An election that might save books in Iran

May 16th, 2013

Once the Islamic republic’s biggest cultural event, the Tehran International Book Fair – now in its 26th year — has wilted under President Mahmood Ahmadinejad’s hardline government. Raha Zahedpour reports on the recession in Iran’s publishing industry.

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Moroccan atheist Imad Habib hiding from police

May 7th, 2013

Moroccan atheist Imad Eddin Habib is now on the run, after police began searching for him last week. Habib told Irshad Manji‘s Moral Courage TV that officers confronted his father, asking him to bring an end to his son’s activism. Habib is the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Morocco, which aims for the “application of a secular constitution.”

The 22-year-old student has gained a reputation for his activism and controversial posts online, including a photograph of himself eating ice cream during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. Shortly before he went into hiding, Habib was featured in an article on a high profile Moroccan news site, and police were searching for him hours after it was published.

Atheism is not criminalised in Morocco, but Article 220 of the country’s Penal Code forbids “shaking a Muslim’s faith”. The article’s vague wording can be used to punish anyone who criticises Islam openly, or promotes any other faith with a jail sentence of up to three years. Ahmed Benchemsi wrote that this says that “when you live in Morocco, you can think whatever you want of religion, but you better keep it for yourself.”

Habib is now said to be moving between the homes of friends, after his parents threatened to hand him over to the police if he were to return to their home in Casablanca. Even though he is uncertain about what will happen to him next, Habib is still committed to his beliefs, and called on his fellow Moroccans to push for the country to “work together to apply the universal human rights.”

“If Morocco doesn’t apply universal human rights, we will turn into another religious dictatorship”,  he said.

Tunisian court fails to review verdict in Muhammad cartoon case

April 26th, 2013

Tunisia’s Court of Cassation yesterday failed to review the seven-and-a-half year sentence of Jabeur Mejri, who was convicted last year of publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad on Facebook. Mejri’s lawyer, Mohammed Mselmi, told AFP that the demand for an appeal “was mysteriously withdrawn”, even though a hearing had been scheduled on 25 April. The defence team will now seek a presidential pardon for their client.

Last March, a primary court in Mahdia (eastern Tunisia) sentenced Mejri and his friend Ghazi Beji to seven and half years in prison. Beji, who published a satirical book entitled “the illusion of Islam” online, fled Tunisia. Mejir, however, has been in prison since he was arrested on 5 March 2012.

Both men were fined 1,200 dinars (GBP £480) and sentenced to five years in prison for publishing content “liable to cause harm to the public order” under article 121 (3) of the Tunisian Penal Code. They each received a two-year jail term for “offending others through public communication networks” (article 86 of the Telecommunications Code), and another six months for “moral transgression.”

On 25 June 2012, the Monastir Court of Appeal upheld Mejri’s conviction.

On 23 April 2013, a committee supporting the two young men published a letter from Mejri, written in his prison cell in Mahdia, in which he claims he has been subject to torture. Mejri wrote:

There’s no freedom of expression here in Tunisia, it is dead…I am forbidden from medicines to cure my illness and from other rights. Seven years and six months is a long period to spend within a dark and gloomy small place. Officers find pleasure to torture me [sic]”

Self-censorship’s chill on artistic freedom in Russia

April 17th, 2013

Self-censorship has poisoned Russian media, art and other spheres.

In the past few years, criminal prosecution of artists and new laws have made it clear for those who criticise the Kremlin or Russian Orthodox Church in their creative work, will face consequences for portraying either of these institutions negatively.

A Russian artist came under fire for depicting members of Pussy Riot as religious icons

Just last week, the State Duma passed two controversial laws in the first hearing. One forbids obscene language in movies, books, TV, and radio during mass public events. The other stipulates criminal punishment — including five years in prison — for “insulting believers’ feelings”. Both laws, as far as human rights activists are concerned, limit artists’ freedom of expression, and encourage self-censorship.

Index spoke to three notable artists to find out how the art community deals with self-censorship, and the ever-increasing restrictions on freedom of expression in Russia.

Artyom Loskutov, an artist from Novosibirsk, is famous for holding “monstrations” — flash mobs with absurd slogans like “Tanya, don’t cry” and “Who’s there?”. In 2009, he was arrested on drug possession charges, but he claims that the marijuana was planted on him by police. A blood test proved that he had not taken any drugs, and his fingerprints were not found on the package. Three years on, he faced three administrative cases, and paid a 1000 rouble fine for creating icon-like images of Pussy Riot members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina and placing them on billboards. He was accused of insulting believers. He is currently appealing the court ruling in the European Court of Human Rights.

The artist told Index that the cases against him are acts of censorship, but vows to remain defiant and continue with his work:

The icons idea concerned two kinds of mothers: one mother is honoured as a saint, the two others — Tolokonnikova and Alekhina — were thrown in prison. The authorities, including the court, are becoming more insane, and one wouldn’t want to cause persecutions. But I can’t say that  given that, I refuse to implement any of my plots. In the 90s my generation felt that we had nothing, except free speech, and all the 2000s attempts to take it away meet nothing but incomprehension

In 2010, The prosecutor’s office  in Moscow’s Bassmany district examined the works of Moscow-based artist Lena Hades,  “Chimera of Mysterious Russian Soul” and “Welcome to Russia”. Russian nationalists appealed to the authorities claiming these paintings insult Russians. The case did not go to court, but Hades told Index that Russian galleries feared exhibiting her paintings after the incident.

“Galleries are afraid of financial sanctions,” Hades says, “Although 95 per cent of my paintings are about philosophy rather than about social events, they are only exhibited in Tretyakov Gallery and Moscow Museum of Modern Art”.

Despite reduced chances of her work being exhibited, Hades still painted Pussy Riot’s members, and went on a 25-day hunger strike against their prosecution. The artist is no fan of self-censorship, even if it comes at a cost. According to her, no artist that responds to reality can accept self-censorship:

This is not courage, this is aristocratic luxury of doing what you want. Self-censorship is more harmful for a modern Russian artist than censorship. He is frightened of scaring away galleries and buyers and prefers to paint landscapes with cows — anything far enough from real social life

Artist Boris Zhutovsky has a long-standing relationship with censorship. In 1962, he was slammed by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who banned work by Zhutovsky and his colleagues. For several years following the incident, the artist faced difficulties in finding employment, and his work was not exhibited in the USSR.

Zhutovsky continues to court controversy today: in the past few years he has painted the trials of Russia’s most well-known political prisoners, businessmen Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, who were first convicted in 2005. He explained Russia’s culture of self-censorship to Index:

Self-censorship is based on fear, and the amplitude of this fear has changed throughout my life. In the times of Stalin, it was the fear of the Gulag and execution. In the times of Khruschev it was the fear of loosing a job or a country – a person could be forced to leave the Soviet Union. After Perestroika the fear shrank, and now the fear which nourishes self-censorship is the fear to anger your boss

He is optimistic that a younger generation of artists will not accept self-censorship as a standard, as the the era of Putin is far from that of Stalin, but only time will tell.

Burma’s art of transition

April 10th, 2013

Artists came together with political leaders, journalists, academics and lawyers for two days of presentations and discussion on Art of Transition Symposium in Rangoon on 30-31 March.

The programme was another in the series of firsts as the space for expression in Burma opens up.

Of course, this freedom is still a work in progress. The conference had a visit from an official who asked politely how things were going, and Index was told there were a couple of undercover government agents present, who kept an eye on who was saying what.

Some of the most respected artists in the country spoke, including film-maker Min Thin Ko Ko Kyi — who produced the Art of Freedom Film Festival last year with Zarganar and Aung San Suu Kyi — poet Zeyar Lin, who represented Myanmar in Poetry Parnassus as part of the Cultural Olympiad in London, and performance artists Moe Satt, Ma Ei and Aye Ko.

Zarganar, comedian, film-maker and partner of the symposium gave the opening and closing speeches;  U Win Tin, patron of the National League for Democracy, and Min Ko Naing, a leading voice in the Generation 88 group, gave the key note speeches on the first and second days respectively.

One of the key questions the symposium asked was how the reforms had affected artists who had developed a nuanced and subtle vocabulary to circumvent censorship.  For some it is difficult to find their bearings; several poets admitted it would take time, maybe two years, to make work under such different conditions.

One speaker claimed that poets were being criticised for sounding more like journalists than poets, that the subtlety of their voice had been lost. Another said that he did not want to publish his poems that had been banned in the past because they would no longer be of the moment. Another artist, who had created hundreds of artworks in prison, said that he felt his most free when he was behind bars.

Some of the younger artists Index spoke to felt very differently about the influence of new reforms.  They welcomed the openness, the free exchange of ideas, particularly online.

A young performance artist said that her art form was now considered “sexy” and she had plenty of invitations to perform so opening up her work to new audiences.   An established poet said that poets have to be more accountable now for what they write.  Previously, when all work had to be passed by the censors, the decision about what was published was completely out of the writer’s hands.

As the first symposium of its kind in the country it was necessarily experimental and as much as anything about finding a Burmese way to have a conversation about artistic freedom in public.

Index is producing a short documentary which will be translated into English. An English language podcast is also in production.

Julia Farrington is head of arts at Index on Censorship

Why is Egypt banning porn?

April 9th, 2013

Egypt is taking steps to enforce a ban on internet porn ordered by a Cairo court late last year. The ban was first ordered three years ago, but went unimplemented. This time it looks like it’s going to happen, and it won’t be cheap: the necessary filtering system will cost the country’s government 25 million Egyptian pounds (about £2.4 million).

According to Sherif Hashem, deputy head of the National Telecom Regulatory Authority, Egypt has been installing the filters since January.

Amr Gharbeia, civil liberties director for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) told Index that, “there is very little information on Egypt’s censorship and deep packet inspection capabilities. So far, Egypt’s non-independent National Telecom Regulation Authority (NTRA) has claimed Egypt’s telecom ecosystem does not have this kind of equipment, and that it is not in its mandate as a regulator to filter content.”

News of the ban comes at a time when the country’s Islamist leadership is facing a host of post-revolution problems: Egypt’s unemployment rate has now reached 13 per cent. In the past two years the country’s foreign reserves have gone from £23.5 billion to £8.5 billion. This past weekend saw sectarian clashes outside of a Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo, with at least eight dead, and many injured. Unsurprisingly, President Mohamed Morsi’s approval rating has reached an all-time low.

Egypt is currently negotiating a $4.8 billion IMF loan, which requires that the country decrease subsidies and increase taxes. Last month, officials announced that subsidised bread would be rationed — a decision that sparked angry protests from bakers. While this isn’t the first time that Egypt has faced protests for increased bread prices, the move flies in the face of one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s main principles: alleviating poverty.

So with all of Egypt’s social and economic woes  — why enforce a costly ban on porn now? Gharbeia told Index that the Muslim Brotherhood “is caught between a rock and a hard place, and is finding great difficulty trying to appease to the more conservative currents and the more liberal groups.”

An improved filtering system might mean that Egypt could implement bans that have previously gone unimplemented, due to technical difficulties. In February, an Egyptian court ordered that YouTube be banned for 30 days, for refusing to remove anti-Islam film, the Innocence of Muslims. The ban was eventually thrown out. Gharbeia said that while a ban on the video-sharing site is “unlikely and very costly”, “it is not impossible in the future, if socially conservative powers remain in power and continue to be the majority in parliament.” Egypt has postponed parliamentary elections to October this year.

 Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin.

Bangladesh rejects call for blasphemy law, but atheist bloggers still detained

April 8th, 2013

Four Bangladeshi bloggers are being held on suspicion of “harming religious sentiment” amid protests calling for blasphemy to be made a capital crime.

On 31 March, hardline Islamists submitted a list of 84 “atheist” bloggers to authorities, demanding their arrest. Rasel Parvez, Mashiur Rahman Biplob and Subrata Adhikari Shuvo, were arrested on 1 April, and had laptops and other devices confiscated. Asif Mohiuddin was arrested days later.

The arrests take part against the backdrop of the Shahbag protests. The protests, which began as demands for the death penalty for figures convicted of war crimes during the 1971 war that led to independence from Pakistan — when many Islamist groups sided with Pakistan — have broadened to general demonstrations against the radical Jamaat-e-Islami and other “extremist” groups.

The secular movement has drawn a strong response from hardliners, who have called for a blasphemy law, along the way smearing activists as defamers of the prophet Muhammad.

The Islamist group Hefajat-e-Islam has said the capital Dhaka will face a “siege” unless the government meets its demand to introduce the death penalty for blasphemy.

However, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina has rejected calls for a blasphemy law, telling the BBC that “existing laws are enough”.

She went on to say that while Bangladesh is a “secular democracy”, where everyone “has the right to practice their religion freely”, it was “not fair to hurt anybody’s religious feeling”, and that the government “try to protect every religious sentiment.”

India: Kumar versus the censor

April 4th, 2013

Despite making two award-winning documentaries, filmmaker Ashvin Kumar has faced difficulty having his films shown. Mahima Kaul reports on his battle with India’s Censor Board
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