Journalist and human rights activist Rafael Marques de Morais (Photo: Alex Brenner for Index on Censorship)
The trial of Rafael Marques de Morais, the investigative journalists who has exposed corruption and serious human rights violations connected to the diamond trade in his native Angola, will restart on 14 May. He was initially set to appear in court again on 23 April, but was informed of the postponement late in the evening on 22 April.
Marques de Morais is being sued for libel by a group of generals in connection to his work. The parties will be negotiating ahead of 14 May, to try and find some “common ground”, Marques de Morais told Index.
“In the interest of all parties and for the benefit of continuing work on human rights and for the future of the country, it is a very important step to be in direct contact,” he said.
“Rafael’s crucial investigations into human rights abuses in Angola should not be impeded by this dialogue. Index stresses the importance of avoiding any form of coercion,” said Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg.
Marques de Morais originally faced nine charges of defamation, but on his first court appearance on 23 March was handed down an additional 15 charges. The proceedings were marked by heavy police presence, and five people were arrested. This came just days after he was named joint winner of the 2015 Index Award for journalism.
The case is directly linked to Marques de Morais’ 2011 book Blood Diamonds: Torture and Corruption in Angola. In it, he recounted 500 cases of torture and 100 murders of villagers living near diamond mines, carried out by private security companies and military officials. He filed charges of crimes against humanity against seven generals, holding them morally responsible for atrocities committed. After his case was dropped by the prosecutions, the generals retaliated with a series of libel lawsuits in Angola and Portugal.
“Despite major differences, there is a willingness to talk that is far more important than sticking to individual positions. But this cannot impede work on human rights, freedom of the press and freedom of expression,” Marques de Morais added.
Who is Alan Buckby? According to Liberties Press, publishers of Numb: Diary of a War Correspondent, Buckby is the pseudonym of a 55-year old British foreign correspondent who was killed on assignment in 2014.
“A war correspondent for more than two decades, he led a double life, appearing to be a regular family man while at home in London, but immersed in sadism and depravity while on overseas assignments. He didn’t just document the violence – he became directly involved in it.”, the Liberties website blurb tells us excitedly.
Fun stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing. The ghostwriter, Louis La Roc, claimed that the materials for the book had come via a mutual friend from “Kay Buckby”, the wife of the deceased reporter.
Earlier this month, “Louis La Roc” appeared on two national radio stations in Ireland, luridly describing the contents of the book, to much criticism from Irish journalists. RTE’s Fergal Keane (not to be confused with the BBC’s Fergal Keane) dismissed the La Roc interview on the station’s John Murray show as “the biggest load of crap I have ever heard”, while the Irish Times’s Hugh Linehan called the interview (and by extension the book) “torture porn”.
Linehan invited Louis La Roc on the Irish Times’s Off Topic podcast on 18 April, where he and fellow Irish Times writer Patrick Freyne questioned him on the veracity of the details in the book. The timeline was, to put it mildly, all over the place. To give one example, in the book it is claimed that Buckby went to Northern Ireland in the early 80s because he was fascinated by British broadcasters’ ban on the broadcast of the voices of Sinn Fein and IRA spokespeople. In fact, that ban was only introduced in 1988. The author claimed that the various discrepancies in detail were introduced to protect the innocent, and that he had used a “cinematic jumpcut” technique to help the narrative along. Moreover, no one could find any evidence of a 55 year-old British foreign correspondent who died in late 2014.
The journalists questioned how long it had taken La Roc to write the book, from receiving the raw material to delivering to the publishers. Three months, apparently. When Freyne expressed surprise at this, La Roc suggested that it was about the same length of time as it took Siobhan Curham to work up Girl Online, the novel published under the name of vlogger Zoella that was one of last year’s best selling books, as if they were identical projects.
After the podcast, in which La Roc was openly accused of peddling fiction as fact, Freyne kept digging, and discovered that La Roc was more than likely the pen name of Colin Carroll, a self-promoter who had in the past, among other things, set up something called The Paddy Games and a website called Irish Empire. At one point he even had a joint BBC/RTE TV show, Colin And Graham’s Excellent Adventures (in the blurb for which, Colin and Graham are described as “sporting hoaxers”).
The coup de grace was delivered when another writer, Donal O’Keeffe, dug up a 2010 interview with Colin Carroll in a local newspaper, the Avondhu Press, in which he had said he was working on a novel with a war journalist as protagonist.
All in all, a very satisfactory bit of sleuthing for all concerned.
What happened next was interesting. Because what happened next was absolutely nothing. Numb is still out there, still listed under the non-fiction section of the Liberties Press website. The blurb still makes the same claims as it always has about the genesis of the book. The publisher is standing by the book, despite confirming that he made no attempt to verify the inflammatory information contained within. Perhaps defiantly, a quote from Oscar Wilde hovers at the top of the page: “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.”
It is as if…it is as if this is the kind of story that only journalists really care about (and you, dear reader, considering you’ve made it nearly 700 words into this piece. But you’re probably a hack too, aren’t you?).
And that is something that should give journalists pause for thought. Do people see us as we see ourselves? And do people put the same value on accuracy and truthfulness as we claim to?
Think of the great journalistic scandals of the past few years: when the story broke of Johann Hari’s fabrications and sockpupetting back in the summer of 2011, journalists talked about little else among themselves. Really, seriously, nothing else for about a month. But were Hari’s Independent readers camped outside Northcliffe House, furiously demanding apologies and clarifications from the paper and Hari himself? No. Non journalists I spoke to about the issue didn’t really understand what the fuss was about.
Or think of Jonah Lehrer, who made up quotes. Sure, like Hari, he was eventually dropped by employers, but did his readers really care that he’d put words in Bob Dylan’s mouth?
Meanwhile, online activists (not naming any names) spread all sorts of nonsense that gets more shares than many social media managers could dream of, because it contains that magical element of “truthiness”, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Colbert: it tells people what they want to hear. Just last week, lots of left wingers got terribly excited about a headline for a column in the Times which said that the Conservatives had got the economy wrong. “Wow ! The Times newspaper nails the Tory Lib Dem lie about the deficit & the financial crisis.” tweeted Michael H, with an accompanying picture of the headline “It’s a lie to say the Tories rescued the economy”. The tweet spread like wildfire, with the subcurrent being that EVEN THE MURDOCH PRESS was backing Labour now. The fact that the headline accompanied a guest column by a Labour peer seemed not to matter. The people sharing wanted it to be an attack on the Conservatives by the Murdoch press, and so it was.
It was the same desire for truthiness that fed the likes of Hari, and to an extent, feeds the publishers of Numb. It was what led Piers Morgan to publish photographs allegedly showing British soldiers torturing Iraqis, even though they were obviously false.
And I suspect it was behind Liberties Press decision to publish the “torture porn” of Numb: it felt like the kind of thing that might just be real.
It is important that journalism realises its duty to entertain and not just hector (not all journalism is, or should be, the “investigative journalism” so lionised by Royal Charter-waving groupies as the true untainted thing). But journalism should at least, be against truthiness, if only out of self interest. If anyone can make stuff up and get 1,000 shares on Twitter, why pay people for deep digging or elegant writing?
But consumers of media have a role to play in this too: everyone should be actively alert to the difference between stuff that is true and stuff that merely feels right, and not encourage the latter. As George Orwell wrote: “We shall have a serious and truthful and popular press when public opinion actively demands it.”
Mr Ilham Aliyev
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan Avenue 7
1005 Baku
Republic of Azerbaijan
Fax: +994124923543 and +994124920625
Email: [email protected]
Mr President,
We, the undersigned members and partners of the Human Rights House Network (HRHN) and the South Caucasus Network of Human Rights Defenders, are dismayed by the sentences upheld against human rights defender Rasul Jafarov and against human rights lawyer Intigam Aliyev, two prominent and internationally respected voices of the Azerbaijani civil society. We call upon the Azerbaijani authorities, through you, Mr President, to put an end to the unprecedented repression against civil society.
We call upon you to immediately and unconditionally release all human rights defenders, journalists and activists currently detained, including and especially human rights defenders Leyla and Arif Yunus, Rasul Jafarov, Intigam Aliyev and the journalist Khadija Ismayilova. Anar Mammadli must also be released, as his detention is solely due to his non-governmental organisation’s monitoring of elections in the Azerbaijan.
During the summer and fall of 2014 the main leaders of civil society were arrested. Many others decided to flee the country, rather than facing court hearings, of which the outcome is well known in advance. A few others have been forced into hiding.
On 22 April 2015, the Court for Grave Crimes in Baku sentenced Intigam Aliyev to 7 years and 6 months of detention on bogus charges of illegal business, misappropriation, tax evasion, abuse of office and forgery. Although Intigam Aliyev’s defence brought documentation to the court that all his grants were registered, as of the entry into force of such an obligation for NGOs in Azerbaijan, in violation of basic principles in regard to freedom of association as found by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission. We denounce the sentencing of Intigam Aliyev and believe the charges brought against him are politically motivated, and a direct consequence of his human rights work .
Intigam Aliyev is one of the most widely-respected human rights lawyers in Azerbaijan and leader of the Legal Education Society, an organization that both promotes awareness of the law and provides legal support to individuals and organizations, The Legal Education Society is a member of the Human Rights House Azerbaijan. Intigam Aliyev is also a lawyer active regionally, including by his participation in the Human Rights House Network’s International Law in Advocacy Programme.
Intigam Aliyev has strived for the legal protection of victims of human rights violations for more than 15 years and has to date represented them in proceedings before the European Court of Human Rights in more than 200 cases (around 40 cases are currently awaiting decision). When he was detained, he was defending more than 140 people in the Court. By detaining Intigam Aliyev the Azerbaijani authorities also deprive their citizens the right to appeal and seek justice before the Court.
In detention, Intigam Aliyev’s health condition has deteriorated and remains inadequately addressed by detention authorities. His conditions prior to his pre-trial detention since 8 August 2014 have continuously gotten worse, giving a strong indication that in fact the medication he is receiving in detention only addresses his pain and not his illness. We believe Intigam Aliyev’s detention conditions might have irremediable consequences on his health.
In the backdrop of an unprecedented repression against civil society in Azerbaijan, charges were also brought against many other human rights defenders, journalists and activists in Azerbaijan, either sentenced or held on pre-trial detention, such as Leyla Yunus, and her husband, Arif Yunus, Anar Mammadli, Rauf Mirkadirov and Hilal Mammadov, Tofiq Yaqublu, Ilgar Mammadov, various NIDA activists, as well as investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova. Charges are also brought against many human rights NGOs, such as the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS) and human rights defenders either forced into hiding, such as IRFS’s leader Emin Huseynov, or have left the country.
On 16 April 2015, the human rights defender Rasul Jafarov was sentenced to 6.5 years imprisonment, also on similar charges as Intigam Aliyev. The court ignored that out of the many so-called “victims” who were interrogated by the court did in fact have no knowledge of any damage supposedly committed by Rasul Jafarov against them. We also denounce the sentencing of Rasul Jafarov and believe the charges brought against him are politically motivated, due to his human rights work.
Rasul Jafarov is a widely respected human rights defender and advocate on the issue of wrongful imprisonment in Azerbaijan. After forming the Human Rights Club in December 2010. He is the initiator of the human rights and democracy campaign “Sing for Democracy,” as well as “Art for Democracy” and later in preparation of the upcoming European Olympic Games to be held in Baku in June 2015, the campaign “Sport for Rights.”
We call upon the Azerbaijani authorities, through you, Mr President, to put an end to the unprecedented repression against civil society in your country. We specifically call upon you to immediately and unconditionally release all above mentioned civil society actors, and drop all charges
held against them.
Yours sincerely,
Human Rights House Azerbaijan:
• Human Rights Centre of Azerbaijan
• Due to the risk of retaliation against Azerbaijani human rights defenders, we decided not to indicate the names of other Azerbaijani NGOs who would be signing this letter.
Barys Zvozskau Belarusian Human Rights House in exile, Vilnius (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Belarus Watch (ByWatch)
• Belarusian Association of Journalists
• Belarusian Helsinki Committee
• Belarusian PEN Centre
• City Public Association “Centar Supolnasc”
• Human Rights Centre “Viasna”
Human Rights House Belgrade (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Lawyers Committee for Human Rights YUCOM
Education Human Rights House Chernihiv (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Chernihiv Public Committee of Human Rights Protection
• Center of Humnistic Tehnologies “AHALAR”
• Center of Public Education “ALMENDA”
• Human Rights Center “Postup”
• Local Non-governmental Youth organizations М’АRТ
• Transcarpathian Public Center
• Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union
Human Rights House Kyiv (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law Enforcement
• Center for Civil Liberties
• Civil Service
• Human Rights Information Center
• Institute of Mass Information
• International Women’s Rights Center
• Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group
• Social Action Center
• Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union
• Ukrainian Legal Aid Foundation
Human Rights House Oslo (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Human Rights House Foundation
• Norwegian Helsinki Committee
Human Rights House Tbilisi (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Georgian Centre for Psychosocial and Medical Rehabilitation of Torture Victims
Human Rights House Voronezh (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• Charitable Foundation
• Civic Initiatives Development Centre
• Confederation of Free Labor
• For Ecological and Social Justice
• Free University
• Golos
• Interregional Trade Union of Literary Men
• Lawyers for labor rights
• Memorial
• Ms. Olga Gnezdilova
• Soldiers Mothers of Russia
• Voronezh Journalist Club
• Voronezh-Chernozemie
• Youth Human Rights Movement
Human Rights House Zagreb (on behalf of the following NGOs):
• APEO/UPIM Association for Promotion of Equal Opportunities for People with Disabilities
• B.a.B.e.
• CMS – Centre for Peace Studies
• Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past
• GOLJP – Civic Committee for Human Rights
• Svitanje – Association for Protection and Promotion of Mental Health
Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR), Poland
Index on Censorship, United Kingdom
Public Association for Assistance to Free Economy, Azerbaijan
Resource Centre for Human Rights, Moldova
Copies to:
• Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe
• Private Office of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe
• Delegation of the Council of Europe in Azerbaijan
• United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders
• United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of association and peaceful assembly
• Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organisation for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE ODIHR)
• Cabinet of Commissioner Johannes Hahn for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement
Negotiations
• Delegation of the European Union in Azerbaijan
• Subcommittee on Human Rights of the European Parliament
• Diplomatic community in Baku, Brussels, Geneva, New York and Strasbourg
• Various ministries of foreign affairs and parliamentary committees on foreign affairs
About the Human Rights House Network (www.humanrightshouse.org)
The Human Rights House Network (HRHN) unites 90 human rights NGOs joining forces in 18 independent Human Rights Houses in 13 countries in Western Balkans, Eastern Europe and South Caucasus, East and Horn of Africa, and Western Europe. HRHN’s aim is to protect, empower and support human rights organisations locally and unite them in an international network of Human Rights Houses.
The Human Rights House Azerbaijan is one of the members of HRHN and served as an independent meeting place, a resource centre, and a coordinator for human rights organisations in Azerbaijan. In 2010, 6’000 human rights defenders, youth activists, independent journalists, and lawyers, used the facilities of the Human Rights House Azerbaijan, which has become a focal point for promotion and protection of human rights in Azerbaijan. The Human Rights House Azerbaijan ceased all its activities following an order of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Azerbaijan on 10 March 2011.
From left: Playwright Zodwa Nyoni, novelist Chris Cleave, author Nadifa Mohamed and Tim Finch, author and chair of Counterpoints Arts.
Index on Censorship partnered a lively event at Rich Mix, London on Tuesday 21 April, along with Counterpoints Arts and Platforma Arts & Refugees Network.
The evening featured discussion of the representation of refugees in novels and plays, as well as extracts from writings by the panellists, author Nadifa Mohamed; novelist Chris Cleave; poet and playwright Zodwa Nyoni and the chair, author Tim Finch. The event also included music by Syrian musician Maya Youssef who performed on the kanun.
Below is a short piece of video from the evening, as well as a selection of tweets from the event:
