27 Oct 2021 | News and features, The climate crisis, Turkey, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
“Funded by George Soros and the Rockefeller family, Greenpeace organises chaotic events around the world, spearheading protest movements against the construction of the Istanbul Canal,” Yeni Akit, the Turkish government’s favourite far-right newspaper, reported recently.
The artificial sea-level waterway, if it gets built, will connect Marmara with the Black Sea, with an outcome most experts agree will be catastrophic for Istanbul and the Marmara Sea. But Turkey’s Islamist government brands anyone opposing its ecocidal project as traitors and foreign agents.
“Greenpeace issued a statement, ‘No to the Istanbul Canal’, on its website, insistently disseminating the lie that this project will harm the environment,” the pro-government daily warned, calling the canal “the project of the century” and describing criticisms and warnings from activists, experts and scientists as “mere propaganda”.
Attacks on environmental activists have never been greater in Turkey, where laws passed under the state of emergency in 2016 continue to allow Islamists to detain dissidents and NGO workers as “terrorist sympathisers”.
For Özgür Gürbüz, one of Turkey’s most seasoned environmental activists, the atmosphere of 2021 is reminiscent of the early 2000s.
Since the 1990s, Gürbüz has organised petitions against the construction of nuclear plants in Turkey; marched outside embassies to protest against nuclear projects by Chinese, French, Japanese and Russian companies; and once walked, backwards, from Mersin to Akkuyu – a 170km journey – to make his voice heard.
One of Turkey’s first environmental reporters, Gürbüz worked for the liberal Yeni Yüzyıl newspaper in 1996 when he began covering protests against Turkey’s first gold mine in the Anatolian town of Bergama. The Canadian company that operated the mine used cyanide in the extraction process. Villagers who opposed the technique placed ballot boxes in Bergama’s town square and held a vote, using direct democracy to settle the issue. They also travelled to Istanbul and, wearing Asterix and Obelix costumes, walked on the city’s Bosphorus Bridge carrying banners that read: “Hey police, first listen to what we have to say, then you can beat us!”
Gürbüz frequently travelled from Istanbul to Bergama to cover the protests. “Then one day,” he recalled, “a massive conspiracy theory, designed to demonise Bergama’s villagers, emerged.”
A German plot
According to the ultra-nationalist press, tales about cyanide were but a plot devised by a network of German NGOs, spearheaded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, to bring Turkey to its knees. Ankara’s State Security Court opened a case in 2002, where 15 NGO workers faced spying charges which carried prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Meanwhile, a Turkish mining company called Koza had taken control of Bergama’s mine. Gürbüz smelt a rat. Whenever he called Koza, the company’s press officer asked him: “Do you know what German NGOs had been doing here? Let me send you a cache of information!” But a brief glimpse at the documents showed they contained nothing “but unfounded claims”.
Gürbüz believes Koza had disseminated disinformation to dissuade patriotic Turks who supported the uprising from opposing their takeover. It later transpired that Koza was one of the companies operated by the movement of Fetullah Gülen, the Islamist preacher who allied with president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the 2000s to purge secularists from Turkey’s public sector.
This tactic of criminalising civil society cast a long shadow that continues to this day.
“Sometimes they accuse us of being German spies; other times we’re British collaborators. Countries change; the accusation of being in the pay of foreign powers does not,” Gürbüz said. “But their accusations devastated Bergama villagers. I know them. They love their soil, and all they wanted was to practice agriculture.
“They are patriots, typical Anatolian people who suddenly found themselves on the telly, portrayed as German and British agents. It was impossible for them not to panic.”
For scholars and experts who worked for environmental causes, the prospect of a knock on the door from the security services became a real possibility. “The public broadcaster TRT gave airtime to the disinformation campaign featuring German NGOs. Such speculation exhausted and harmed Turkey’s burgeoning environmental movement,” said Gürbüz.
The spying case that began in 2002 came to nothing. Still, its mentality set the tone for the oppression of green activists over the next two decades, casting doubts on international NGOs just as the climate crisis worsened.
“Those who environmentalists rattle use whatever tool that comes in handy for them,” Gürbüz said, pointing to Aysin and Ali Ulvi Büyüknohutçu, a couple in their 60s known for their environmental activism in south-west Turkey, who were murdered in 2017. Gürbüz said: “They were trying to defend their environment. They received no funding, and yet the forces opposed to their struggle hired a young man to shoot them with a hunting rifle.”
Gürbüz sees a pattern in these cases where polluters use Turkey’s xenophobic climate to blame NGOs that oppose their ecocidal projects.
“Other tactics include tax controls, sending inspectors to NGOs to intimidate their workers,” he said.
To counter such manoeuvres, Gürbüz believes, journalists must act boldly. “In the past, we used to deal directly with the government because most polluters were public bodies. With the new autocratic regime, things are different. Private company CEOs are friends of newspaper tycoons who have ties to the government. Thanks to these intricate ties, the field for environmental journalism has shrunk.”
Tuna censorship
Gürbüz has suffered numerous instances of censorship. After identifying heavy metals in fish samples from the Marmara Sea, his newspaper refused to print the word “tuna” to avoid angering advertisers. (He published the uncensored version on his blog.) When he travelled to Yatağan to report on the public health implications of a thermic plant, his editor refused to publish the report, fearing that the company behind the project might become the newspaper’s new owner.
“This is why independent media is so crucial for the environmental struggle,” Gürbüz said.
After his reporting career came to an end, he spent a year in China before, on returning to Turkey, entering the NGO world, working for Greenpeace Mediterranean’s energy campaign and moving to the Heinrich Böll Foundation to become project co-ordinator, overseeing which projects to fund. He also worked for WWF Turkey.
Then, in 2013, everything changed with Occupy Gezi, the biggest environmentalist protest in Turkey’s history.
“Thousands of people marched there, and they managed to save the park,” he said. “Honestly, it isn’t easy to see how such events begin and shapeshift. A handful of my friends who were collecting signatures outside Gezi suddenly saw their supporters snowball into thousands after bulldozers entered the park and cops burned their tents.”
As Gezi grew, Turkey’s Islamists once again branded environmental activists as foreign agents funded by “the interest lobby”, a dog-whistle term used to appeal to their antisemitic voters. Pro-government papers identified the German airline company Lufthansa’s jealousy of Istanbul’s planned new airport as the reason behind “the German hand” in protests.
But Gürbüz said: “If you want the agents behind Gezi, why don’t you look at the people who advised the government to build a shopping mall there in the first place? If it weren’t for them, these protests would never have happened.”
And yet their rabid discourse is still with us. Dozens of scientists, environmentalists and scholars have written extensively about the Istanbul Canal’s disastrous effects, and “it would be a strategic mistake for the government to try to present this as another foreign-funded opposition campaign”, Gürbüz said – but that is precisely what is happening. “This discourse is an insult to the mind of this nation.”
Turkey’s Green Party
In 2008, Gürbüz served as a co-founder of Yeşiller (Green Party), the second iteration of a party that originally launched in 1988. The original Yeşiller emerged as a fresh voice in the leftist circles that the 12 September coup in 1980 destroyed.
Koray Doğan Urbarlı, a green activist, has childhood memories of Yeşiller’s early protests. He said: “In 1990, when I was five, Yeşiller held a meeting in Izmir to oppose the construction of the Aliağa Thermal Power Plant. My parents also brought me to the Yatağan protests. I later learned that those were all Yeşiller events.”
In August 2008, Urbarlı attended a meeting organised by Yeşiller. The party was a month old, and it changed his life. Helping found its local Izmir branches, he devoted his life to Yeşiller.
There he also met Emine Özkan. Born in 1993, Özkan had spent her youth in an ultra-conservative family in Eskişehir, specialising in bird migration before starting work for NGOs. Today, Urbarlı and Özkan are spokespeople for Yeşiller’s third iteration.
“There was a straight line between bird preservation and politics,” Özkan said. “I discovered how LGBT rights, children’s rights and disability activism are all connected. Yet, as individuals, there is a limit to what we can achieve. The more we can organise this into a political struggle, the more we can deliver change.”
When she first entered the green struggle, just a few activists in Turkey were aware of the impending climate crisis. “Now, it impacts our lives daily. It adds to other problems: Turkey’s autocratic regime and economic crisis. What we have known and said in the background for years is now coming to the fore,” she said, adding that as authoritarianism increases and trust in the government diminishes, environmental NGOs and the women’s movement are on the rise.
“These days, oppressed people channel all their political frustrations via the green movement,” said Urbarlı, who accepts that talking critically about ecological issues is easier than in other fields in Turkey, such as those of minority or LGBT rights.
“In the past, we were seen as marginal figures; now what we say plays a crucial part in political debates.”
It’s little wonder Yeşiller is receiving the government’s cold shoulder. Despite submitting all the required documents on 21 September 2020, it has received no word from the Interior Ministry, which refuses to acknowledge it as a political party. “They neither deny nor affirm us. This violates our civil rights,” the co-founders said.
Turkey’s constitution clarifies that no one has the power to prevent a party’s foundation, and yet the government has “placed Yeşiller in limbo”.
Despite state muzzling, Yeşiller is hopeful for the future. “Looking at Occupy Gezi eight years on, we can see that the principles we held dear during the foundation of Yeşiller in 2008 were realised in the form of peaceful resistance, with demands for local democracy and gender equality,” Urbarlı said. “Gezi helped disseminate green ideas to bigger crowds, and it enlightens our ideas to this day.”
But the government’s xenophobic discourse has proved to be similarly resistant. When wildfires broke out in the country’s forests in late July, a social media campaign targeted Yeşiller after the party’s Twitter account pointed to climate change as the cause of the fires.
Pro-government newspapers said “Kurdish terrorists” were behind the fires; one journalist blamed the planting of “traitorous” pine trees as part of the Marshall Plan in the 1950s, calling it a sinister plan devised by “US imperialism” to burn Turkey to the ground with help from its “traitorous” local collaborators. The post was shared and liked by thousands.
“These conspiracy theories make people feel safe,” Özkan said. “This is the difficulty of environmental politics today. Despite these lynching attempts, we have to continue telling the truth.”
Urbarlı envisages a future in which the party can serve in a coalition government, anticipated to be formed after the general elections that are scheduled for 2023.
“It’s easy to be an environmentalist when you’re in the opposition,” he said, highlighting the example of Erdoğan, the Istanbul Canal’s architect, who used to conduct press conferences with Yeşiller to defend freedom of expression decades ago when he was the Istanbul head of the Islamist Welfare Party.
“Such is the difference between being in opposition and power, and it is a lesson we should learn from.”
25 Oct 2021 | News and features, The climate crisis, Uganda, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
Uganda’s natural resources base, one of the richest and most diverse in Africa, continues to be degraded, jeopardising both individual livelihoods and the country’s economic development.
Evidence from the UN Environment Programme reveals that its forests, home to several endangered or soon-to-be extinct animal and plant species, are being mercilessly ravaged by poachers, illegal charcoal traders and loggers, and greedy investors.
Overfishing in the country’s lakes and rivers is rife. Its wetlands are being cleared for agricultural use and the rate of forest cover loss stands at 2.6 per cent annually, according to independent sources.
As part of efforts to ensure that the east African nation’s natural resources are effectively managed and protected, a group of environmental activists has gone to war to protect these natural wonders from bleeding further.
“Environmental activism in Uganda is not a safe identity – it’s a hostile and fragile environment,” William Amanzuru, team leader at Friends of Zoka, told Index.
“Activists are seen as fronting foreign views and opinions, enemies of the state and enemies of development.”
Amanzuru, who won the EU Human Rights Defenders Award in 2019, says environmental abuse in Uganda is highly militarised, so any intervention for nature conservation seems like a battlefield in a highly sophisticated war.
William Amanzuru, team leader at Friends of Zoka
“You directly deal with our finest military elite who run the show because of the huge profits gained from it,” he said. “We are always being followed by state and non-state actors and those involved in the depletion of natural resources like the Zoka Central Forest Reserve.”
Amanzuru said he had received threatening phone calls and had been intimidated by government and local police officials. “My phone is always tapped,” he added.
Anthony Masake, programme officer at Chapter Four Uganda, a human rights organisation, said environmental human rights defenders in Uganda were increasingly operating in a hostile environment.
“They repeatedly face reprisal attacks in the form of arbitrary arrests and detention, character assassination, being labelled traitors, assaults, intimidation and isolation, among others,” he said.
Masake added that illegal loggers and charcoal dealers, land grabbers and corporations often connived with their government backers to shield them from the law and accountability.
“Politicians, police officers and local leaders have often been cited in incidents of reprisal attacks against environmental defenders in Adjumani, Hoima and other districts,” he said.
Hidden from view
Uganda’s environmental battlefields are located in rural and remote areas where life and time seem to stop – far from the public eye and the noise and the vibe of big cities.
“The terrain has exposed them to easy targeting because the operation areas are far removed from urban areas where they would be able to access quick and competent legal services,” said Masake.
“The rise of incidents of corruption, abuse of office, lack of accountability for abusers and deterioration of the state and rule of law has further emboldened perpetrators to continue attacking environmental defenders because they know they can get away with it.”
As watchdogs of society, journalists who attempt to expose environmental crimes and abuse are also often the victims of sheer brutality and violence, according to several sources who spoke to Index.
“I deplore the way [president Yoweri] Museveni’s security forces ill-treat journalists, especially environmental journalists,” said one. “They have done nothing wrong. All they do is to tell the nation and the world that our natural resources are in danger of being extinct if we do not trade carefully. Is that a crime?”
The journalist, who claimed to fear Ugandan security forces and intelligence services “more than God”, spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Silencing the critics
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and its partners, the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and the World Organisation Against Torture, have vehemently and repeatedly condemned the arrest and arbitrary detention of environmental journalists.
Venex Watebawa and Joshua Mutale, the team leader and head of programmes at Water and Environment Media Network (Wemnet), were recently arrested in Hoima, in western Uganda, on their way to attend a radio talkshow at Spice FM.
The FIDH reported that they were supposed to discuss the risks and dangers of sugarcane growing projects in the Bugoma forest and of allowing oil activities in critical biodiversity areas including rivers, lakes, national parks, forests and wetlands.
Home to more than 600 chimpanzees and endangered bird species, including African grey parrots, Bugoma is a tropical rainforest which was declared as a nature reserve in 1932.
Following the arrest of Wemnet members, all hell broke loose when security forces arrested more environmental activists who went to the police station to negotiate the release of Watebawa and Mutale.
The arrests, which are believed to have been called for by Hoima Sugar, the company decimating the Bugoma forest to convert it into a sugarcane plantation, were a bitter pill to swallow. (Index asked Hoima Sugar to comment on these allegations but received no response.)
“Environment stories are so delicate because the people behind the destruction of the environment are people with a lot of money, who are well connected and have a lot of influence,” Watebawa told Index.
He slammed the National Environment Management Authority – which is mandated to oversee conservation efforts – for having been influenced by Hoima Sugar.
“To our surprise, it gave a report in a record time of two weeks to clear the below-bare-minimum-standard environmental impact assessment report to clear 22 square miles of land in a sensitive and fragile ecosystem,” he said.
“The deployment of paramilitary agencies to give sanctuary to the destroyers of the forest speaks volumes of the government’s commitment to protect the environment.”
Journalists who have attempted to get anywhere near the Bugoma central forests have been harassed or faced the wrath of the army.
“These incidents have demotivated and scared us,” said Watebawa. “Between March and June, two of our members lost their cameras and laptops. Our communications officer, Samuel Kayiwa, was trailed, his car broken into in Kajjasi, and his gear stolen.”
The trade in environmental abuse
In another incident targeting the environmental media, Wemnet reported that someone broke into the house of Agnes Nantambi, a journalist working for New Vision, after midnight, forcing her to surrender her laptop and camera.
Amanzuru was arrested in February after an incident in which locals impounded a Kampala-bound truck ferrying illegal charcoal. He claimed that the military provided protection for those investing in illegal logging, illegal timber harvesting and the commercial charcoal trade.
He said the country’s environment sector was highly politicised, with the government drawing a lot of illicit money from the abuse of natural resources.
“Politicians trade in environmental abuse because this is an unmonitored trade … They make quick money for their political sustainability.”
And as the Museveni government’s aggression towards environmental activists increases day by day, human rights organisations have vowed to fight and to die with their boots on.
Amanzuru’s arrest attracted the attention of the EU ambassador to Uganda, who wrote to environment minister Beatrice Anywar Atim to request a fair and speedy trial.
Entities offering support include the Defenders’ Protection Initiative, Chapter Four Uganda and the National Coalition of Human Rights Defenders in Uganda.
But despite the grim outlook, Watebawa remains optimistic about the future of environmental activism.
He says society is stronger, more organised and more determined than ever, and the media persistently exposes environmental abuse.
He believes all responsible citizens must challenge the impunity to which environmental human rights defenders so often fall victim because the environment, ultimately, is a shared resource.
22 Oct 2021 | Afghanistan, News and features, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
Documenting the lives of women in Afghanistan, Forty Names by Afghan poet Parwana Fayyaz is a poignant reminder of lost opportunities, of freedoms given and then taken away, of a new generation living without enlightenment through education.
The collection, the title verse of which won the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem “focusses on stories and experiences from my childhood” and the ingrained attitude of acceptance that comes with a lack of schooling.
The title itself is reference to one of those very stories, where 40 women throw themselves off a cliff in order to protect their honour, rather than die with dishonour.
As she told Carcanet Press: “I grew up among women who told stories, stories concerning women. As the time passed, the women themselves became the stories. The majority of these women never went to school. They share their philosophy of life down through generations. [They say] “in the face of hardship, be patient, patience is the remedy”.”
Born in 1990, Fayyaz’s education challenges this idea. Now with a PhD in Persian Studies from Cambridge University, how can silence possibly make sense?
“When I left my home and Afghanistan to embark on my journey to become more educated, I began to reflect on the lives of the women I had always admired,” she said. “I began to question my admiration for them. They were suffering and yet they accepted it. To suffer in silence is seen as a token of patience.”
“With more education, patience became more elusive.”
Indeed, the choice now for so many women and girls in Afghanistan, sadly, is only silence and patience, but without the reward the piety is supposed to bring. As the Taliban tightens its stranglehold over the country, it forces out the oxygen required for art and literature to flourish and for women to learn how to express themselves in this sense.
Certainly, more than they previously should have done, everyday people in the west are taking notice of Afghanistan. The stories and images that have shocked so many people are not new, but it quite obviously takes a feeling of personal involvement – Nato troops were caught in a dangerous evacuation process – for people to take notice for long.
Even the process of translation for Fayyaz was important in this regard, “My poetry makes use of the art of translation to enhance the meaning of my story-poems for a Western audience, specifically involving the translation of Persian names into English. In active translation, the Persian names are the sounds and the English translations their echoes.”
Perhaps, to the English-speaking world, the plight of Afghans under the Taliban will remain as far-distant noises that will not reverberate so loudly for long. Forty Names, then, is in its truest sense a reflection of what has been lost for a whole generation of Afghan girls: a reminder that Afghanistan’s brief experience of democracy will never be forgotten.
Forty Names
by Parwana Fayyaz
I
Zib was young.
Her youth was all she cared for.
These mountains were her cots
the wind her wings, and those pebbles were her friends.
Their clay hut, a hut for all the eight women,
and her Father, a shepherd.
He knew every cave and all possible ponds.
He took her to herd with him,
as the youngest daughter
Zib marched with her father.
She learnt the ways to the caves and the ponds.
Young women gathered there for water, the young
girls with the bright dresses, their green
eyes were the muses.
Behind those mountains
she dug a deep hole,
storing a pile of pebbles.
II
The daffodils
never grew here before,
but what is this yellow sea up high on the hills?
A line of some blue wildflowers.
In a lane toward the pile of tumbleweeds
all the houses for the cicadas,
all your neighbors.
And the eagle roars in the distance,
have you met them yet?
The sky above, through the opaque skin of
your dust, carries whims from the mountains,
it brings me a story.
The story of forty young bodies.
III
A knock,
father opened the door.
There stood the fathers,
the mothers’ faces startled.
All the daughters standing behind them.
In the pit of dark night,
their yellow and turquoise colors
lining the sky.
‘Zibon, my daughter,
take them to the cave.’
She was handed a lantern;
she took the way.
Behind her a herd of colors flowing.
The night was slow,
the sound of their footsteps a solo music of a mystic.
Names:
Sediqa, Hakima, Roqia,
Firoza, Lilia, Soghra.
Shah Bakhat, Shah Dokht, Zamaroot,
Naznin, Gul Badan, Fatima, Fariba.
Sharifa, Marifa, Zinab, Fakhria, Shahparak, MahGol,
Latifa, Shukria, Khadija, Taj Begum, Kubra, Yaqoot,
Nadia, Zahra, Shima, Khadija, Farkhunda, Halima, Mahrokh, Nigina,
Maryam, Zarin, Zara, Zari, Zamin,
Zarina,
at last Zibon.
IV
No news. Neither drums nor flutes of
shepherds reached them, they
remained in the cave. Were
people gone?
Once in every night, an exhausting
tear dropped – heard from someone’s mouth,
a whim. A total silence again.
Zib calmed them.
Each daughter
crawled under her veil,
slowly the last throbs from the mill-house
also died.
No throbbing. No pond. No nights.
Silence became an exhausting noise.
V
Zib led the daughters to the mountains.
The view of the thrashing horses, the brown uniforms
all puzzled them. Imagined
the men snatching their skirts, they feared.
We will all meet in paradise,
with our honored faces
angels will greet us.
A wave of colors dived behind the mountains,
freedom was sought in their veils, their colors
flew with wind. Their bodies freed and slowly hit
the mountains. One by one, they rested. Women
figures covered the other side of the mountains.
Hairs tugged. Heads stilled. Their arms curved
beside their twisted legs.
These mountains became their cots.
The wind their wings, and those pebbles their friends.
Their rocky cave, a cave for all the forty women.
And their fathers and mothers disappeared.
Three Dolls
During the wars,
my mother made our clothes
and our toys.
For her three daughters,
she made dresses, and once
she made us each a doll.
Their figures were made with sticks
gathered from our neighbor’s garden.
She rolled white cotton fabric
around the stick frames
to create a skin for each doll.
Then she fattened the skin
with cotton extracted from an old pillow.
With black and red yarns bought from
uncle Farid’s store, my mother created faces.
A unique face for each doll.
Large black eyes, thick eyelashes and eyebrows.
Long black hair, a smudge of black for each nose.
And lips in red.
Our dolls came alive,
with each stitch of my mother’s sewing needle.
We dyed their cheeks with red rose-petals,
and fashioned skirts from bits of fabric,
from my mother’s sewing basket.
And finally, we named our dolls.
Mine with a skirt of royal green was the oldest and tallest,
and I called her Duur. Pearl.
Shabnam chose a skirt of bright yellow
and called her doll, Pari. Angel.
And our youngest sister, Gohar, chose deep blue fabric,
and named her doll, Raang. Color.
They lived longer than our childhoods.
Her Name is Flower Sap
Somewhere – in the no-man’s land,
there are high mountains, and there is a woman.
The mountains are seemingly unreachable.
The woman in her anonymity is untraceable.
The mountains are called the Tora Bora.
The woman is known as Sharbet Gula, Flower Sap.
In her faded-ruby-red Chador, she appeared
a young girl with a frown, with her green eyes.
Not knowing where to look.
When the world looked back at her.
As young kids, refugees of wartime in Pakistan
we were equally intrigued with her photograph.
‘Her eyes have the magic of good and bad.’
‘The light of her eyes can destroy fighter jets.’
So went Afghan children’s conversation
in the aftermath of 9/11. ‘But could she take down
The Taliban jets,’ we wondered,
as the jets crossed the skies in one song.
But Flower Sap could never answer us.
For she had disappeared like our childhood.
*
As the borders became damper lands,
Afghans like soft worms crawled toward their homeland.
In the in-between mountains,
Flower Sap re-appeared, without any answers.
Now she was a grown-up woman.
A mother of four girls. A widow.
There were some questions in her eyes.
The ones I had seen in my parents’ eyes.
Where do we go next? Now that our country is free.
She still did not have any answers.
And where was the power of her eyes?
I then saw her smiling. As an immigrant, I smiled too.
For her name saved the day.
She was taken to a hospital for her eyes.
The president of the county met her,
and sent her on a pilgrimage.
Her name educated her daughters,
it gave her a house and a reason to return to her homeland.
What else is there in the names and naming?
If not for reparation.
Forty Names was published in July 2021 by Carcanet Press, carcanet.co.uk
22 Oct 2021 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
On 15 October 1971, in the depths of the Cold War, the feted British poet Stephen Spender wrote an impassioned appeal for the Times Literary Supplement in which he highlighted the threat of a world without creativity or impartial news as repressive regimes sought to silence dissent.
Writers, academics, journalists and artists were subject to state sanctioned persecution on a daily basis, threatened, arrested and in too many cases murdered as authoritarian leaders moved against their citizens. Watching was no longer enough, letters to the Times and statements of solidarity were no longer sufficient for Spender and a group of his contemporaries.
It was time to act, to provide an international platform for dissidents to publish their work and importantly it was time to make a positive argument for the liberal democratic values of free speech and free expression. It was time to launch Writers and Scholars International and its in-house journal Index on Censorship.
Spender concluded: “The problem of censorship is part of larger ones about the use and abuse of freedom.”
In the 50 years since Spender wrote in the TLS, Index has published the works of thousands of dissidents, their words, their art and their journalistic endeavours. From Havel to Rushdie, from Zaghari-Radcliffe to Ma Jian, their works have found a home in our publication. Their stories have been told and their works published for posterity – a recognition of their plight.
Fifty years later Spender would have hoped for us to be irrelevant, that the fundamental freedom of free expression was not just respected but embraced throughout the world. If only that was the case. Every week there is an attack on academic freedom at home or abroad, a new debate about our online rights and a new report of a systematic attack on those that embody the very principle of free speech.
In 1971 over a third of the world’s population lived under Communist rule with still more living under other forms of totalitarian regime. Today 113 countries, representing 75 per cent of the global population, completely or significantly restrict core human rights.
These aren’t just statistics, there are real people behind each headline.
In Belarus 811 people are currently detained as political prisoners by Lukashenka, including Andrei Aliaksandrau one of Index’s former staff members. In Egypt more than 60,000 people are imprisoned, including our award-winner Abdelrahman Tarek – detained and regularly tortured since the age of 16 for attending democracy demonstrations. In Afghanistan three young female journalists were brutally assassinated as they left work earlier this year. In Hong Kong the 50 leading democracy protestors have been arrested by the CCP and their families threatened.
These brave journalists and campaigners represent millions of people who cannot use their voices without fear of retribution. Every day they face a horrendous choice between demanding democratic rights or being silenced.
Index seeks to be a platform for them – providing a voice for the persecuted, ensuring that no tyrant succeeds in silencing dissent.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You may also wish to read” category_id=”41669″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
