12 Aug 22 | Iran, Iraq, News and features
At four in the afternoon on 16 April 2022, Iranian documentary filmmaker Gelareh Kakavand was at home when there was an insistent hammering at the door.
“There were five security police officers accompanied by a woman. They threatened to break it if it didn’t open immediately,” Kakavand told Index.
“They locked me in a room, put a camera in front of me, and started searching the house. When I protested that this was illegal to search my house and confine me in the room, they threatened to arrest and beat me.”
After the search of her home, which doubled up as her film studio, they confiscated Kakavand’s camera, camcorder and mobile phone.
Across the city at around the same time, Kakavand’s fellow filmmaker Vahid Zarezade returned home to find his door broken down.
“Agents had stormed my residence in my absence,” said Zarezade in an interview with Index. “The intelligence and security officers had told my landlord that the occupant of the house was engaged in ‘fraud and embezzlement’.”
The couple were then taken to one of Iran’s intelligence ministry buildings and interrogated, accompanied by threats, obscenities and insults.
Their work in documentaries – which they like to refer to as artivism – had always attracted unwanted attention from the authorities.
“During our career, we have made films about political prisoners such as Abbas Amir-Entezam, Mohammad Ali Amouei and Jila Bani Yaghoub, and the problems and sufferings of life and education among Baha’is in Iran. We also covered Keyvan Emamverdi’s case, documenting cases of sexual harassment and rape, and the emergence of the Iranian #metoo movement,” said Zarezade.
“As a result, we faced security, professional, and even financial and livelihood issues. Because of a film we made about the removal of paintings in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Iran we were handed a two-year suspended sentence and fined. We were also threatened many times for our film about Entezam. I was also imprisoned for one of the documentaries I worked on,” he said.
They were threatened verbally and had contracts cancelled for refusing to bow down to the authorities.
It soon became clear that the violent April raids related to a documentary they had started making two years earlier called White Torture, based on the book of the same name by human rights defender Narges Mohammadi.
White Torture features hard-hitting accounts of torture and sexual and physical humiliation faced by prisoners in Iran, particularly those who follow the Baha’i faith, the country’s second-most followed religion after Islam. The name refers to psychological torture relating to the extreme sensory deprivation and isolation of solitary confinement.
After they were released from interrogation but still fearing for their lives, Kakavand and Zarezade made the difficult decision to flee the country, prompted by the re-arrest and imprisonment of Mohammadi.
“We were worried the security forces might have gotten hold of the hard drives that contained videos and human rights documents, so we decided to leave Iran to make the pressure less on the members of the group as well as our families,” said Zarezade.
“We left Iran in order to finish the film and to ensure the narrators would remain secure and the accounts of prisoners would be preserved.”
Index spoke to Zarezade at an undisclosed location as the pair decided on their next moves.
—
Vahid Zarezade has been fascinated by the world of cinema since childhood.
“Despite my family’s disagreement, my first and only choice was to study cinema at university. Gradually, I started getting more interested in documentaries,” he said. “Society and my surroundings, with their cruelty and injustice, made the poetic and dreamlike aspect of cinema seem unreachable and impractical. Through documentaries I could intertwine concrete reality with the world of cinema.”
Zarezade soon began collaborating with Gelareh Kakavand on documentary work.
“Gelareh is a reflection of an egalitarian and demanding artist. More than being a filmmaker, she tries to create inner reflections and experiments. For example, in a film project about Iran’s mandatory hijab, she was one of those who used to walk the streets without a hijab many years ago. For many people, this was very inspiring.”
He believes that making films in Iran is not difficult but that the problems come later.
“What is difficult is the supervision and censorship that is applied to every cultural product and not only films, and this exhausts the artists,” he said. “The security system very noticeably monitors the artistic community of Iran and threatens them in different ways.”
Zarezade says filming White Torture was inevitable. “It was not me who chose to film this documentary, it was White Torture that chose me.”
“I was imprisoned years ago because of making a documentary which was never completed.
“Prison had a great impact on my life and my choices. During those years, I became acquainted with different people and thoughts. Throughout all those years, I endeavoured to highlight this both directly and indirectly in my projects. After getting to know Narges Mohammadi and becoming aware of the book she was writing, White Torture, I suggested making a documentary simultaneously.”
White Torture includes an interview with fellow Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was sentenced to six years in prison in July. In the footage, Panahi and his lawyer go to court to complain against solitary confinement.
Zarezade believes the White Torture, which was released in spring 2022 White Torture and won an award at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival, shines a strong light on what is truly happening in Iran.
“For years, the Iranian regime claims not to have any political prisoners and that the judicial system of the country perfectly performs according to law and justice. Totalitarian regimes are always trying to create an appropriate image of how they govern the society to the world. Taking a look at prisons and the diaries of prisoners and civil right activists will make the reality clear,” he said.
“In a country where endeavouring to create a civil society is considered a crime, in a country where a women’s right activist is charged by the crime of being a feminist, there probably would be no space left for civil demands and seeking justice. They have taken a large part of the Iranian society as hostage and their propaganda machine is spreading lies day and night.”
Despite their relative safety, the future for Zarezade and Kakavand remains uncertain.
“I think we will always be concerned about being forced back to Iran. We get out of the house infrequently,” Zarezade explained. “On the streets and in crowded places, even when grocery shopping, we do not address each other in Farsi. This is because the security agents of the Islamic Republic are very active outside the country, taking hostages and even committing assassinations. What happened to Ruhollah Zam shows that it is not far-fetched for them to kidnap people in any country.” (Zam, the founder of Amadnews and a critic of the Iranian government, was executed in December 2020 after being lured from exile in France. He was tricked into attending a meeting in Iraq where he was seized by agents of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps in what they described as “a complicated operation”.
Zarezade says he has now become numb to censorship.
“I have spent 40 years of my life under supervision and censorship. Sometimes I feel like I have become my own censor. To my mind, the responsibility of the art and its artist is to turn a blind eye to censorship and move around it with new means of expression. This might seem unreachable in practice but what is important is to ignore censorship in art and do your work your own way regardless. Thus, your work, just like a signature that solely belongs to you, will go through a monitoring and censoring process and the new work that comes out of these censoring processes will find its own way of publication and survival.
09 Aug 22 | Belarus, News and features
Sometimes the letters from a prisoner of the regime in Belarus are full of encouragement and nice stories. While human rights defenders and activists speak up about severe detention conditions and beatings, psychological pressure and denial of medical assistance, the picture from the prisoners’ letters seems to be rather peaceful. Their imprisonment often looks like a retreat: they write about reading books and enjoying the fresh air during walks. The sharp contrast between the detention and what they write about may be confusing at first glance.
At this point, it is important to understand what the regime is like in Belarus. To be a political prisoner of the regime does not mean access to any prisoners’ rights or basic human rights, it does not mean respect for any rights in general. This also includes all rights to correspondence. In a country where people are detained for any oppositional political expression, down to wearing white-red-white socks, it would be naive to expect that the regime would not establish total information control over them in jail.
In Belarusian prisons, letters pass through strict two-way censorship regimes that consist of the combination of prison’s general regulations and specific treatment of those who are there for political reasons. Words, sentences, and even pages can be withdrawn, whole letters can be returned to the sender or simply disappear if the rules are not followed. This is, however, the best case scenario. In the worst-case, a person can be sent to a punishment cell, beaten, and threatened. Sometimes in the letters, you can actually hear a voice behind a prisoner’s back dictating to them, forcing words of praise for the administration of the penal colony or coerced requests aimed at relatives to cancel any legal complaints procedures. Such conditions make it impossible for political prisoners to open up and write about the ill-treatment they receive. What is left is to stay strong.
Political prisoners in Belarus have become experts at finding neutral topics to escape the censor’s ire. What is more, they know that the truth is theirs: they are not criminals, they are heroes of new Belarus who dared to stand face to face with the regime and reclaim their rights. However, one should not be tricked by the cheerful mood. Often, it is meant to support loved ones, ironically cover the pain after the unfair treatment, and thank those who ensure they are not forgotten.
08 Aug 22 | News and features, Statements
Valetta city centre, Malta. Photo: Koby/Unsplash
We, the undersigned free expression, press freedom, and journalists’ organisations, express support for The Shift News as it faces an all-out legal battle against 40 freedom of information (FOI) lawsuits brought by 40 government entities in Malta. These appeal lawsuits pose a serious threat to the country’s already worrying freedom of information and press freedom climate. We call for these cases to be immediately dropped and for the government of Malta to fully comply with its FOI obligations going forward.
In July 2021, Malta’s Data Protection Commissioner ruled in favour of 40 FOI requests filed by independent media outlet The Shift News as part of an investigation into relations between Media Today co-owner Saviour Balzan and government entities. The Shift specifically asked for a list of all contracts and payments between companies owned by Balzan and governmental bodies, in light of the public interest need for transparency in relations between independent media and government in a troubling media landscape dominated by political party ownership.
Each of the government entities lodged identical appeals against the Data Protection Commissioner’s decisions. Eventually, all 40 decisions were appealed, naming The Shift News founder and editor Caroline Muscat, who had submitted the FOI requests. The Appeals Tribunal has so far issued 12 rulings, all in favour of The Shift and the Data Protection Commissioner. These 40 governmental bodies are now pursuing a second round of appeals against these decisions, opening up another front in an already costly legal battle.
These vexatious lawsuits seem intended not to win, but to exhaust The Shift’s time and resources, and divert the outlet’s ability to pursue public interest reporting, while also sending a clear signal to others that the Maltese government will fight media attempts to obtain information under the FOI law. Our organisations condemn these legal proceedings aimed at weakening Malta’s independent press, and call for them to be immediately dropped. The Maltese government must instead comply with its FOI obligations, and take immediate steps to improve freedom of information and press freedom in the country.
The Shift has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the high costs associated with fighting this legal battle, which can be supported by following this link.
Signed :
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
ARTICLE 19 Europe
Association of European Journalists
Committee to Protect Journalists
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
IFEX
Index on Censorship
International Press Institute (IPI)
OBC Transeuropa (OBCT)
PEN International
05 Aug 22 | Afghanistan, Belarus, Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, News and features, Poland, Russia, South Africa, United Kingdom
Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe in rehearsal. Photo: Mikalai Kuprych
Index on Censorship has always supported the theatre of resistance, and our Winter 2021 magazine even had this issue as its main theme.
In Belarus, for example, organisations such as Belarus Free Theatre are crucial to fighting Lukashenka’s ruthless regime. Playwrights in Turkey have also faced government censorship throughout history and have to find their way around it.
In the UK, theatre censorship was officially abolished in 1968, putting an end to over 200 years of control by the Lord Chamberlain. Countries like Brazil are also making things harder for the arts and theatre sector through a kind of financial censorship linked to ideological values.
Now, we explore the universe of theatre and censorship, looking back at pieces published in our magazine.
Staging dissent: When a British prime minister was not amused by satire, theatre censorship followed. We revisit plays that riled him, 50 years after the abolition of the state censor
In this piece published in 2018, actor and director Simon Callow revisited the struggle to officially abolish censorship in theatre in the UK, which happened in 1968, after lasting for almost 200 years.
He explains why vigilance is still needed nowadays and writes about other forms of censorship, such as self-censorship.
Theatre Censorship
In August 1980, Anna Tamarchenko wrote a piece about the strict and recurrent censorship in Russian theatre.
She exemplifies her point of view citing Russian plays that only hit the stage years after being written, such as Boris Godunov, first staged in 1870, 45 years after it was published. Alexander Pushkin, its author, had already passed away 30 years earlier.
“Under the Soviet regime censorship has gained new opportunities to exert pressure on theatrical life,” Tamarchenko wrote.
Alternative theatre
In this piece published in 1985, theatre critic Agnieszka Wójcik (pseudonym) dives deeply into the censorship and repression against student theatre in Poland, especially following the introduction of Martial Law in December 1981, when student theatre began to be considered a threat to public order.
“The repressions following December 13 therefore somehow ‘objectively’ defined the status of student theatre as suspect, if not downright illegal. After the banning of NZS (the independent student union) which had taken most student groups under its wing during the Solidarity period, they lost the foundations of their material existence,” Wójcik wrote for Index.
Why the Taliban wanted my brave mother dead…
For the 2021 Winter issue of Index magazine, Associate Editor Mark Frary reported on the play The Boy with Two Hearts, written by Afghan author Hamed Amiri and inspired by his memories of his mother’s campaigns for women’s rights and why they had to leave Afghanistan behind.
“When Hamed Amiri was 10 years old he watched his mother Fariba give a speech in his hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, speaking out for women’s rights and education and against the ruling Taliban. A day later, a mullah gave the order for Fariba’s execution and the family began a gruelling 18-month journey through Europe,” Frary writes.
Testament to the power of theatre as rebellion
In December 2021, critic, columnist and cultural historian Kate Maltby wrote about Belarus Free Theatre’s journey towards performing at the Barbican in London in 2022.
She talked to Nikolai Khalezin, playwright and journalist, and Natalia Koliada, theatre producer. Both founded Belarus Free Theatre in March 2005 and told Index about the rollercoaster they’ve been through after going into exile in order to escape from Lukashenka’s dictatorship.
“Since 2011, Khalezin and Koliada have held political asylum in the UK, a necessity for survival in the face of repeated harassment and imprisonment at the hands of Lukashenka’s regime”, writes Maltby.
Where silence is the greatest fear
Published in December 2021, this piece written by Issa Sikiti da Silva, Index contributing editor based in West Africa, looks at the censorship suffered by Kenyan theatre and how it has dragged under a series of corrupt leaders.
He also investigates the legacy left by colonial Britain in Kenya and how it still impacts theatre in the country.
“There was hope that Jomo Kenyatta’s ascension to the presidency in 1964 would help heal the wounds inflicted by the British and pave the way to tolerance, social justice, freedom and prosperity,” Da Silva writes.
God waits in the wings…ominously
Brazil is also home to its share of theatre censorship and free speech issues. In December 2021, Index’s editorial assistant Guilherme Osinski and former associate editor Mark Seacombe reported on a presidential decree that art must be sacred. They explored how it has affected Brazilian theatres across the country.
Osinski and Seacombe interviewed two Brazilian theatre companies, which shared their thoughts on president Jair Bolsonaro’s approach to art in Brazil, comparing the current situation to when the country faced a bloody dictatorship from 1964 to 1985.
“While the overt and ruthless censorship of the military dictatorship that ended in 1985 is now history, theatre today has to comply with a nebulous concept known as “sacred art” or be starved of public funds”, writes Osinski.
Desegregating the theatre
In August 1985, Professor Stephen Gray wrote for Index and explained how theatre in South Africa was shaped and controlled by the law, before this censorship was eventually relaxed and became less strict.
“Theatre itself is debate, and in South Africa, where sensitive issues ignite like flash-paper, to each show its own controversy,” Gray writes.
Play politics: policing theatre in Indonesia
At the beginning of the 1990s, Indonesia’s government had promised more openness and freedom for theatre companies in the country. However, president Suharto closed the doors on Jakarta’s popular theatre and other plays began to be banned across Indonesia.
Andrea Webster reported on that issue for Index in July 1991, emphasising the ironies between Suharto’s speech for democracy and the bans and curbs on theatres.
“The ban occurred just over a month after President Suharto himself made an Independence Day speech on 17 August where he spoke of ‘openness’ and democracy, where ‘differences of opinion had their place in Indonesian society,’” Webster wrote on the occasion.
Sending out a message in a bottle: Actor Neil Pearson, who shot to international fame as the sexist boss in the Bridget Jones films, talks about book banning and how the fight against theatre censorship still goes on
In June 2019, then editor in chief of Index on Censorship, Rachael Jolley, interviewed actor Neil Pearson about why governments fear books being published and how the fight against theatre censorship still goes on.
Among many things, they discussed self-censorship and the boundaries between a play which is acceptably controversial and unacceptably controversial.
“If you are genuinely against censorship, you have to be evenhanded against censorship. If your idea of freedom of speech is only allowing people to say what you already agree with, then Goebbels would have no problem with that definition of speech,” Pearson told Index.
‘Humpty Dumpty has maybe had the last word…’
One of the biggest names in British theatre recently wrote for Index on Censorship. Sir Tom Stoppard, playwright and screenwriter and whose work covers themes such as human rights, censorship and political freedom, wrote in December 2021 on how the battleship over freedom still lies between the individual and the state.
04 Aug 22 | News and features, Northern Ireland, Statements, United Kingdom
Gerry Kelly MLA & Gerry Adams TD. Photo: Sinn Fein, CC BY 2.0
Index on Censorship is concerned at the lawsuits that have been filed against journalist Malachi O’Doherty and columnist Ruth Dudley Edwards. Both are being sued individually by Sinn Féin politician Gerry Kelly MLA, who is claiming aggravated damages for comments they each made – on radio and in print respectively – in relation to Kelly’s role in 1983 Maze Prison escape.
“Everyone has the right to defend their good name but as elected representatives, politicians have a duty to display a greater degree of restraint when it comes to taking to legal action against journalists. This is especially true when the contested statements are related to matters of public interest. Lawsuits against journalists can have a serious and damaging impact on media freedom and on our democracy,” said Jessica Ní Mhainín, Policy and Campaigns Manager at Index on Censorship.
Explaining Index on Censorship’s decision to file a media freedom alert to the Council of Europe Platform, Ní Mhainín said: “We are concerned that these lawsuits in particular have several characteristics of strategic lawsuits against public participation or ‘SLAPPs’. SLAPPs involve powerful people – such as politicians – making legal threats or taking legal actions against public watchdogs – such as journalists – in response to public interest speech.”
This is the seventh media freedom alert filed on the United Kingdom to the Council of Europe Platform to Promote the Protection of Journalism and Safety of Journalists this year and the third relating to SLAPPs.
04 Aug 22 | Ruth's blog
On the hottest day of the year, the professional team at Index was due to have an in-person brainstorming session about what might come our way next and what we needed to be prepared for. Our away day quickly became a virtual session with everyone melting in the heat.
In the midst of the conversation, one of my brilliant team members described one part of her work, that on SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation), as challenging reputation laundering. While that’s exactly what she’s been doing, I haven’t been able to move on from that phrase.
As unimpeded access to information becomes the norm in democracies in the 21st century, it might be easy to assume that rewriting history to agree with your own world view would be almost impossible. It feels, however, increasingly naive to believe that immediate access to this sheer volume of news and information is actually protecting truth. We face misinformation and propaganda campaigns at a state actor level, single issue activists, the misuse of libel laws and the increasing use of SLAPPs, as well as outright lies by bad faith actors, making it difficult to determine the reality of a situation.
This is compounded when people are ashamed of their history or don’t have the tools to talk about it.
Which brings me to my holiday last week. I had a wonderful break in Barcelona with my partner, doing all the tourist stuff you do on a city break. But by the third day, it became clear that there was one thing that no one was talking about – the Spanish Civil War. The Barcelona picture book in our room didn’t mention it. The plaques around the city missed out great swathes of Barcelona’s history from 1936 until the mid 1970s. The civil war wasn’t even touched upon at the Maritime Museum or either of the two cathedrals we visited, which were sites of some of the revolts. And the city open-top bus tour (the ultimate tourist experience) mentioned neither Franco nor the fact that the city had been the site of some of the most violent clashes in the civil war. In fact, it didn’t even mention the civil war.
Our response was to read more and to join the Walking Museum of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona (which was brilliant). But the more we read and the more we walked, the more I couldn’t move on. As we ate on La Ramblas, I watched tourists from around the world having an amazing time, but I wondered how many of them knew its history. In 1936, this was the site of a street battle where people were killed feet from where we now sat because they were adamantly fighting for democracy and freedom. When we walked past the Moka coffee shop, I wondered how many people eating a pastry realised that George Orwell had taken refuge there. And when we went to the anarchist bookshop (obviously required shopping on holiday), I wondered how many people walking past realised that its former staff led the fight against Franco’s fascists in the city.
After the fall of Franco, the Spanish decided that it was too difficult and too divisive to engage in a peace and reconciliation process. Instead, most political parties agreed to draw a line in the sand and move on, ignoring their immediate past. My experiences last week suggest that at least for corporate Spain that remains true, but the political reality for Spaniards is apparently now a little different. The whereabouts are still unknown of 114,000 people who disappeared under Franco’s regime, and their grandchildren want to know what happened to them. Now, there is a growing memory movement. Because political leaders failed to agree on an established factual version of Franco’s regime, there are now increasing tensions between the political left and the right as to what really happened, with revisionism and denialism an increasing theme in mainstream Spanish politics.
What I witnessed in Barcelona was not only an example of attempted reputation laundering – it was an effort to run from a country’s past, which I truly believe is impossible. But that’s only impossible because of us – the rest of us. We have to study and understand atrocities from the past and make sure that the truth will out. It is our ultimate responsibility as people who campaign to protect freedom of expression.
29 Jul 22 | Artistic Freedom, Asia and Pacific, News and features, Sri Lanka
Ranil Wickremesinghe, now president of Sri Lanka, attending a presentation at the Annual Meeting 2017 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 17, 2017. Photo: World Economic Forum/ Mattias Nutt/Flickr
I’m writing this on the morning of 22 July while watching footage from the early hours of this morning showing military and police assaulting protesters, journalists and lawyers outside of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face, Colombo. Activists report on social media that protesters and journalists were severely beaten with batons, threatened with being shot. Many of the tents and structures built by the protesters over the last three months at this site were destroyed. This was Ranil Wickremesinghe’s first day in power, after being selected as the new Rajapaksa proxy president in a deeply corrupt vote held by a Rajapaksa-controlled parliament.
Of particular note in this moment is that the protesters had already announced their intention to vacate the site later today, responding to an itself repressive court order. Even by the standards of dictatorial abuse of power, the violence was tactically superfluous. Instead, it was a message to protesters and the nation at large signalling how Wickremesinghe intends to govern, beginning with the brutal, malicious repression of peaceful dissent.
This can be confusing to an outside observer. Much of the commentary about Gotabaya and Mahinda Rajapaksa (the brothers who have dominated Sri Lankan politics in recent years) focused on their family: corrupt strongmen who were to blame for the island’s many failures. If the nepotistic, violent Rajapaksas were everything that was wrong about Sri Lanka, it seems as if deposing them should have improved matters. Instead, little has changed. This is for two reasons, both deeply intertwined. The first reason is that Sri Lanka’s structure of governance is deeply warped around the over-empowered office of the executive president, generating a stream of power-addicted despots. The only purpose of that office is to abuse it. One of the calls of the current protest movement is to abolish the office entirely.
The second reason is that the Rajapaksas are far from the only nepotistic, violent political dynasty to hold executive power in Sri Lanka. There are three of note: the Rajapaksas, of course. The Bandaranaikes, whose patriarch invented the racist demagoguery that characterizes Sri Lankan politics to this day, and whose statue overlooks the protest site that was brutalized last night. And there are the Wijewardenas, now headed by Ranil Wickremesinghe, the new executive president of Sri Lanka, who holds the office created forty years ago by his own first cousin once removed, J.R. Jayawardena.
It was Jayawardena who also gave Sri Lanka the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which has been used for four decades to arbitrarily detain and torture. Its targets, as the targets of the Sinhala-Buddhist dominated Sri Lankan state have usually been in the postcolonial period, have primarily been members of the Tamil and Muslim minority populations, though it is a blunt instrument and used as carte blanche by the state. Detainees are nominally accused of “terrorism” but often held without charges for years or decades. Journalists and writers, too, have been frequent targets of this and other legal instruments the Sri Lankan state uses for repression. These are by no means the sole mechanism the state has at its disposal—many journalists and writers have been killed, disappeared, assaulted and forced into exile. But other than the state’s extrajudicial violence, cases under the PTA also demonstrate the depth of complicity from the various arms and bodies of the state in carrying out repression.
A clear example is the case of Ahnaf Jazeem, a teacher and poet. In 2019, after the Easter bombings, the government began arresting hundreds of Muslims under the PTA, often on the most tenuous “evidence,” such as the possession of texts in Arabic. Jazeem, then 25, was arrested under the PTA in May 2020, after these far-fetched “investigations” led police to search his place of work, a private school where he had been teaching and living until the pandemic lockdown. In his quarters, they found copies of his book of poems. This was his first collection, Navarasam, which had been published a few years earlier. The poems were written in Tamil, which the Sinhala police could not read and which, because of the ingrained racism of the Sri Lankan state, were therefore automatically suspicious. Too, the book included art alongside some poems, some of which depicted militants, illustrating (what the police could not read as) antiwar poems. In this context, that was considered sufficient to imprison a poet without charge or trial. Early reports in the Sinhala media did not even identify Navarasam as a poetry collection: it was referred to solely as “an extremist text.”
Jazeem was detained in squalid conditions in the TID building under the PTA, handcuffed even while sleeping, with no access to a lawyer, for months. He was accused of supporting terrorism, the Easter bombers, and ISIS through his teaching and his book. The magistrate’s court had Navarasam rush-translated by the court’s sworn translators, resulting in a highly literal word-for-word translation which was then sent to a group of child psychiatrists at a government hospital to report on whether this text could influence children toward “extremism”. The psychiatrists’ report was mealymouthed, but sufficiently affirmative for the magistrate’s purpose, citing multiple poems as promoting violence and religious hatred.
Navarasam was later translated independently by writers and academics working for Jazeem’s release together with his pro bono legal defense team—which of course took much longer, because proper literary translation of a book of poetry is not something that can be done in a few days to support a trumped-up court case. Here is an extract of one such counter-translation, by Shash Trevett, of one of Jazeem’s poems, “The Thundering Himalayas,” that the psychiatrists’ report specifically cited as promoting violence, leading to Jazeem spending 19 months in detention in total.
If you are brave, you can defeat tragedies.
If you are submissive, failure will follow you.
If, every minute of every day
you think anything is possible
you will own every obstacle in your way
and the world will spread open beneath your feet.
A river is not designed to stand still all day.
It runs towards its desire
to join as one with the sea.
Whatever will obstruct, will obstruct.
What is to occur, will occur.
Whatever lies in its path, will lie there
as the river creeps ever forward.
A rock might block its path
a dam might impede its course
but a river will always overcome obstacles
that hamper its flow.
In order to reach its goal
it will splash and spray.
It will gently dislodge the rock
and set a brand new course.
It doesn’t meet obstacles with violence.
It doesn’t drown them
or split them in two.
Instead, it rises above the rocks
and flows on its way.
If you were to be like a river
you can achieve whatever you wish for.
Even if the Himalayas were to block your way
you will be able to dismantle them with ease.
During that period, more and more writers, activists, academics and organisations spoke up offering readings on the book, both in the original and via its legitimate translations, confirming again and again that the text was explicitly anti-extremist, anti-war, anti-violence, and in fact, specifically anti-IS. Jazeem was finally released on bail in December 2021, but the case is still ongoing and he is required to travel 180 km every month to sign at the Terrorism Investigation Department, even as this grows increasingly difficult due to Sri Lanka’s fuel shortage.
Jazeem was arrested and detained under the PTA without investigators or magistrate being even able to read the book they considered damning evidence against him. The prosecution and its accomplices wallowed in this expedient illiteracy; it was his defenders that had to read poetry, produce counter-translations, argue for a just reading and make the case that truth even matters. In this case as in so many others, the Sri Lankan state’s utter indifference to reality in the service of power, manifests as hypocrisy but is so deeply ingrained in systemic conditions that it’s perhaps better described as perversion.
The Rajapaksa’s genocidal “humanitarian operation” in 2009 remains the nadir, but Ranil Wickremesinghe’s administration today is fully engaged in the same rhetorical manoeuvre, citing “civil liberties” to justify the violent assault of protestors and “political stability” to explain his reappointment of a cabal of Rajapaksa allies and Sinhala-Buddhist extremists to his new cabinet—the very government that had lost their mandate to mass protests, whose resignations prompted Wickremesinghe’s own entry into government to rescue the Rajapaksa throne as it tottered on the brink of falling. Under this Rajapaksa caretaker administration, the quick return of Gotabaya himself seems altogether too likely.
26 Jul 22 | Asia and Pacific, News and features
People protest in Myanmar against the military coup in 2021. Photo: Htin Linn Aye
The last time a political activist was hanged in Myanmar was in 1976, when the ethnic Chin student Salai Tin Maung Oo, 25, was executed for sedition. I was hoping against hope that the junta was bluffing when it announced in early June 2022 that it would go ahead with the execution of four political prisoners on death row, Phyo Zeyar Thaw, Kyaw Min Yu, Hla Myo Aung and Aung Thura Zaw.
I knew too well what the regime was capable of. Since the February 2021 coup, daily atrocities by security forces, extrajudicial killings and tortures to death of hundreds of civilians are well documented. The lives of two of my poet friends in their prime, K Za Win and Khet Thi, were cut short by the regime in March 2021 and May 2021 respectively for their leading role in the anti-coup protests.
Zeyar Thaw and Min Yu (AKA Jimmy) are big names in Myanmar. Jimmy belonged to the 1988 protest movement. He spent a total of 21 of his 53 years of life behind bars as a prisoner of conscience. Zeyar Thaw belonged to a younger generation, politicised by the 2007 Saffron Revolution, a protest led by the Myanmar monks. Myo Aung and Thura Zaw are likely to be ‘the 2021 generation.’
The original Burmese title of my poem is The Rope. I translated it into English and gratefully accepted an editorial suggestion that The Rope be retitled On the Ropes. Whatever happened to the sacrifice of all the activists since Tin Maung Oo, not to mention many nameless martyrs before and after him?
Wherever we are, we earthlings may be on the ropes against tyranny of all sorts — from dictatorships in the East and blatant lies by elected politicians in the West to ubiquitous corporate greed and hypocrisy. Because of this failure in leadership and our lack of common sense as a common species, we may as well be on the ropes against the biggest blow of our times, the climate crisis.
On the Ropes
In all manners of capital punishment
hanging is
the most hideous.
To ancient Greeks
the rope takes away more than life.
It takes away decency
even in death.
Had the Romans hanged Jesus
—instead of nailing him on a crucifix—
the Christian church wouldn’t
have had much impact.
Would you hang around
your neck an icon of a broken-neck Jesus,
hanging by the neck
on a noose?
Be it short drop, pole method,
standard, or long drop,
the hanged is condemned
to indignity.
Once the neck snaps midair
the body shits and pisses itself,
the eyes bulge,
the tongue sticks out of the mouth,
if not stuck between the lips,
bloodied and bitten.
The Klan loves to lynch their victims.
Only racist hatred justifies the rope.
Hanging cannot be accomplished
without gravity.
This makes the innocent Gaia complicit
in our human crime—
in its ferity and finality.
A version of this poem was circulated in SUSPECT newsletter on 16 June 2022.
26 Jul 22 | Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
Phyo Zayar Thaw gives a speech in Myanmar during a protest in 2021. Photo: Maung Sun
Kyaw Min Yu and Phyo Zayar Thaw were prominent voices in the democracy movement in Myanmar. But on 25 July 2022, state news outlet Global New Light of Myanmar released a statement claiming that they had been executed on the grounds of “terror acts.”
Min Yu, also known as Ko Jimmy, was a 53-year-old veteran of the 88 Generation Students Group formed during the 1988 uprising, which advocated against the country’s military regime. He had spent much of the time since in prison, first 15 years for his participation as a student leader in the uprising, and then five years for leading protests during the Saffron Revolution in 2007, a movement sparked by huge fuel price increases.
Throughout his time in and out of prison, Min Yu wrote several books including self-help book Making Friends and fiction The Moon in Inle Lake. He also wrote a plethora of political short stories that were published in Japan under the pen name Pan Pu Lwin Pyin.
Min Yu was arrested again in October 2021, during a raid. A warrant had been put out for his arrest after he made social media posts critical of the military junta coup in February of that year. He had been in hiding ever since. He was accused of advising the National Unity Government as well as hiding weapons at an apartment in Yangon. He leaves behind his wife and fellow activist Nilar Thein and their daughter Nay Kyi Min Yu, as well as his eternal work advocating for fundamental freedoms.
Zayar Thaw was a 41-year-old rap star turned politician for the National League for Democracy party. His band Acid often released songs with lyrics containing thinly-veiled attacks on the military, which aggravated the junta. During his transition from rap star to lawmaker, he became a close ally of pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi and accompanied her to international meetings.
In 2000, Acid released Myanmar’s first hip-hop album, which remained number one on the Burmese charts for more than two months – a testament to the relatability of the lyrics highlighting the hardships of life in Myanmar which drew them into danger.
Taking an even more vehement stance against Myanmar’s military rulers, Zayar Thaw later co-founded the youth movement Generation Wave, following the Saffron Revolution. The activists used graffiti and pamphlets to spread their pro-democracy messages around the nation while also circulating anti-government films. Several members, including Zayar Thaw, were arrested and imprisoned for their participation.
From hip hop and activism, Zayar Thaw moved firmly into politics. In 2012, the same year Aung San Suu Kyi was elected, he became a member of Pyithu Hluttaw, the lower house of Burmese Parliament.
In November 2021, Zayar Thaw was arrested again by the Myanmar military junta for offenses ranging from “possession of explosives” to “financing terrorism.”
Both Min Yu and Zayar Thaw were sentenced to death in January 2022. They were convicted by a closed military court and their appeals were rejected. Human rights experts have spoken out against their treatment.
Global New Light of Myanmar claimed that the two men were charged under counter-terrorism laws, but have given no information about when or how they were executed. The Myanmar government’s horrific grab for power and disregard for human life has left the loved ones of Min Yu and Zayar Thaw with few answers. Both families have submitted applications for information on the unjust executions, but are unsure of what will happen now.
The families of Min Yu and Zayar Thaw have lost their sons, their brothers, their spouses, and their fathers. But their fight for basic freedoms in Myanmar lives on through their organisations and art.
21 Jul 22 | Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
For over fifty years, Index on Censorship has supported dissidents, journalists and activists in part by training them on the most current technology. In recent years that has included how to use encryption and encrypted communication apps, helping them to protect themselves from repressive regimes in the easiest and most comprehensive ways possible. This training was especially necessary when accessing encryption proved to be a specialist pursuit, involving intensive training, helping people on the ground to understand the options and downloading often complex peer-to-peer messaging apps.
Now, thankfully, encryption is everywhere; human rights defenders, journalists and MPs use platforms like Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp to exchange everything from gossip to public interest data. Encryption is critical for investigative journalists who need to communicate with sources and to protect their investigations against hostile actors, whether states or criminal gangs.
And for all of us encryption has its uses: sending family photos and sharing personal information. After all, who hasn’t sent their bank details to a friend?
Telegram is used by activists, journalists and politicans. Photo: Christian Wiediger/Unsplash
For Index on Censorship, protecting encryption is a critical frontline in the fight for freedom of expression. Free speech isn’t just about the words themselves: it is the freedom to exchange information, the freedom to gather information and the freedom to confide ideas and thoughts to others without the risk of arrest and detention. Encryption is now central to our collective ability to exercise the right to freedom of expression.
Five years ago, Jamie Bartlett wrote for Index on Censorship about how his experience of police intimidation in Croatia, a democratic EU member state, changed his view on encryption. In Jamie’s case it offered a secure means of communicating with a source who the authorities had made it clear they did not want him to speak to.
Today, in too many states, encryption is now essential. As we speak the reality on the ground in authoritarian regimes including China, Hong Kong, Belarus and Russia, the difference between using an encrypted messaging app to express yourself, or unencrypted communications will mean the difference between freedom and imprisonment, if not worse.
Promoting and defending encryption is essential for any organisation that promotes and defends free speech. That’s why Index on Censorship is delighted to announce that we’ve received a grant from WhatsApp, the messaging app, to support our work in defending encryption. The grant of £150,000 will be used for our general work in defending digital freedom and our work streams will not be determined by any one other than my team at Index. From our perspective this grant is incredibly welcome as it will allow us to develop new content that explains the importance of encryption to the public, allows us to get new legal advice on why encryption should be protected as a fundamental defence of our human rights, as well as bringing new voices into the debate on why encryption is so critical to defend free speech.
As with any grant, the grantee has no influence whatsoever over Index on Censorship policy positions or our work itself. Index has had its criticisms of Meta (WhatsApp’s parent company) in the past and I’m sure we will in the future, and we’ll continue to speak freely to any government or company.
Right now, we’re continuing to argue for a pause to the UK government’s rush to push through its flawed Online Safety Bill, ensuring we have the opportunity to work with Ministers to amend the bill to remove the flawed ‘legal but harmful’ provisions in the legislation (as demolished by Gavin Millar QC’s power legal opinion for Index) and also ensure the potential undermining of encryption is taken out of this legislation.
We’ve got a lot to do – but the political weather is changing in the right direction.
20 Jul 22 | News and features, Statements, United Kingdom
The Royal Courts of Justice, the scene for many SLAPP actions in the UK. Photo: PxHere
The co-chairs of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition welcome today’s announcement that the government intends to introduce a package of legislative measures aimed at putting an end to strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) in the UK.
Noting that many of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition’s recommendations are reflected in the proposals, the co-chairs commend the government for clearly stating its intention to introduce primary legislation to address this issue. They are pleased to see it is a recognised priority to filter SLAPPs out of the court process as quickly as possible, regardless of the law weaponised by the SLAPP litigant.
At the same time, the co-chairs urge the government to be bolder in the measures aimed at tackling SLAPPs. In particular they point to the need for a higher threshold to filter out SLAPPs, the need to reduce and compensate SLAPP targets for the harm caused by the litigation process, and the need for measures – such as punitive damages – to deter SLAPP litigants from targeting public watchdogs with abusive legal threats and actions.
Charlie Holt, UK Campaigns Manager at English PEN, said: “The government’s proposals provide a solid foundation for tackling the problem of SLAPPs. With this framework in place, the Government must now ensure its proposed law is sufficiently ambitious to decisively tackle the problem of SLAPPs. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to protect public public watchdogs from abusive lawsuits – it’s crucial the government’s measures do not fall short of what is needed”
Susan Coughtrie, Project Director at the Foreign Policy Centre said: “Thankfully it is clearly no longer a question as to whether SLAPPs are a problem in the UK, but what measures will most effectively address them. We are highly encouraged to see the government’s proposals, which reflect many of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition’s recommendations. How quickly these reforms will be implemented and their effectiveness in remedying the UK’s SLAPPs problem will be a key part of our continued focus on this issue.”
Jessica Ní Mhainín, Policy and Campaigns Manager at Index on Censorship said: “We welcome the government’s intention to take action against SLAPPs and we look forward to working with officials to ensure that the strongest possible measures are adopted to ensure that public watchdogs are no longer subject to legal intimidation.”
//ends//
Notes to Editors:
- The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition is an informal working group, established in January 2021, made up of representatives from freedom of expression, press freedom, anti-corruption, and human rights organisations, as well as media lawyers, researchers and academics who are monitoring and highlighting cases of legal intimidation and SLAPPs, as well as seeking to develop remedies for mitigation and redress.
- The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition’s submission to the Ministry of Justice’s SLAPPs consultation is available in full at https://fpc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Joint-UK-anti-SLAPPs-Consultation-Submission.pdf
14 Jul 22 | Opinion, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
“Unintended consequences”, “ideologically incoherent”, “won’t change culture or make us safer”.
I have written all these words and many more about the British Government’s Online Safety Bill. Index on Censorship has spent the last eighteen months campaigning against the worst excesses of the Online Safety Bill and how it would undermine freedom of expression online.
Our lines have been clear:
1. What is legal to say offline should be legal online.
2. End to end encryption should not be undermined.
3. Online anonymity needs to be protected.
The current proposals that were progressing through the British Parliament undermined each of these principles and were going to set a new standard of speech online which would have led to speech codes, heavily censored platforms, no secure online messaging and a threat to online anonymity which would have undermined dissidents living in repressive regimes.
So honestly, I am relieved that the government has, at almost the last minute, paused the legislation.
I am not opposed to regulation, I do not for a second believe that the internet is a nice place to spend time and nor would I advocate that there shouldn’t be many more protections for children and those who are vulnerable online. We do need regulation to limit children’s exposure to illegal and inappropriate content but we need to do it in such a way that protects all of our rights.
This legislation, in its current iteration, failed to do that, it was a disaster for freedom of expression online. The proposed “Legal but Harmful’ category of speech would have led to over deletion by online platforms on a scale never seen before. Algorithms aren’t people and frankly they will struggle to identify nuance, context or satire or even regional colloquialisms. With fines and the threat of prison sentences, platforms will obviously err on the side of caution and the unintended consequence would be mass deletion.
So today, we welcome the fact that the legislation has been paused and we call on the new prime minister and the next secretary of state to think again in the autumn about what we are actually trying to achieve when we regulate online platforms. Because honestly, we won’t be able to make the internet nicer by waving a magic wand and removing everything unpleasant – we need to be more imaginative in our approach and consider the wider cultural and educational impact.
So, as I have said in the media overnight, this is a fundamentally broken bill – the next prime minister needs a total rethink. It would give tech executives like Nick Clegg and Mark Zuckerberg massive amounts of control over what we all can say online, would make the UK the first democracy in the world to break encrypted messaging apps, and it would make people who have experienced abuse online less safe by forcing platforms to delete vital evidence.
Let’s start again.
