22 Oct 2013 | Africa, News and features, Politics and Society
In June 2013, police and protesters clashed at the offices of the Daily Monitor, Kampala. Picture Isaac Kasamani/Demotix
In the age of technology with high-speed Internet access and smart phones, it is sometimes easy to imagine that all journalists’ working lives are the same: deadlines, insufficient resources, worrying about the threats of digital media and the race to break news.
In some ways these concerns are indeed universal. However, what journalists in North America and Europe hardly ever have to worry about is their basic right to report the news. It is true that in a post-Wikileaks and News of the World journalistic environment, all reporters have had to consider their fundamental role in providing news and information and analysis ethically. However, in Africa many journalists find themselves carefully tiptoeing through minefields of media laws which limit their ability to report accurately and truthfully on the news of the day, particularly when reporting on activities of the powerful in government.
Recently in Swaziland, a journalist has been charged with contempt of court for reporting the fundamental issue of whether or not the Chief Justice is fit to hold office, given that he is the subject of impeachment proceedings back in his own country, Lesotho. Several Zambian journalists were brought to court earlier this year, initially accused of sedition. In Ethiopia, journalists are serving time in prison, sentenced for threatening the state with their reports.
Besides individual actions taken against journalists, whole media enterprises are also at risk. In Tanzania, the two newspapers Mwananchi and Mtanzania have been suspended by the unilateral action of the Minister of Information citing breach of the peace concerns – Mwananchi was reporting on new salary structures in the government. Earlier this year, the newsroom of the Ugandan newspaper Daily Monitor was under siege for over a week, while police was trying to find letters that were exchanged between editors and a source.
There is no doubt that much state action against journalists and media houses is unconstitutional. However, there is also no doubt that Africa’s media laws do make provision for draconian action to be taken against journalists and publications.
The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s Media Programme has recently published a two-volume Media Law Handbook for Southern Africa, written by Justine Limpitlaw. The handbook is available for free download on the internet. One of the most important aims of the handbook is simply to provide information about what the law is in a number of southern African countries. Statutes are often not available electronically and many journalists simply have no idea about what the laws governing the media are.
A key characteristic of many southern African countries is a media law landscape with a relatively benign liberal constitution at the apex. All constitutions protect freedom of expression to some extent. However, very few changes have been made to media legislation to ensure that the legislation accords with the constitutional right to freedom of expression. Despite oft-expressed anger at the colonial era and its on-going repercussions for the continent, African political elites have essentially retained colonial era media laws as is.
One only has to list many in-force statutes to note that African media law appears to have stultified in the early or mid-20th century. Both Lesotho’s and Swaziland’s Sedition legislation dates back to 1938. Swaziland’s Cinematograph Act is from 1920. Many countries’ Penal Codes date back to the 1960s – prior to their independence from Colonial powers. These Penal Codes criminalise many forms of expression including defamation, insult and false news, and provide for significant jail sentences.
Sadly few attempts have been made to update African media laws. On the rare occasion where a country has engaged in media law reform, the results have been decidedly mixed. South Africa’s attempt to update apartheid-era security laws has been roundly condemned for promoting governmental secrecy at the expense of the public interest.
There is hope. In 2010, the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights adopted Resolution 169 on Repealing Criminal Defamation Laws in Africa. The resolution calls on states parties to repeal criminal defamation and insult laws which impede freedom of speech. In May 2013, the Pan African Parliament adopted the Midrand Declaration on Press Freedom in Africa. The Pan African Parliament resolved to launch a campaign entitled “Press Freedom for Development and Governance: Need for Reform” in all five regions of Africa. These initiatives by intergovernmental African organisations are historic and represent a real opportunity for media law reform. There is also significant pressure being brought to bear on a number of countries to enact access to information laws.
The objective link between a free press and accelerated development is clear. Sadly governments appear all too willing to forego development in their desire to retain political control. Journalists are under real threat in many countries in Africa and the threats are not only from rogue police officers but also from ordinary police officers and other state functionaries merely carrying out the letter of the law.
The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung believes that the media Law handbook could act as a catalyst for bringing together journalists, media owners, members of the judiciary, government officials and media activists to have a serious look at African media law with a view to taking it out of the colonial era. Together with the Pan African Parliament’s and the Comission’s efforts, this is a great opportunity to make Africa a place where journalists can report the news of the day accurately and fairly without fear of arrest and imprisonment.
This article was originally posted on 22 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
21 Oct 2013 | Americas, Honduras, News and features, Politics and Society
San Pedro Sula: Colon is prime farming and cattle territory in the Honduran Caribbean coast. Its geography extends across eight thousand plus kilometers through mountains, rivers and thick vegetation. It is a strategic territory and middle transit point for drug transshipments from South America to Mexico and the United States. At the helm of these operations are Mexican and Colombian traffickers, according to Colombian and Honduran police reports. Plantations of African Palm conceal clandestine landing strips, which were previously used by crop fumigation planes and where today small planes laden with cocaine land unrestricted, according to the Honduran Armed Forces.
The local chieftains are Javier and Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, brothers and former cattle rustlers who today oversee a multimillion-dollar empire. Their organized crime group is called Los Cachiros, which allegedly picks political candidates and has close links to local police, according to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Access Control, OFAC.
Until recently, few Hondurans knew about Los Cachiros. Journalists did not dare write about their activities. In fact, few reporters visit Colon, their territory, or other northern territories in this Central American country, where dozens of narco chieftains have built profitable drug trafficking networks with little scrutiny from the local press.
In June of this year, Hondurans finally read in the local press about the Maradiaga brothers and their organization. Something similar occurred with José Handal Pérez, a prominent businessman in San Pedro Sula, owner of a retail empire, which includes clothing stores, auto part shops and restaurants. Local media wrote about Handal Pérez in April, following the release of another report by the OFAC, which identified him as a drug transporter and money launderer.
“We published (the story) because the United States gave us information,” explained without hesitation a local newspaper editor who asked not to be identified in this article. “To investigate such matters in this country is very difficult. We can’t take the risk. Also no local authority would provide us with such evidence.”
Honduras has become the ideal transit spot for international drug traffickers. The country and its government institutions are mired with government corruption and ineffective or compromised public security forces, according to a September 2012 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, “Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean.” In the last four years since President Manuel Zelaya was deposed and President Porfirio Lobo was selected, an institutional crisis has hit the country, creating a power vacuum that has been exploited by local and international organized crimes groups, according to UNODC. Today Honduras has the highest per capita murder rate in the world with 91 murders per 100 thousand inhabitants. The crime statistics are higher in northern territories, where drug trafficking networks operate. The country also has one of the highest numbers of journalists killed, or attacked, in a country not at war.
The Mexican cartels—Zetas, Sinaloa y Gulf—have had a presence in Honduras for quite some time. Two Colombian criminal bands, The Rastrojos, who have a working relationship with Los Cachiros, and the Urabeños, have a presence in the country. Maras or organized youth gangs—MS13 and Mara 18, which originated in the nineties with deported gang members who grew up in low-income barrios in California—control barrios in some of the country’s most important cities. In La Ceiba, a Caribbean resort town that has a reputation as an important drug trafficking corridor, and where civil society is desperately trying to rebuild its tourist flow, youth gangs have proliferated and even determine who can live in their areas of control. Youth gangs throughout the country work as low-level level drug distributors and are sometimes subcontracted by the cartels as foot soldiers or enforcers, according to Honduran police and the UNODC.
Just Bloody Pictures
However, when reading most Honduran newspapers, readers go away with little understanding of what is occurring in the country. Most crime stories are written without context or explanation and are accompanied by bloody, gory pictures. Local media write these crime stories purposely, as a safety mechanism because of entrenched fear and trepidation among local reporters and editors, according to interviews with reporters and editors and a review of various newspapers in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula by Fundacion MEPI, a regional investigative journalism project based in Mexico City.
MEPI’s analysis found that the news media reports extensively about youth gang criminal activities, but they seldom write about the presence of international organized crime groups and their connections in Honduras to the security forces and to business and political sectors. In private interviews, editors, reporters and news analysts, who asked for anonymity recounted strategies applied in newsrooms to protect their staff of violence. Twenty-nine journalists have been murdered in Honduras in the last four years, with 16 of them were killed because of their work, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ. MEPI has completed similar investigations on how the media works under threat of violence in the Mexican regional press.
The content analysis by MEPI showed that seven out of ten stories about crime published in both San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa media did not include details about the victims, nor the possible reasons for the crime. Gruesome pictures were often spread across the pages with headlines such as: “Found dead after visiting his Mother,” “Three men are executed and placed in plastic bags,” or “Transvestite is taken out of his house and killed.”
MEPI’s content analysis found that the media has been correctly reporting on a wave of violence of great proportions and premeditation. According to the stories, 80 percent of the crimes were committed with firearms and 20 percent of the victims were tortured before and after they were killed. Many of the bodies were found tied up and packed inside black garbage bags, a practice also favored by Mexican organized crime groups.
In March 2012, newspaper accounts described an escalation in the number of victims found decapitated or with their bodies cut to pieces. None of the stories, however, provided reasons as to why the new killing method was introduced in Honduras. A crime reporter told MEPI that the new killing methods could be tied to the Mexican organized crime group, Zetas, former military special forces-turned bandits, who built up a reputation for their brutality in killing opponents, and who have a presence in Central America. “About a year and half ago, bodies in plastic bags started appearing. The government won’t accept it is linked to the Zetas,” he said.
Like in Mexico, criminal groups also leave messages at the crime scenes. Some of the messages are carved out in the victims’ bodies. Other messages are scribbled by hand in cardboard signs that are placed next to the bodies. In 2012, several victims were found in both Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula with a hand or foot missing. The message was cryptic to the uninitiated. But a criminal investigator in El Salvador said that often those mutilations have specific meanings. A missing hand means the victim stole; a missing foot, he fled. Both are messages to the victim’s friends.
In Mexico, several media leaders were critical of the media when it published the messages left at crime scenes, and most newspapers and television news programs have stopped publishing or broadcasting them. The media agreed that they were becoming messengers in criminal groups’ vendettas. The Honduran press, however, continues to publish the messages.
More than 70 taxi and bus drivers were killed in 2012. They are the two top jobs and occupations that are high risk in Honduras today. But MEPI did not find any stories explaining to readers why these jobs have a higher probability of violence on the job. The stories also do not explain if the government has any program to improve security for workers in these occupations.
Similarly, five out of each 10 murders in the Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula in 2012 were carried out by men who rode as passengers in motorcycles, although there is a law prohibiting two riders in a motorbike.
The Press Confronts Violence
Why has superficial crime reporting that relies on bloody photos and spreads, gained some much ground in Honduras? Few journalists and analysts understand it. But MEPI’s content analysis and interviews with reporters and editors drew out multiple reasons: little access to timely official reports by the authorities, a lack of government-media implemented safety mechanisms to protect journalists, and fear of retaliation, if stories appear to have too much context and insight.
To elucidate the danger, one reporter told us, “A few years ago, in Tegucigalpa there was a bandit who was well known and was called The Black Cat. The man controlled all drug sales in Tegucigalpa. If any reporter identified him in a story, he would go to the news outlet and demand to know who wrote the story.”
Many newsrooms forbid their journalists from reporting in low income
neighborhoods controlled by violent youth gangs around San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, The media also shuns reporting trips to the departments of Olancho, Atlántida, Puerto Cortés and Colón, centers of drug trafficking activity—most stories related to these territories appear in news briefs. “It is difficult to report on crime in our country,” said one editor in Tegucigalpa. “Relatives of crime victims do not want to talk to the press. And for our safety, we don’t follow up crime stories.”
A debate on how to stop the media from using graphic pictures and reporting on crime has caused much discussion in Honduras. “(Their reporting style) is related to the lack of training,” said a member of the Honduran Human Rights Commission who did not want to give his name because he was not authorized to talk on the record. “They use bloody pictures to sell more newspapers. They don’t care.”
A poll conducted by DLA Consulting Group in March of this year backs this assumption. The survey found that four out of 10 persons polled said that they were left “in fear, nervous and concerned” after reading the Honduran press.
Business groups and civic leaders have also complained about the press and the reality they paint of Honduras in their stories. Early this year, the Mexican pollster Mitofsky rated President Lobo, number 18—next to the last place—in a poll that ranked 19 presidents across the world. Lobo’s approval rate is down to 27 percent of all Hondurans. Lobo capitalized on the debate over too much violence in the media. He proposed to regulate content in the media, and issue sanctions if a news outlet published news that were deemed to promote crime, obscenity and any other element that attempted against “morality and good manners.” The law proposal was strongly criticized by the Honduran media and international freedom of the press organizations. Media owners reacted quickly and in May, representatives of all mayor newspapers and broadcasters agreed on a self-regulation code of ethics that would forbid the news media from publishing photos and broadcasting video that promotes “immorality and violence.” The President still accuses the media of making a profit out of promoting violence.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Last july, body parts of a man which appeared to have been partially burnt, floated on a small lagoon near sugar cane fields in San Pedro Sula. It was the body of Aníbal Barrow, a television commentator who had been kidnapped by armed commandos two weeks earlier, with his family and a driver. The driver and family members had been freed earlier by the gunmen.
Barrow was a close friend of President Lobo and was the second journalist with known links to the President murdered violently in the last two years. In May 2012, police found the body of Ángel Alfredo Villatoro, also a television broadcaster who had been kidnapped two weeks earlier. His body was found dressed with a police special forces uniform. Nobody understood the uniform and the message. A few days before Villatoro was kidnapped, the police had taken away bodyguards that had been assigned to the reporter because of death threats.
Sound investigations on why reporters are getting killed have not been reached on any recent case. “We have examined some cases deeply but can never reach any conclusions,” said one editor. Part of the reason many journalists are afraid to dig too deep in the cases of their dead colleagues is because they fear that in these cases, as in others in Honduras today, the authors could come from political, journalistic or police sectors, who may be operating in tandem with members of organized crime.
Official Communiques
A reporter’s job is made more difficult because of a lack of government information that could explain the wave of violence. According to reporters and editors in both San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa, the Coroner’s Office and local and national police agencies do not provide statistics or comprehensive reports. The lack of official information is due to various reasons. One is the alleged collusion between members of the government and police sectors with organized crime, as reported in the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights report as recently as last year.
But safety is also a concern for police officers and government officials. More than 120 police officers have been killed violently in the last three years, according to the Human Rights Office and police reports. Even top government officials run into trouble if they delve in too deep. In December 2009, six months after former President Zelaya was deposed, the then anti-drug Zar, Arístides González was gunned down in Tegucigalpa just days after he announced that the government was going to take measures against several clandestine landing strips it had discovered in the department of Olancho in northwestern Honduras. González had ordered an investigation of a group that was working with the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel. The order to kill him was carried out by a local Honduran trafficker.
This article was originally published on 21 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
Read more about this topic at Index on Censorship magazine.
18 Oct 2013 | About Index, Events, Volume 42.03 Autumn 2013
The following speech by Sarah Brown, education campaigner for A World at School, was delivered at the launch event for the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
I am delighted to be at Lilian Baylis Technology School – I went to school in North London, but my first flat was just down the road from here – I know how hard everyone at this school has worked for it become the first in Lambeth to get an outstanding in its Ofsted and now stands out as ‘outstanding in all aspects’ in the top 10% in the country. Being named for a pioneering woman who nurtured some amazing talent in the theatre, opera and ballet worlds leaving her mark across London gives the school a lot to live up to, but clearly nurturing some amazing talent here of its own these days.
Index on Censorship’s magazine that we are launching here tonight also serves to highlight some talented voices, and some very courageous ones too. Like all of the magazine editions which came before it, it is distinguished by both the quality of its writing and the bravery of its stance. But this one is particularly important to me for the priority it has placed on the voices of women. From pioneering feminists writing about women’s safety in India to the stories of female resistance and of hope from the Arab Spring, this magazine is giving a megaphone to the people whose contribution is so often marginalised, ignored, or eliminated altogether.
In the spirit of Index on Censorship’s core values, the power of our voice is the theme of my remarks tonight. And I want to start by updating a feminist slogan that lots of women who have done pioneering work on role models have been using for years now. Their view is ‘if she can see it, she can be it’. In other words, if you have a visible role model you are much more likely to keep fighting to get past all of the hurdles that are still too often put in the way of girls and women, just as they are for people who are disabled, or LGBT or BAME, or hold a forbidden political viewpoint in the harshest of regimes around the world.
‘If you can see it, you can be it’ – I very much think that’s true – the importance of strong visible women role models. Even my own sense of what is possible for me has certainly been determined by watching women – whether my own mother learning and leading throughout her life, from running an infant’s school in the 70’s in the middle of Africa, completing her PhD a few years go in her seventies and even now I am struggling to keep up her as she launches a new project leading the research on a study of quilt-makers (mostly women) and the stories they tell. Other role models from me have ranged from the icons of my teenage years from poet and rock artist Patti Smith to writer Jill Tweedie to American feminist Gloria Steinum. Today my work leads me to meet such a range of inspirational women leaders from Graca Machel to Aung San Suu KyI to President Joyce Banda of MalawI to young women like AshwinI Angadi, born blind in a poor rural community in India she fought for her education, graduated from Bangalore university with outstanding grades, gave up her job in IT to campaign for the rights of people with disabilities, and I find myself alongside at the UN last month.
So I agree that visibility counts, but if I think of my role models they are all women who never give up raising their voices – who make a career literally of speaking up. And I want to update that old slogan with a rather more disturbing thought and suggest tonight that if you can hear her, you will fear her.
Let me explain what I mean.
From Nigeria to Egypt to Yemen and Afghanistan to the richest countries of the West, we are seeing the rise of targeted attacks focused on women who use their voice to speak out for other women. Sometimes these attacks are physical, and I will talk about them more in a moment. But here in the UK there has been a spate of attacks which are verbal and online, and which are perpetrated by men who fear women’s power.
From the disgusting rape threats directed at Caroline Criado-Perez for daring to suggest a woman should remain on British bank notes to the horrendous and sexualised verbal violence meted out to Mary Beard after she appeared on question time to model Katie Piper finding her online voice speaking up for the stigma of disfiguration in a defiant response to the acid attack on her, and the creation of her defiant new beauty at the hands of her NHS surgeon. And of course, the all too prevalent victims of domestic violence who get a collective voice through women’s aid and the main refuges around the UK – who speak up more when they see it can even happen to a goddess like Nigella.
It is clear that the public square – and too often the private home – simply doesn’t provide a safe environment for Britain’s women.
If anybody doubts how bad things have got, I’d encourage you to go and take a look at Laura Bates’ work with the Everyday Sexism Project, an online directory of harassment, discrimination and abuse submitted by over 50,000 women who are shouting back. It paints a picture of a Britain in which violence and the threat of violence against women is so routine, women had almost ceased to notice it as a crime and an outrage, until a platform came along that gave their problem visibility and, with it, importance.
So I want to suggest that a public square which is so hostile to women that they do not feel they can participate in it without inviting overwhelming abuse is, itself, a form of censorship. It might not be the same process as smashing up a newspaper office or burning a book or even shooting teenage girls on a school bus, but the effect is the same: that of silencing a voice which has a right to be heard.
And if you want further evidence of how hearing how women’s voices can terrify those who risk losing their power, just consider how the worst misogynists in the world were afraid of just three words.
The words I’m talking about weren’t said by somebody famous. They weren’t said by somebody powerful. They hadn’t even been planned before they were uttered. But they awoke the world.
Malala YousafzaI as a schoolgirl from rural Pakistan published her youthful diary detailing how life had changed for girls after the Taliban took over her mountain town. She and her friends Shazia and Kainat spent the next few years campaigning for girls to be allowed to return to school, although they knew how dangerous speaking out against the Taliban could be. Malala even talked in interviews about how they might try to kill her for it.
Just over a year ago, this worst imagining happened and Malala was targeted by a Taliban assassin. He boarded the school bus, identified Malala and shot her in the head, and injured Shazia and Kainat sitting either side of her. As the footage of Malala’s airlift to safety was broadcast young women used just three words to claim their solidarity and support with her “I am Malala’. She and her two friends are all now safely in the UK continuing their education, and as the worlds’ gaze has given them some safety the campaign continues with a growing movement of young people all of whom are role models for every child around the world, whether in school or waiting for the dream to come true and the opportunity to learn coming to them too.
It was such a powerful reminder of a question I first asked myself some time ago:
Why is the most terrifying thing for the Taliban a girl with a book? Or for that matter the terrifying group in Nigeria – Boko Haram – who are firebombing schools and dormitories while students sleep. Boko Haram – the name literally means – western education is evil.
These terrorists know, better than we do, that a girl with an education is the most formidable force for freedom in the world. A girl who can read and write and argue can be brutalised and oppressed, she can be bought and sold, discriminated against and denied her rights. But she cannot, in the end, be stopped.
Girls like Malala, Kainat, Shazia and others in the end, will prevail.
And that is why they hate them so.
And so it seems to me if a girl like Malala, on her own, can inspire so much fear, then imagine what she could do if backed by a movement of hundreds of millions. That is why I believe that the efforts to achieve global education are at the heart of how we unlock the potential of every young citizen. As children learn, they achieve understanding, tolerance, opportunity and the chance to contribute to a better world. Reaching girls is at the heart of this – we need to do so much better for girls.
Right now, there are 57 million children missing from school. That’s 57 million of our younger selves missing out on the education which could transform not just their lives, but the world. 31 million are girls, and of those at school, many many millions are not learning, and girls are just not getting the same number of school years as their own brothers – to the detriment of everyone.
New research has shown that providing universal education in developing countries could lift their economic growth rates by up to 2% a year and the results are starkest of all when it comes to educating girls.
All the evidence shows that for every extra year of education you give a girl, you raise her children’s chances of living past five years old, because educated mums are more likely to immunise their kids and get them the health care they need. Educated girls are more likely to stay AIDS-free and are less vulnerable to sexual exploitation by adults. They marry later, have fewer children and are more likely to educate their children in turn. Perhaps most importantly of all, education increases a girl’s chance of well-paid employment in later life and the evidence suggests that female earners are more likely to spend their wages to the benefit of their children and community than traditional male heads of the household.
And the benefits, of course, don’t always stay just on a local community level, but can sometimes have national and even global implications too. Because if you look at women who have been in leading positions in every continent around the world – from Sonia GandhI to Graca Machel to Dilma Rousseff to Joyce Banda, they all have one thing in common. They all have an above average level of education. And that’s why one of my new mantras is women who lead, read.
If we want better politics, a politics of pluralism and freedom of expression around the world, then it begins with empowering women – and that begins with educating them.
So there are plenty of good reasons to invest in education and learning for every child – but the best bit is that we’ve already promised to. We are not advocating for a new pledge, simply for the fulfilment of one already made. In the year 2000 world leaders committed to getting every child in school by 2015 as part of a series of ambitious targets called the millennium development goals. World leaders have already signed the contract, now they just need to deliver the goods.
So for me the argument about whether we should invest in education to get the 57 children missing from school into the classroom is a bit of a no brainer – and for me there is no question that closing the gender gap in education should be the priority. As soon as people hear the facts, they tend to stop asking whether we should do it and start to focus on whether we can.
That’s a fair question and people will always want to probe whether we can make a difference to decisions taken hundreds of thousands of miles away. It’s a question I ask myself a lot too. But I take heart from two things. Firstly, we know that progress is possible even on seemingly very big problems because we have made it before. You can look at the big changes in the last century or so – from the end of slavery, achieving the vote for women, the end of apartheid – all started as impossible calls for change, but change came. Enough voices gathered together calling for the same thing – even a politician can’t fail to hear the call then, or if minded to change anyway can do so with a strong mandate behind him or her. Even campaigns I have contributed- that we may all have contribute to – from drop the debt to make poverty history to the maternal mortality campaign brought big changes – but I have heard first-hand what happens at the start – “it is too big an ask, it can’t be done in the time, it is too costly” – well enough free voices calling for action and – give it a little bit of time and a whole lot of noise – change comes. Less than ten years ago over 500,000 women were dying in pregnancy and childbirth unwitnessed, unacknowledged unnoticed by political leaders who held the power to save these lives. Today thanks to the collective voices of those who cared enough – through the white ribbon alliance and others, that number is a whopping 47% lower, and the work to reduce it further continues at the highest levels, and out in the more remote rural areas where the message needs to be carried far and wide to reach every woman at risk.
A 47% drop in the number of mothers dying. That’s not just a number – that means there are thousands of dads living with the love of their lives when they would otherwise have a broken heart nobody else could possibly mend. Thousands of big brothers and sisters who didn’t need to fear that in gaining a new member of the family they risked losing an old one. And thousands of babies being nursed to sleep tonight by the person who loves them most in the world and who has survived to love them as they grow. So this stuff works: campaigning is the key for all of us lucky enough to use our voices.
And on education, I am hopeful we can get even further than we have with the maternal mortality campaign, and achieve all of our goals by 2015. I know that sounds incredibly ambitious – because it means getting 57 million children into school in less than two years. Gordon and I have decided to devote the next years of our lives to this and we intend to be judged by our results. Increasing awareness is great – but if the numbers of children getting a high quality education does not increase in leaps and bounds in the years to come then we collectively will have failed.
Thankfully, we have a lot of help. When Gordon was appointed the United Nations’ Secretary General’s Special Envoy on education, the weight of the UN system was added to our cause. Business leaders have come on board to the Global Business Coalition for Education that I am fortunate to chair, and I am pleased that religious leaders have agreed to form a faith coalition to mobilise the faith communities as has happened so powerfully for debt relief and make poverty history in the past. Most significantly, younger people are lining up at as ambassadors, spokespersons, online champions and community mobilisers – the 600 strong youth leaders from the digital platform A World at School who assembled at the un on Malala Day in July, are all now engaging with their networks, supported by NGOs from around the world. The digital platform is growing rapidly, and the consistent messages, the constant call for action and the rising volume are starting to make a difference. From Syrian refugee children needing a place at school this autumn to young girls wanting to study before they marry in Yemen, Nigeria, Bangladesh to child workers who have never been inside a classroom, the momentum for them is growing.
This grand confluence of forces is powered by the single most important driver of change – every individual who cares enough to take up an action – whether just a tweet or post, or more. It includes you.
Because if we can’t mobilise millions of so-called ordinary people to do hundreds of extraordinary things, the governments of the world will conclude that the pledge they made to get every child into school can be allowed to quietly slip away, the pledge for gender equality ignored, the pledge that every child can be safe from violence, from trafficking and from finding their own voice just disappears. That would be a tragedy not just for the millions of children whose lives continue to be destroyed, but for the notion of progress itself.
If we can’t even rely on our leaders to do that which they have promised to do, can we rely on them to do all that we need them to do? I don’t want my children to grow up in a generation of cynics, a whole group of people who think that promises don’t get kept and politics doesn’t really work. I want them to see and to know that if we make a promise – particularly a promise to a child – we keep it. That when we see an injustice, we right it. That when we are presented with an opportunity we seize it. And that when we have the chance to change the world there is nothing we won’t do to see that potential fulfilled.
That, for me, is the ambitious spirit of activism which Index on Censorship embodies, and the one which we must now bring to bear in ensuring that the girls and women of the world learn first how to read, and then how to lead. This is the chance of our generation and I hope you, like me, think it is one we must grasp with both hands.
This speech transcript was originally posted on 18 Oct, 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
18 Oct 2013 | Bulgaria, Digital Freedom, Germany, News and features, United States
On 30 September, Bulgarian-German author Ilija Trojanow was travelling from Brazil to the US for a conference on German literature. That was his plan, anyway. At the airport in Salvador da Bahia, he was told his entry to the US had been denied. No explanation was provided then, and none has been provided since.
Trojanow is one of the main forces behind a 74,000 strong and growing petition against mass surveillance. Initiated and signed by some Germany’s biggest writers, the petition argues the government is bound by the constitution to protect its citizens against foreign spying.
His experience in Brazil exploded in the German media, but Trojanow seems more bemused than anything else.
“It wasn’t bad enough that governments are spying on everybody!” he says with a laugh. “What this shows is that general attacks on everybody and not individual victims, are too abstract. An individual case, even if it’s a minor one, can get more attention.”
While the incident did create more discussion around mass surveillance and caused a spike in the number of signatures, there is no doubt the petition already had widespread support. The issue of mass surveillance seems to have struck a particular chord in Germany. Trojanow believes this is due to their history.
“East Germany more than any other country in the former Soviet block has discussed its secret service files. It has been a dominant issue in the media. The archives are easy to access. Germans know how horrendous it is when the secret service is not under real control.”
He also thinks the famous German efficiency shines through even in this case. Many felt that something needed to be done about the mass surveillance, and when Germans set out to do something, they do it properly.
“It is quite ironic,” he adds: “Germans had democracy beaten into them. They were educated in democracy by the US and the UK. It seems they were good students!”
Trojanov himself has long been interested in the issue of state surveillance, with his 2009 book “Freedom Under Attack”, for instance, becoming a bestseller in Germany. For him, the issue carries a more personal dimension. Growing up in a Bulgaria, parts of his family were engaged in the struggle against the communist authorities.
“I am in the situation now where I am able to read transcripts of what adults in my family were saying, as our apartment was bugged.”
“What you realise is that when you have the attention of the secret service pointed at you, whatever you do is in some way proof of guilt. Even completely innocent things become potentially implicating.”
The petition was formally presented to the German government on 18 September, back when when it had 63,000 signatures. A month and ten thousand additional names later, they have still have yet to receive any sort of official reply. Still open, Trojanow and his compatriots now plan to take it global. As he says, mass surveillance is a worldwide challenge and cannot be tackled simply by and within one nation.
“I don’t understand why we wait until situation is completely unbearable. You start safeguarding your freedoms when they are attacked on the edges.”
This article was originally posted on 18 Oct 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
