Index condemns the arrest of prominent rights activist Nabeel Rajab
Index on Censorship condemns last night’s arrest of Index’s 2012 Award winner and head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), Nabeel Rajab and the ongoing harassment of human rights activists in Bahrain including the arrest of those involved in peaceful protests.
Kirsty Hughes, Chief Executive of Index said:
The arrest of Nabeel Rajab, and the continued targeting of other well-known activists, is deeply worrying and appears to link directly to Bahrain’s continuing failure to respect fundamental, and basic, rights including freedom of speech, and freedom to protest. Reforms have been promised by Bahrain but not delivered.
Bahrain must stop harassing human rights activists and recognise that freedom of expression and other fundamental rights are vital components of a free and open society. The Bahrain government should allow proper scrutiny of its actions: real transparency must include allowing both domestic and international rights organisations and journalists to report on and monitor ongoing unrest in the country.
Nabeel Rajab, BCHR - winner of Bindmans Award for Advocacy at the Index Freedom of Expression Awards 2012
Rajab was arrested as he flew into Manama’s airport last night. According to Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior, he was “detained under suspicion of committing several punishable crimes” but it is yet to specify the charges. Rajab was returning to Bahrain to face a court hearing on existing charges.
Rajab, who is also director of the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), has been a vocal critic of the human rights violations committed during Bahrain’s ongoing civil unrest, which first began with protests on 14 February last year.
While accepting an Index award on behalf of BCHR this year, Rajab called for assistance from the international community, explaining that members of BCHR – which was banned by authorities in 2004 – have been detained, tortured or exiled while attempting to exercise fundamental rights and freedoms including free expression and freedom of assembly (freedom to protest).
The founder of BCHR, Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, is in detention awaiting a retrial after been jailed for life by a military tribunal for taking part in peaceful protests. He has been on hunger strike for 88 days. And Rajab’s arrest comes only weeks after the arrest of Abdulhadi Alkhawaja’ daughter, Zainab Alkhawaja, who was detained after protesting for the release of her father during the Bahrain Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Earlier this week an international delegation of free expression organizations – including Index – were denied entry to the country.
Chen Guangcheng knows exile isn’t easy, but it may be his best bet
Even before the internet, dissidents in exile were able to create networks that provided a lifeline to those back home, writes Index editor Jo Glanville
This piece originally appeared on Comment is Free
The desperate plight of Chen Guangcheng is a graphic illustration of how China treats its dissidents. Harassed and intimidated, Chen has spent the past seven years between prison and house arrest since he exposed the government’s forced abortion policy in 2005 (he was awarded the Index freedom of expression award for whistleblowing in 2007). House arrest is a common tactic in China for containing and controlling whistleblowers and activists. In Chen’s case, since his release from prison in 2010, it has meant a life of social isolation and fear. Other current well-known victims include Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser and Ai Weiwei, who famously attempted to turn China’s tactics on their head by installing his own in-house surveillance.
The week’s dramatic events echo the story of celebrated dissident Fang Lizhi, who died last month; Fang also took refuge in the US embassy following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and stayed for more than a year until China allowed him to leave. Fang was one of the most important influences on the Tiananmen generation of young activists and the authorities considered him “the biggest black hand behind the 4 June riots”. In exile in the US for the rest of his life, as well as pursuing his academic career as an astrophysicist, he remained active in speaking out for human rights in China along with other exiles of 1989, including Wang Dan.
The experience of exile for dissidents, despite the continuing possibility for influence, can bring another kind of isolation. “Homelessness, loneliness and despair have almost driven me to self-destruction,” wrote the poet Liu Hongbin on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. It is only through memory, he has written movingly, that he has made the journey home. Writer Ma Jian, who has written the definitive novel of the Tiananmen generation, Beijing Coma, while in exile, was still able to visit China regularly until last year – a measure of how far the situation has deteriorated. Chen’s desire for “a rest”, as he told Congress, is likely to be more than a short stay.
However, there are networks that can only be built from exile and that have always been a lifeline for dissidents back home, long before Twitter, SMS and Facebook revolutionised the possibilities of making revolution. Under editor George Theiner, a Czech dissident in exile in London, Index on Censorship magazine published the leading lights of Czechoslovakia’s pro-democracy movement in the 80s, most notably Václav Havel, as well as publishing and distributing Polish and Czech samizdat – a vital outlet for opposition activists. When Index’s founding editor Michael Scammell started publishing the most famous dissident of them all, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great man panicked: when he heard that his work was appearing so widely in English, he thought it was the KGB who was circulating his writing as part of a political provocation. But it was the first worldwide publication of much of his work in translation and an immensely important part of circulating the plight of dissidents in the Soviet Union.
Forty years on, Belarusian activists in exile have played a vital role in galvanising opposition to Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Since the elections in 2010, following the mass arrests and imprisonment of the opposition, some of the leading lights of the pro-democracy movement have settled in London and Warsaw where they have helped to shape a successful European campaign alongside human rights groups. Natalia Kaladia, artistic director of the acclaimed Belarus Free Theatre, had to flee Belarus following her arrest and the intimidation of her family. In a campaign with Index, her new organisation Free Belarus Now, which she runs with Irina Bogdanova, sister of former political prisoner Andrei Sannikov, has helped to persuade Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas to stop doing business with Lukashenko’s regime.
While none would choose exile, Chen is reported as telling the US ambassador that “he wanted to be part of the struggle to improve human rights within China”, thanks to the internet it is now perhaps more possible than it ever was in the days of the carbon copies of samizdat to continue to exert an influence back home.
Jo Glanville is editor of Index on Censorship magazine
Somali journalist slain by unidentified gunmen
Somali journalist Farhan Jeemis Abdulle was reportedly murdered by two unidentified men on Wednesday evening in Puntland. According to colleagues of the journalist, he received threats from an anonymous caller days before he was shot and killed on his way home from work. His colleagues allege that the local militant Islamic group Al-Shabab killed him for covering local programmes aimed at discouraging violence in youth. Local police are investigating the murder, but have not made any arrests yet.