Representatives from Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence will be in London next week hoping to win a highly prestigious Index of Censorship Freedom of Expression Award. Read the full article
Despite growing public knowledge of global digital surveillance capabilities and practices, it has often proved hard to attract mainstream public interest in the issue. This continues to be the case in Iran where even with widespread VPN usage, there is still little real awareness of digital security threats.
With public sexual health awareness equally low, the three people behind Jensiat, an online graphic novel, saw an opportunity to marry these challenges. Dealing with issues linked to sexuality and cyber security in a way that any Iranian can easily relate to, the webcomic also offers direct access to verified digital security resources. Launched in March 2016, Jensiat has had around 1.2 million unique readers and was rapidly censored by the Iranian government.
“Our interactions with readers leads us to believe they have picked up what we’ve been discussing, and are incorporating them into their online lives,” its creators told Index on Censorship.
With a team of illustrators, satirical writers, technologists and Internet researchers Jensiat constructed a graphic novel with a unique strategy of instilling a culture of understanding and everyday practices. The first season, which finished in August 2016, was centred around six episodes. The story revolved around the main character Leila, her love interest Jamshid, and her best friend and sexual health therapist Shirin. The characters built an NGO based on counselling and advice on matters regarding relationships, sexuality and sexual health, all the while encountering cyber security concerns such as phishing attacks, unsecured networks and how to protect your social media accounts from an abusive partner.
Iranians now contact the creators of the graphic novel seeking advice on what technologies or applications to download, and to discuss and debate the many risks Iranians face online. In March 2016, Jensiat’s website was filtered by the Iranian filtering committee, highlighting the discomfort the creators bring to the Iranian regime’s attempts to control the internet.
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Enough is Enough, a play formed as a gig, tells the stories of real people about sexual violence, through song and dark humour. It is written by Meltem Arikan, directed by Memet Ali Alabora, with music by Maddie Jones, and includes four female cast members who act as members of a band.
While touring Wales recently with my new play Enough Is Enough, I thought about what I experienced with my earlier work in Turkey. But which Turkey?
In the so-called “New Turkey”, everything is being surveilled by the government, from plays and books to everything you share on social media. There were no undercover Welsh police or prosecutors sitting in the audience in Newport or Pontypridd.
We designed Enough is Enough as a touring project. We went to 21 different Welsh venues in 21 different places, north, south, east and west, in less than a month. Audience members had strong positive reactions and some suggested that the production should be taken into schools. In the New Turkey even thinking about taking the play to schools would be enough to be accused of something unimaginable. If you dared sing the songs sung in Enough is Enough, you can be sure you would receive a violent reaction.
When you confront reality in a direct way, even if it is through art, governments around the world do not want to hear your voice. The New Turkey’s government is only an extreme example. When you speak truths, governments do not want you to be heard – they do not want you at all.
Yet when you show reality in a direct way, when you slap the audience with pain, the reaction becomes the same everywhere. First they are shocked, then they find you unusual, but in the end they compliment you for doing it.
During our tour of Wales, people let us into their hearts, looked after us and many venues promised to invite us again. Audience members shared their stories with us. Many wanted to work with us, others supported us unconditionally.
After every performance we had “shout it all out” sessions. We heard repeatedly how many of the issues we confront on stage – sexual violence, oppression and misogyny – are being swept under the carpet because people don’t like to discuss them.
These sessions took me back to a time before I wrote Mi Minor, the play accused of being a rehearsal for the Gezi Park protests in 2013. A time before I had to leave the country because of those accusations. A time before the innovations in the New Turkey was not as horrifyingly obvious as they are now. A time when the AKP, the ruling party of Turkey, was backed not just by the liberals in Turkey but liberals around the world. Back then I was told I was wrong about the government. It was in 2007 that I wrote a play entitled I am Breaking the Game.
That play premiered in Zurich and toured to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Istanbul and Ankara. No matter where it was performed there was a particular reaction that stuck with me: “These issues are not our issues, they belong to the East.”
I was inspired by the stories of people I know personally. I was in touch with the victims of domestic violence, honour killings, rape, incest and sexual abuse. I knew all stories were true. So I wasn’t sure why then so many didn’t see these issues as theirs. I searched and searched for this place far away from everyone and everything, where all these horrible things keep happening, called the “East”. Eventually I found myself in the West.
After graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, actor Pinar Ogun felt inspired by Breaking the Game. She felt angry that the run of the play was short in Turkey and she became passionate — almost obsessed — to stage it in London. She tried to convince her instructors at LAMDA, artistic directors of various venues and theatre friends to make it happen. She even introduced me to a couple of people who showed interest, but the reaction was again the same: “Of course these issues are very important but these issues are not our issues, they belong to the East. We resolved these issues in the 1970s. Such plays, performances have been done in the past. These are very old discourses.”
Laurie Penny was one of the only people who had a different reaction. She interviewed me nine years ago: “However much she is hounded by Turkish authorities and tutted at by European theatre goers, one thing is certain: Meltem Arikan is not about to roll over and hush. And thank goodness for that.”
When slapped in the face does it hurt less in the West than in the East?
Why is it considered a social phenomenon when women are killed in the name of honour in the East but an individual crime when women are killed in the name of passion, obsession or jealousy in the West? Child marriage in the East is seen as a nightmare. But, in the West, does calling pregnant children “teen moms” prevent their lives from turning into a nightmare?
After I was forced to leave Turkey and began living in Wales, Ogun restarted her campaign to stage I am Breaking the Game. A year ago, I finally said yes. I’ve been observing a West that has been dazzled by the light of past enlightenments, alienated from its very own issues, attached to the chains of concepts and utterly disconnected to its reality. With Ogun’s company, Be Aware Productions, we applied to Arts Council Wales for research and development funding. But even after the grant was awarded, I was afraid I would still hear the echoes of the long-dead rejection: “These issues are not our issues, they belong to the East”, “the stories of the East”, “The East…”
My rejections, my questions, my issues.
During our research process we met with Welsh sex workers, organisations that help and support women facing violence, and victims. My initial idea was to replace these new stories with the stories in the play, but then I decided to write a new play entirely.
I developed the play with stories of abuse, rape and incest from Britain, all true stories, all had actually happened in these lands. Sometimes I used the exact words of the victims, sometimes I made them more poetic, but most importantly, in order to reach the hearts of the audience, I decided to use the magic of music and that’s how the idea of making it a gig-theatre came to be.
My rejections, my questions, my issues.
When writing Enough is Enough, my intention was to become a megaphone to the people who are facing violence here, to point to the elephant in the room by talking about incest and to underline the fact that when it is about the existence of women and men, those in the West and those in the East were the same.
I dare to say this because I can see blatantly that no matter how much cultures, cuisines, languages, clothes, ethnical backgrounds have managed to differentiate each and every one of us, no matter whether we were born in the West or in the East, we’re all forced to have the life forms designed by the patriarchy and so we are all dominated by the same fears for thousands of years.
Just like the East, the West also lives in its own virtual world built on the concepts of the patriarchal culture. And the relative comfort of this world doesn’t mean a thing for the victims. Just like Turkey, just like France, just like Yemen, just like the USA, women, children and men in Britain become victims. Abuse, rape and incest endlessly continue to exist with all its savagery within society, behind closed doors. The pain and consequences of this ongoing violence continue to be ignored. And while children become the children of fear, not the children of their parents, all around the world violence continues to beget violence. Those who face their pain empathise with victims, whereas those who escape their pain empathise with the perpetrators.
During the Wales tour, the reaction from people who were violated, who knew what violence was, who did not escape from their pain, who faced themselves, who were not in denial of their experiences, in short, the reaction from people who knew the pain of reality, was warm, open and stripped-down. We received the biggest support from women’s organisations, women, some brave men, young people and the LGBT community.
On 8 April 2017 at the Wales Millennium Centre and from the 26-29 April at Chapter Arts Centre, we will continue to say “Enough is Enough”. This time our goal is to reach promoters and artistic directors for an England tour. We want to make our voice be heard in England, and shout “Enough is Enough” together with the English audience.
I really wonder about the reaction of the audience in England. Will they be as open as the Welsh audience or will they keep repeating their apologies while saying these are the East’s problems. The irony is that this time we will be coming from the West, at least west of England.
Yet, whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure there won’t be any audience members who try to organise a mob against us.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure the play would never be banned with the accusation of “disturbing the family order”.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure that newspapers won’t run a smear campaign against the actors because of our play.
Whatever the reaction of the audience in England may be, I know for sure I won’t receive any death threats just because I dared to address violence against women. [/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The biggest joke in Cassandra Vera’s case is a year-long prison sentence for 13 humorous tweets about the assassination of Francoist minister Luis Carrero Blanco. A liberal democracy has sent someone to jail for making jokes in poor taste.
Vera, who is now 21 years old, published tweets between 2013 and 2016 about the assassination of Blanco, dictator Francisco Franco’s prime minister. He was killed in a car bomb attack carried out by the Basque terrorist organisation ETA in Madrid on 20 December 1973.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_icon icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-times-circle” color=”black” background_style=”rounded” size=”xl” align=”right”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]
Many people seem interested in stopping the circulation of words and ideas they dislike. But, of course, it is precisely those ideas and words that someone dislikes that require the protection offered by freedom of speech.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Even though the Audiencia Nacional sentence can be appealed and probably won’t entail prison, it is obscene. In recent times there have been many worrying cases in Spain: the burning of the image of Juan Carlos de Borbón was punished with a €2,700 fine; the singer César Strawberry was sentenced to one year in prison because of six tweets which, according to the ruling, “humiliated victims of terrorism”; other users of this social network have been convicted or prosecuted. The balance does not always fall on the same side. On other occasions, the left that has asked that action to be taken against bishops who pronounce homophobic homilies or against Hazte Oír, an ultra-Catholic outfit which launched an anti-transgender campaign. A side effect is that these censorious tendencies turn rather unpleasant people and groups into martyrs of freedom of speech.
Many people seem interested in stopping the circulation of words and ideas they dislike. But, of course, it is precisely those ideas and words that someone dislikes that require the protection offered by freedom of speech. On the other hand, this protection is offered regardless of the merit of what is stated: defending the right to express an opinion does not mean that we agree with it or that this opinion is protected from criticism, rebuttal or derision. As Germán Teruel, a lecturer in the Universidad Europea de Madrid, has written: “Recognition of freedom of expression means that there are certain socially harmful, harmful or dangerous manifestations that are going to be constitutionally protected.” Freedom, Teruel maintained, demands responsibility, respect and indifference.
In Vera’s case, the article that has been applied (578 of the Penal Code, which punishes “glorification or justification” of terrorism) has, for some experts, debatable aspects. It also seems designed to combat something else: the activity of a terrorist organisation which had propaganda outfits and capacity for social mobilisation. In this case, and in a few others, legislation originally designed to solve different problems has been applied to Vera. Often, the law is not being used to combat terrorism, but to prosecute and convict people who say stupid things on Twitter. Cases such as this, as Tsevan Rabtan has written, have the added effect of delegitimising measures against the justification and glorification of terrorism in general.
This example is especially striking: the victim of terrorism was also the prime minister of a dictatorial government. The attack (where there were other casualties, and where two other people died) took place more than 40 years ago, long before Vera was born. The killers benefited from 1977’s amnesty law. The assassination of Carrero Blanco is an iconic moment in Spanish history. Like many such milestones it endures a certain depersonalisation and produces constant reinterpretations, some of them frivolous or insensitive. Trying to stop this happening causes injustice – only the tragedies of some victims are protected. On the contrary, if it was done efficiently, the result would be a society where we could not talk about many things.
As legal scholar Miguel Ángel Presno Linera explained, in cases such as Strawberry’s and Vera’s: “It is legally incomprehensible that the context in which they [their comments] were issued is not taken into account; in the first case, the Supreme Court reversed the acquittal agreed by the Audiencia Nacional – ‘It has not been proven with those messages César [Strawberry] sought to defend the postulates of a terrorist organization, nor to despise or humiliate their victims’ – and sentenced him on the basis that the purpose of his messages was not relevant – what had to be valued was what he had really said.”
Moreover, these interpretations don’t take full account of the way social networks work. Networks cannot be a lawless terrain and freedom of speech is always regulated, but the type of communication that is established based on them must be taken into account too: the importance of expressive use, the effects that can be or want to be achieved. When you read something without taking into account the context, not giving value to its intention and not discriminating between what is said seriously and what is said in jest, you simply misread it.
The tweets that originate these rulings are often rejectable, but this kind of legal answers have wider and more dangerous effects. They also serve to intimidate us: to impoverish our conversation and our democracy and to make us all less free.
Daniel Gascón is the editor of Letras Libres Spain.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Coming soon: The spring issue of Index on Censorship magazine looks at how pressures on free speech are currently coming from many different angles, not just one. Spanish puppeteer Alfonso Lázaro de la Fuente arrested last year for a show that referenced Basque-separatist organisation ETA. In an Index exclusive, he explains what the charges have meant for his personal and professional life.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1491210162193-902bf89d-62e7-0″ taxonomies=”199″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
