinks in the wall of silence, which Lisa Weeden outlines in her tour de force Ambiguities of Domination. One way ordinary Syrians thwarted the cult of Hafez al Assad that pervaded their daily lives was in their choice of newspapers. Throughout the 1970s, al Thawra published a daily editorial cartoon by Ferzat. When he was dropped from the newspaper, al Thawra experienced a 35 per cent drop in sales and was forced to ask the cartoonist to return. Ferzat’s stories about his days there are particularly amusing and they reveal just how much leeway can exist in what at first glance appears to be a monolithic system. In some instances, the offending cartoon would be published in the paper. Then the abusive phone calls from the minister of information would begin.

Ferzat continues:

They came with this new procedure. First the editor-in-chief had to look at the caricature. If he approved it, he had to send it to the general manager. If he approved it, or if he found it controversial and difficult to understand, he had to send it to the minister of information. Take into consideration that the minister of information was a bit of an ass, he would say ‘Yes’ because he didn’t understand it and the next day the people would get the meaning because it only took commonsense. Suddenly the angry phone calls would start all over again.

According to Italian visual critic Donatella Della Ratta, Bashar al Assad’s Syria is ruled by what she calls “a whispering campaign” waged by competing elites, the secret police, the official media and finally the president and his inner circle. All of the different factions are involved in censorship: it takes many pillars of society to control the flow of information and ideas in a totalitarian state.

In such a society, what is the difference between self-censorship and survival for someone like Ferzat? “What I can tell you is that I have no boundaries,” he says.

I don’t have a censor or a policeman in my head before I draw. However, it is not requested of fedayeen — freedom fighters — to be suicidal. As an artist, I’m not going to go and find a landmine and sit on top of it. I invented the symbols that actually manipulate the censor and survive the dangers of punishment. I put simple codes and symbols in my drawings, and anyone who has the capacity to notice things would understand them. That is what I do to secure myself and not be suicidal.

He concludes: “At the end of the day, my drawings and caricatures are part of the daily culture of the street. I want to represent the consciousness of the street, of the people, and I do, and that gives my work value.”

As Ferzat and the graffiti artists of Deraa, who sparked a revolution over a year ago, have shown: Sharpie pens and spray paint can be the most effective tools against a brutal regime.

Malu Halasa is a writer and editor. Her books include The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie (Chronicle Books)

This article appears in the new edition of Index on Censorship. Click on The Sports Issue for subscription options and more

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In February 1663, the London printer John Twyn waited in Newgate prison for his execution, the unique horror of being hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the place known today as Marble Arch. This medieval agony was the recently restored monarch King Charles II’s terrifying lesson to his subjects: do not write, or print, treason against the state.

Even more cruel, Twyn’s offence was merely to have printed an anonymous pamphlet justifying the people’s right to rebellion, “mettlesome stuff” according to the state censor (the King’s Surveyor of the Press). No one suggested that Twyn had written this treason, only that he had transformed it from manuscript to print. Perhaps he hadn’t even read it. Never mind: he was sentenced to death.

Pressed both to admit his offence and reveal the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author (and thereby save his own life), Twyn refused. In words of breathtaking courage that echo down the centuries, he told the prison chaplain that “it was not his principle to betray the Author”. Shortly afterwards, Twyn went to his doom. His head was placed on a spike over Ludgate, and his dismembered body distributed round other city gates.

Words can be weapons, and the pen challenges the sword. Writers, and printers, “the troublers of the poor world’s peace”, in Shakespeare’s phrase, have always seemed a danger to the state. Across Europe, for the first three centuries of the printing press, questions of religion and politics were usually settled by the authorities of the day with rare and explicit savagery. As John Mullan has shown in his excellent monograph Anonymity, the safest course for the dissident writer was a pseudonymous or anonymous cloak of identity.

Eventually, the Romantic assertion of the heroic individual’s place in the world at the beginning of the 19th century ended this prudent convention, but slowly. The scandalous first two Cantos of Don Juan were printed without naming either Lord Byron or his publisher, John Murray. Despite the risks, the poet soon found fame irresistible. “Own that I am the author,” he instructed Murray, “I will never shrink.” By the reign of the fourth George, Britain’s liberal democracy was never likely to eviscerate, hang or decapitate a transgressive writer, though some terrible penalties did remain on the statute book for decades to come.

Abroad in Europe, as repressive states, notably Tsarist Russia, grew harsher, the fate of writers worsened, but hardly varied. The essential predicament was unchanged from John Twyn’s day. Putting black on white, words on the page, as accurately and truthfully as one could, would never fail to make trouble with vested interests, arterio-sclerotic authorities and evil despotisms. Dostoevsky was marched before a firing squad, but reprieved. The distinguished list of writers, before the Cold War, who died for their art includes Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel, possibly the greatest loss of all.

Writers and despotic regimes

By the middle of the 20th century there was, in the words of Graham Greene, a fairly general recognition that “it had always been in the interests of the State to poison the psychological wells, to encourage cat-calls, to restrict human sympathy. It makes government easier when people shout Gallilean, Papist, Fascist, Communist.” In the same essay, on “the virtues of disloyalty”, Greene expressed the writer’s credo in an age of growing state control. “The writer is driven by his own vocation,” he said, “to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state.” Greene concludes this celebration of opposition by quoting Tom Paine: “We must guard even our enemies against injustice.”

Confronted by the intractable collision of the creative individual of fiery conscience with the frozen monolith of the powers that be, there is one essential question: What Is to Be Done? In 1968, the poet Stephen Spender, sickened and dismayed by reports of literary repression in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil and South Africa (as well as several recently decolonised African states), responded to the spirit of a revolutionary year. He decided to organise a fight-back, setting the pen against the sword, based in London.

George Orwell had already pointed out, in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature”, that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes, but the despotisms of the past were not totalitarian”. In fact, it was the totalitarian regime of the USSR, and its trial of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, that proved the tipping-point for Spender. He was joined by Pavel Litvinov, the Soviet scientist, dissident and human rights activist, who wrote an open letter asking if it might not be possible to form in England an organisation of intellectuals who would make it their business to publish information about what was happening to their censored, suppressed and imprisoned colleagues abroad. Litvinov was inspired by the fates of fellow Russians, but he insisted that such an organisation should operate internationally and not just concern itself with victims of Soviet oppression, though their plight was possibly the worst in those dark days of the Cold War.

Spender, who was exceedingly well-connected, organised a telegram of support in response to Litvinov’s appeal, signed by an awesome roll-call of the great: Cecil Day-Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, WH Auden, Henry Moore, AJ Ayer, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, Mary McCarthy, JB Priestley and his wife Jacquetta Hawkes, Paul Scofield, Igor Stravinsky, Stuart Hampshire, Maurice Bowra and George Orwell’s widow, Sonia. These, and subsequently many others, declared they would “help in any way possible”.

This initiative led, in turn, to the formation of the Council of WSI (Writers and Scholars International), whose founding members included David Astor, editor of the Observer, Elizabeth Longford, Roland Penrose, Louis Blom-Cooper and Spender himself. Index on Censorship was born when Michael Scammell, an expert on Russia, came up with the idea of founding a magazine. Thus was the ongoing battle for ‘intellectual freedom’ moved onto new terrain best suited to writers and scholars — the printed word published in a little magazine. Soon, the advantages and benefits of fighting oppression from a dedicated bastion of free expression became obvious to both sides, free and unfree alike.

A clarion voice in the fight for free speech

Index, whose first issue appeared in 1972, declared that its aim was to “record and analyse all forms of inroads into freedom of expression”. Further, it would “examine the censorship
situation in individual countries” and would publish “censored material in the journal”. In the long and bloody history of the fight for intellectual freedom there had been many impassioned statements of principle about the writer’s role as a piece of grit in the engine of the state. No one, however, had ever thought to jam a whole toolbox into the machinery of power, and place a fully-funded institution (such as WSI) in direct opposition to the repressive intentions of despotic regimes. This was the unique and historic importance of Index. But its success was not a foregone conclusion. Spender, its founder, was fully alert to the potential for windbaggery and failure inherent in such a venture. There was, he wrote, “the risk that the magazine will become simply a bulletin of frustration”.

Actually, the opposite came to pass. Index became a clarion voice in the cause of free expression. The abuses of freedom worldwide in the 1970s were so appalling and so widespread that the magazine rapidly found itself in the frontline of campaigns against repression and censorship in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Latin America and South Africa. Alongside Amnesty International and the PEN Club, Index gave vivid expression to the truth that “censorship” today takes many cruel forms: writers who are sent to labour camps, or blackmailed by threats to their families, or harassed into silence and isolation.

Perhaps the most important thing Index did, from the beginning, was to universalise an issue that was in peril of becoming a special interest: freedom was not “a luxury enjoyed by bourgeois individualists”. Along with self-expression, it was a human right, and an instrument of human consciousness that should be fought for worldwide.

Historically, the classic polemical statement against censorship, John Milton’s Areopagitica, a pamphlet against the Licensing Order of 1643, had focused on the English Parliament’s threat to a free press. Milton, writing in the midst of Civil War, was less worried about blood than ink: “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image,” he writes, “but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.” Three centuries later, Index would concern itself with both the breath of the oppressed writer but also the lifeblood of liberty, namely, free expression.

In an astonishingly short time, barely a generation, from 1972 to 1989, the magazine established itself as a force to be reckoned with. At first, it took up the issue that had inspired its beginnings: Soviet oppression. In defence of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Index published part of a long, autobiographical poem, “God Keep Me from Going Mad”, composed in 1950-53 while Solzhenitsyn was serving a sentence in a labour camp in North Kazakhstan, the setting for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This was followed by a scoop in 1973, the unexpurgated text of an interview Solzhenitsyn had given to AP and Le Monde in which the writer revealed that “preparations are being made to have me killed in a motor accident”.

Václav Havel, Solzhenitsyn and the Iron Curtain

The importance of this document, one of the writer’s very rare accounts of his predicament, is that it described in horrifying and particular detail the true nature of the Soviet regime’s campaign against him, especially the constant surveillance and the unrelenting menace of the state’s agents. Solzhenitsyn was also able to draw attention to the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. In the bleakest depths of the Cold War, taking up the cause of Russia’s dissident community made the difference between international recognition and utter oblivion.

As the magazine grew in confidence, it began to focus on other, related injustices behind the Iron Curtain, notably in Czechoslovakia (as it was). It was among the first to publish the banned playwright Václav Havel in English. In 1976, a retrospective on Czechoslovakia eight years after the Soviet invasion of Prague described how Havel was being “constantly harassed and persecuted by the authorities”, the beginning (as it turned out) of a long assault on Havel’s liberty.

When Charter 77 was formed the following year, Index became a vital link in the chain of communication between the samizdat literary community in Prague and the wider world. The exiled Czech journalist George Theiner, who succeeded Michael Scammell as editor, strengthened this link. Context and continuity, the steady accumulation of a body of work and opinion, are vital ingredients in any effective campaign on behalf of oppressed writers. Index now provided both a sober and authoritative framework for its protest and also, through the office in London, a team of journalists dedicated to monitoring the devious and sinister machinations of oppressive regimes worldwide.

In the 1980s, the magazine spread its wings. There were exposés of repression in Latin America and persecution in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria). Roa Bastos, who had suffered so badly in Paraguay, found a new champion. Nadine Gordimer, who had supported Index from the beginning, published a story about the romantic dilemmas of a secret policeman in South Africa. In Europe, Samuel Beckett became so engaged with the plight of Václav Havel that he dedicated a short play, “Catastrophe”, to his fellow playwright and allowed Index to publish it in its pages, another notable scoop. By the end of the 1980s, the idea of standing up for the abstract idea of ‘intellectual freedom’ by reporting censorship and publishing banned writing had become a recognised part of the common discourse within the libertarian community.

The influence of Index on the literary world has been at once subtle and impossible to overstate. In my mind, there is no doubt that its example became an inspiration to those British publishers, like Faber, Penguin and Picador, who (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) published banned or oppressed writers such as Milan Kundera, Václav Havel and Josef Skvorecky. The literature that came from behind the Iron Curtain added a new dimension to the reading of the West. Translations of novels like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting were so exceptional that the book would briefly become, ex officio, as it were, almost a part of the Anglo-American literary tradition.

The institutional importance of Index is hard to overstate because, in the words of André Gide, good sentiments do not usually generate good literature. Just because a writer is committed to fighting injustice in his or her society, there’s no guarantee that his or her work will have artistic value. But once the role of literature as “witness” is established in the minds of the public, it makes it more difficult to dissociate literary merit and the social or political value of the text. Index provided a forum for banned writers to demonstrate the role of literature, both good and less good, as unsubmissive, contrarian, transcendent and instinctively transgressive.

Perhaps it was as well that the Index model was so firmly set by Spender and its founders. After 1989, the strength and security of WSI (notwithstanding a constant search for sponsors) was crucial. The fall of the Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union gave every indication that the raison d’être of Index — opposing Soviet oppression — had been trumped by History.

New frontiers for free expression — and censorship

In fact, the reverse was the case. Writers and free expression continued to be persecuted worldwide. Russia did not cease to be despotic with the disbanding of the KGB. In some ways, the condition of everyday life for Russian writers grew significantly worse, and certainly far more dangerous. The war in Chechnya gave the authorities a new pretext to crush free journalism. Anna Politovskaya became just one of many who turned to Index to make her plight better understood in the West.

With the millennium, meanwhile, the rise of the internet and the IT revolution inherent in the development of digital communications offered a new challenge. The old barriers to state control were coming down. Frontiers that had once been impenetrable were suddenly porous. Secret policemen could continue to terrorise writers, printers and publishers, but it was much harder to stop the free flow of information on the worldwide web. What place would Index have in the new world order of “free” content shaped by Google, Wikipedia and Amazon? The answer, of course, is as a research institution, a memory bank and a continuing moral example, along with publishing online as well as in print.

Index in the new century has made the fight for “intellectual freedom” normative as well as liberating. WSI remains the tool of one very simple, good idea. Its historical board members are unchanged: Milton, Paine, Wilkes, Zola and, possibly, Orwell. Index knows that such an achievement is not lightly won. The history of state repression shows that the individual writer and artist and scholar is vulnerable on his own. He, or she, needs the committed support of independent organisations that cannot be crushed by state terror. Furthermore, the plight of writers especially should not be at the mercy of intellectual fashion or the caprice of a Twitter feed. Free expression needs its gatekeepers: publishers, editors, booksellers, and independent columnists. And this community needs a place to meet, a forum for ideas and debate. This is what Index provides. More serious than Twitter; better organised than Facebook, it’s a forum that can exploit the social media, but not become its prisoner.

In the 21st century, this can be virtual, articulated through Google or Wikipedia. But it also needs to be orchestrated by people, standing apart from fashionable trends, who understand the nuances of the fight for intellectual freedom and who know what they are talking about. This, in a sentence, is the unique Index proposition: ideas honestly and freely expressed and writers worldwide uninhibited by the censorship of the mind or tyrannical restrictions on the printed word.

This article appears in 40 years of Index on Censorship which marks the organisation’s 40th anniversary with a star line-up of the most outstanding activists, journalists and authors. Click here for subscription options and more

Robert McCrum is an associate editor of the Observer. He has been a member of the advisory board of Index on Censorship since 1983

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A year ago, literally overnight, Belarus further regressed into a paranoid police state which sees a potential enemy in every citizen. This former Soviet republic of ten million people wedged between Russia and the EU is now a benighted, bankrupt dystopia where ordinary people live in fear of coming under suspicion from a vengeful tyrant.Meanwhile, outside Belarus, the official world is about to go into seasonal hibernation. The Christmas decorations are up in the marble halls of democracy and no more is expected to be heard from there until next year. The levers of political, diplomatic and economic pressure are set at rest.

This is a letter from a few artists to artists everywhere.  As a class, artists have no executive powers but time and again in countries all over the globe it is our voices that have reminded statesmen and politicians of their moral duty to act for the redress of injustice.

In the case of Belarus, 19 December 2011 is such a moment, and we call upon the power of art to disturb the sleep of conscience

Ai Weiwei, Alan Rickman, April Gornik, Bob Holman, David Lan, Eric Fischl,  Gillian Slovo, Hamish Jenkinson, Joanna Lumley, Jude Law, Kevin Spacey, Michael Sheen, Michael Attenborough, Natasha Kaliada, Nicolai Khalezin, Ron Rifkin, Sam West, Tom Stoppard, Vaclav Havel, Vladimir Shcherban

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The [communist] regime was punishing in many different ways. They were very creative and if you were caught doing something against it, quite often they would just let you fail the next exam or they would ask the professor to fail you. I was involved in the medical school culture club, at the dorms. We often invited either poets or rock groups or theatre performers who were not allowed to make official recordings, or played on the radio, but were on occasion allowed to perform at small clubs. So that is what we were doing. We were exchanging prohibited books, had some discussion clubs.

But we were definitely not, I would say, dissidents.
Family was and has been a great influence on my life. My father was a professor at Charles University who was expelled after 1968 because he refused to welcome the Soviet Army. Even though he was not on the list of people being fired for supporting the Prague Spring, not voting in favour of their expulsion [from the university] meant his name was added to the list.

After losing his job, he became a railway labourer. This also had some positive sides — the husband of one of his students met him on the tracks and said: “Professor, is it you? What the hell are you doing here?” He responded that it was the only job he could find to support his family. So he gave him the position of work safety officer.

My mother’s father, who was the head of the tax authority in the 1950s, was asked to be the governor of one part of the Sudetenland.

My grandfather refused and ended up in the coalmines in North Moravia. In 1968 they came to him and wanted to rehabilitate him, but he said that given the people who were in power, he would stay where he was. So he could not practise law, and became a bureaucrat in the glassworks.

My grandfather and father were both people who were very much concerned with the wellbeing and solidarity of other people. My father was from a family of nine, a very poor family. My grandfather became the father to eight of his siblings at a German forced labour camp. So they were much more on the left, but they hated communism in the form in which it was here.
So that was the society and the personal stories which I grew up with. I felt the schizophrenia of society — that you would give a totally different answer to the same question asked at home or in front of other students.

On fear and corruption
I was afraid [in 1989]. I was afraid all the way. People were imprisoned without any cause simply for voicing their disagreement. One of our classmates got drunk and took down a Russian flag on the street and was expelled and basically put in prison. In each study group at university, which usually had between ten and 15 students, we basically knew that there would be one or two informers from the secret police, so we were always kind of watching over our shoulder.

So we were somewhat careful and we were afraid of the strength and violence of the regime. But it was so clear how morally and economically corrupt the regime was. Even kids from high-ranking communist families, our classmates, said that they didn’t believe in it and that their fathers didn’t believe in it. They were just profiteering from the system. So it was so clear, who was right and who was wrong. And there was also the global situation, perestroika, Gorbachev . . .We had information from Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and we talked about it. Even if you wanted to ignore it — you couldn’t escape it. We could see that the Wall was disintegrating one step at a time but still, to imagine, to have the courage to imagine, a revolution — I did not have that picture or aim in mind.

On 17 November I knew some of the people organising the events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Czech universities being shut down [by the Nazis --- an officially permitted student demonstration]. I helped to distribute posters in our dorm and at a club, which basically said to take a candle and flower and come to Charles University campus. Nobody knew whether even a couple of people would show up and we were very surprised by the number of people that were there. I myself was there as a regular participant, ducking when I saw that the secret police was filming us. But some people were more courageous; they had posters calling for an end to one-party rule and free elections. And we started to shout and give each other courage — that we were not the crazy ones, that there were plenty of us thinking exactly the same thing. And so I marched from the campus to the cemetery where the guy who was shot by the Nazis in 1939 was buried and somebody redirected the march downtown.

I had no idea [that the demonstration was going to end in violence]. I mean, I really had no idea what to expect. I just felt that the fact that [the demonstration] was official gave people like myself the courage to show up. When we came to the National Theatre on the National Boulevard, right downtown, the riot police were in place. One end of the street was cut off by a row of crowd control police officers, with helmets, shields, and white truncheons. On the other side were two tanks with a fence in front of them.
And these two tanks advanced and basically smushed this last section of about 2,000 to 5,000 people — and created incredible fear because people couldn’t move.

With buildings on two sides and the crowd control police on the third side, they boxed us in and people couldn’t leave and people broke their legs or dived under cars just to be able to breathe. They created small bottlenecks through which people wanted to get out and they started to beat people from both sides. There was a special SAS commando with dogs and they were beating everybody coming out of that small alley which they had created.

And so we were totally panicked and just wanted to leave. I was really afraid for my life and we were passing through the alley and they were beating us from both sides. I had a backpack because I had picked up some fresh laundry, which my Mum had sent by train, and I used it to protect my head. Boris, my roommate, had his girlfriend [Dana] with him; I am 6 foot 6 and she was like half my size. We had to lift her, because I would say my thigh was at her lungs and she couldn’t breathe, so we had her between the two us going through that small alley. Boris got hit over his head, fell down and was unconscious. I was just beaten over my legs and thighs and as I was kind of numb, I realised only later that my key chain with keys was stuck in my thigh. We were pressed together like sardines and it just went into my flesh, but I didn’t feel it at the time. I just picked up Boris, and Dana was yelling so much as there was another red beret guy who wanted to beat him up even though he was on the ground, and she screamed and yelled and he hit her over her leg. So I was kind of trying to pick both of them up and just run away, which we eventually managed to do after getting hit a few more times.

On revolution
Later we were sitting and talking in the dorm and saying that revolution was not really for us, that we would probably not be able to make any changes with a broken head. I guess we were quite shook up and scared and we talked through the night. When we heard on Radio Free Europe or Voice of America that somebody had died at the demonstration, we started trying to get some information and connecting with other people we knew at different
schools and learned that on Sunday people would go back to where the student supposedly died.

We worked up the courage and told ourselves that this was it, that nobody should be dying. And since we had been there, we were the eyewitnesses, we were totally appalled by the reaction of the regime, which either ignored it or just mentioned that there had been some hooligans disturbing the peace but that nothing significant had happened.

So we started going door to door. There were two 15-floor blocks of dormitories and we just knocked on every door and told people what had happened and asked them to join us on the National Boulevard again on Sunday and that is basically how I got really involved and identified with the demonstrations.

And when we gathered back on Sunday night, some people were again beaten up. We had wanted to go to Prague Castle to demonstrate in front of the presidential palace and they blocked us and prevented us from doing so.

But they did let us go home. So we basically started organising. We waited for colleagues to come back from their weekends and put together a strike committee and started to get organised. That is how the people who had organised everything from birthday parties to more sophisticated poetry readings or theatre performances became natural leaders and were officially elected.

On Monday morning, people from Prague and those living in private accommodation met with the faculty and I was the one reading the demands. On Sunday night we had coordinated with students from other universities and other schools and even other cities. I had started to organise it at the medical school level and that was it.

On right and wrong
I guess it was the first confrontation, the realisation of how brutal the regime could be and how wrong it was [that gave me the courage to become a leader]. I think it was two things for me, the child that was becoming a man: it was the feeling that I don’t want this to be my life and the naivete of youth. I knew the regime was what it was and we had been taught to not stick out of the crowd or be noticeable in any way — the easiest thing to do was to be kind of neutral and grey and average. But I just couldn’t help it. And that other people looked to me for leadership and opinion — it just kind of happened that I could not escape it. I clearly felt that what gave me the strength was the clear conviction that we were right and they were wrong.

My parents had no idea for I think four or five days, but then I called home because I knew my father was listening to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America religiously, so it was only a question of time before my parents would find out. And I have to say that that was also one of the deciding moments that gave me the strength and support to get involved even though I was already fully in it.

I called home to tell them that I was fine and my Mum answered and said, ‘You are involved? I am sure you are part of these strike committees, aren’t you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but I am fine, Mum.’
And she said, ‘I order you to immediately come home!’ We lived about two hours away from Prague. She said something along the lines of: ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your Dad? You know you are going to ruin your life. I am afraid for you. You have worked so hard for your medical degree.’

And I said, ‘Mum, I can’t go home. I am sorry. I have to stay here. I have some duties here.’

So she called my Dad and said, ‘Josef, talk to him, order him to come home.’ And Dad came and said, ‘You know, if you were next to me, I would slap you silly, but boy, am I proud of you.’ For me, that was the moment that gave me the blessing that my parents understood — or at least I think they both understood. When Dad said that, I knew I was free to go and do whatever was needed.
On the students
My view, or perhaps speculation, as to why the students [were the catalyst] is that it was partly coincidental, it could have been any other trigger, any other catalyst situation in which the regime would have just overstepped the boundary and people would have got pissed off, and that would have been the threshold moment for them to actually be angrier or more frustrated with the regime — but in this case it was the students.

I was born in 1968 and we were the first generation that did not remember the persecutions after 1968 or in 1977 after Charter 77, during the so-called normalisation when the regime had a much tighter grip on the lives of people. And we were too unimportant to really be confronted by the regime in its full force. We had not, as of yet, been asked to compromise our beliefs or integrity for job promotions or for even being able to practise our professions so I think we were quite idealistic, naive as young people are.

And we were still viewed as the kids of the 1968 generation who had got at least a slap on the wrist and was therefore quite afraid and intimidated but since they [the regime] were kind of killing their kids, they had to step up. And because we got involved they had no choice but to support us or let us fail like they had in 1968.

I was absolutely amazed by the events that followed. It was just . . . a trip. We couldn’t sleep. We just didn’t want to miss a single moment and it was like we were totally at war. We were young and had ideals, but we students were usually smart people who had some skill and intellect to get organised. What happened is that the students started occupying universities which had at least some kind of infrastructure like phones and video systems, which we used to copy footage that students had made of the beatings, because the regime had for many weeks been totally disinforming the population about what had happened. They were lying. They were either silent or they were lying.

So we started to send our own colleagues to their hometowns with the tapes which they showed to people, basically trying to raise awareness and asked people to support us and go on strikes or at least show up and go on the main squares after work and demonstrate their support for us. So we were very effective and since we went to our own neighbourhoods, people knew us. It was a very effective sort of grassroots movement organisation. People basically just wanted, needed, somebody clean, believable and credible to say that the emperor was naked.

On the regime’s demise
[That the government was going to fall] was clear after I guess maybe the first week. Those of us involved in the strike committees and organisation were always taking turns going to Wenceslas Square to get recharged among the million or several hundreds of thousands of people listening to Havel or one of us, to sing and feel the brotherhood, the alignment of young, old, managers, workers, students — to understand that we were in it together. It was just so clear that we did not want to live the same life. Somebody had to stay behind and get organised and keep watch, but everybody wanted to go and feel that energy which helped us to overcome the fear that the tanks might roll in and we might be shot.

There was a scare one day that the tanks were rolling in to Wenceslas
Square, to the centre of Prague, to pick up the heads of the organisations of different universities and only later on did I hear that it was only by two votes that the Politburo ended up not sending in the army. It was quite a close call and the difference between 1968 and 1989. We had, I think, around 100,000 Soviet troops stationed mere minutes from universities throughout the country, so if the Czech army had been allowed to come in . . . I think we had
more luck than brains. Young people refuse to see their mortality and they feel invincible.

On politics
I felt like a rock star. We were clearly the white knights and I think I never felt that way before or after the revolution. And on top of it all we were winning. It was a truly marvellous time and I feel truly grateful to have been able to play a part by pure coincidence.
When I was asked to become a member of parliament representing the students, I couldn’t sleep for three days — the whole world was on my
shoulders. I spoke to Otakar Motejl [Czechoslovak (1990---2) and Czech (1993---8) Supreme Court chairman, Czech minister of justice (1998---2000) and Czech ombudsman (2000---present)], a very courageous lawyer who defended most dissidents in politically motivated trials, to ask for his advice. He told me, ‘Jan, we need somebody like you in there.’

And I said, ‘But I don’t know nothing about anything!’
And he said, ‘No, you have clearly demonstrated that you have an opinion, that you have common sense and you have no baggage. We need somebody like you as a representative of the students. Go in there and just be yourself. There are people who can advise you on special or expert matters, but you have the credibility and we need somebody like you there.

Just keep your head straight and do as your conscience tells you.’
So I did that and it was really great because we were mainly destroying the old regime and making sure that a new structure would be allowed. We were replacing the old communist parliament and we were basically appointed or co-opted so to speak [in a special election]. There was a political agreement that one-third would remain for the communists and two-thirds would be replaced by other political forces. I was asked to be there on behalf of the students, kind of on the spot, for the Civic Forum, which was the broad anti-communist alliance. The first thing we did was remove the article about one-party rule from the constitution.

It was fantastic. I was sworn in on 28 December and my first day on the job I was to vote in Va´clav Havel. It still gives me goose bumps. At that moment I kind of felt that we had won. We were [at a special session of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia] in the Vladislav Hall at Prague Castle where the coronations of the kings of Bohemia used to take place and we had only one point on the agenda — to vote Va´clav Havel in as the new president and go celebrate it.

It was a unanimous vote — even the communists voted for him. Then there was just fantastic joy and it was like the festival in Rio de Janeiro — only much colder.

On freedom
I was recording an address on national public radio and I was very new to it and I was very tired, I just couldn’t get it right. It was taking forever and I just wanted to go back to the dorm and sleep. The studio of Czech national radio is close to Wenceslas Square and it was maybe eight in the evening and I was really tired and I just wanted to go to the subway and as I was going down [into the station], [I met] my colleagues from medical school — in green surgical gowns so they wouldn’t lose each other in the crowds. They had a guitar and bass and some alcohol with them and they just kind of picked me up, took me on their shoulders and were running around and screaming
‘Viva Jan!’ And people started to recognise me and somebody held rum to my mouth and I was forced to swallow. They gave me a guitar and told me to play.
We ran into an old lady on the square and she had a wheelbarrow with a barrel of slivovice, plum brandy. She was from somewhere in the countryside and had come to Prague on the train for New Year’s Eve, looking for students to whom she wanted to give [the slivovice], which her husband, who had died in the meantime, had buried in 1968 after the Soviets invaded. He had told her that he would open it only when freedom returned. So there were moments which were just like a fairy tale — and it was just wonderful. r
Jan Bubeník was talking to Jo Glanville

Following his election as the youngest MP in the Czech Republic’s first federal parliament, Jan Bubeník left politics in the summer of 1990. He has since worked as a management consultant and headhunter, and remains active in humanitarian and human rights work.

Jan Bubeník was a 21-year-old student when he became a leader in the protests in Czechoslovakia and helped bring down the government

This article first appeared in Index on Censorship magazine, Volume 38 Number 3. Click here to subscribe.

The post The Velvet Revolutionary appeared first on Index on Censorship.