28 Apr 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China
With Ai Weiwei still missing in action, and dozens of other government undesirables, such as activists and rights lawyers also disappearing, it’s no wonder that the director of the Songzhuang Documentary Film Festival got cold feet.
Zhu Rikun told Chinese rag, The Global Times, that they had canceled the event, which was scheduled for early next month, because: “The overall situation was tense, and we had received a lot of pressure. We worried that the films to be shown would meet some problems in this environment and decided to cancel it.”
He did not elaborate on the referred to pressures.
UNCUT got in touch with an independent filmmaker who was planning on attending the festival. He asked us not to use his name.
“Although I had a feeling that it would be cancelled, I was still surprised when they actually did it,” he said, expressing disappointment.
I think it’s down to ideology. They don’t like people with diverging viewpoints coming together and watching these kinds of films. And neither do they want to let those people who have diverging viewpoints express their ideas.
The Global Times went on to cite an organizer for the festival as saying none of the films that were due to be shown were sensitive and most of them had already been shown at a festival in southern China in March this year.
This would have been the eighth incarnation of the festival which was started in 2003. It is held in the outskirts of Beijing in an artists’ district, a popular haunt for “sensitive” events.
The China Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is hoping to show a season of films in June. It remains to be seen if they will feel confident enough to go ahead.
27 Apr 2011 | Azerbaijan News, News and features
Elnur Majidli a Strasbourg-based blogger and internet activist has been threatened with a 12 year jail sentence for ‘inciting hatred’. Index on Censorship’s Mike Harris interviewed Elnur at the Council of Europe as part of Index and the International Partnership Group for Azerbaijan’s lobbying efforts
(more…)
27 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
The latest batch of revelations from WikiLeaks, a trove of more than 700 files on prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in the US War on Terror, confirms that an Al Jazeera cameraman was detained for years in part for information he could provide about the television network and its contacts with Osama bin Laden.
The 11-page cable identifies Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese national, as being a member of al-Qaida, as well as a member of the Taliban leadership “who acted as a money courier and propagandist for the al-Qaida network under the cover of his employment with the Union Beverage Company (UBC) and al-Jazeera media.”
The document describes al-Haj’s own account of his travel throughout the Middle East and Central Asia as a journalist for Al Jazeera, at several points trying to gain access to cover events in Chechnya at the request of the network. He was detained in December of 2001 by Pakistan while on his way to report in Afghanistan. The leaked document adds that, in talking with interrogators, al-Haj was “careful not to implicate himself as a member of an extremist organization, or to have had any dealings with extremists beyond performing interviews as a journalist.”
Despite al-Haj’s own accounting of his career as a journalist, the government labeled him a “high risk” threat to the US. The document also identifies him as a detainee of “HIGH intelligence value” and says that he was transfered to Guantanamo in part to provide information on his employer UBC and “The al-Jazeera News Network’s training program, telecommunications equipment,and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of UBL and a subsequent interview with UBL.”
The US government, which has lately embraced Al Jazeera during its coverage of uprising this spring throughout the Arab world, for years tarred the network as a close ally of terrorist groups and a mouthpiece for their propaganda.
Al-Haj was released from Guantanamo, after repeated demands by orgnisations like Reporters Without Borders (and after treatment his lawyer described as torture), on 1 May, 2008.
