12 Jan 22 | Belarus, News and features, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”118138″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://freeandreiandirina.org/”][vc_column_text]Today, one year since the detention of Andrei Aliaksandrau and Irina Zlobina, Index on Censorship and ARTICLE 19 are launching a campaign aimed at amplifying calls for their immediate and unconditional release. Andrei and Irina have been behind bars since 12 January 2021, when they were detained and imprisoned for their defence of fundamental human rights.
A journalist and human rights defender who previously worked at both Index on Censorship and ARTICLE 19, Andrei is now facing charges of “treason to the state”. The charges stem from allegations that he paid the fines of journalists and protestors detained during the pro-democracy protests that were triggered by the highly disputed 2020 presidential election. Belarusian law enforcement agencies erroneously equate this with financing unlawful protests. If convicted, Andrei will face up to 15 years in prison.
“Thanks to you, and other good people, my conscience is clear,” he wrote to a friend last year.
His partner, Irina was also detained “on suspicion of financing protest activities” and has since been charged with “organization and preparation of actions that grossly violate public order”. She is facing up to three years in prison.
“We invited journalists, human rights defenders, press freedom activists and friends of Andrei and Irina to record short video messages for the campaign. Those videos will be shared on social media in the coming days,” ARTICLE 19 and Index on Censorship said. “As Andrei’s former colleagues, we want as many people as possible to know how incredibly kind and generous he and Irina are, and to understand the unfathomable injustice they are both facing at the hands of the Belarusian authorities.”
We urge you to help us call for their immediate and unconditional release by joining our campaign:
- Sign the petition to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Andrei and Irina.
- Share ARTICLE 19 and Index on Censorship’s campaign posts on social media.
- Use the hashtags #FreeAndrei, #FreeIrina, #FreeAndreiAndIrina to post messages of support.
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07 Jan 22 | News and features, Opinion
Happy New Year!
At the start of every year, I have a renewed sense of hope – that maybe, just maybe this year will be different. That the news won’t be filled with egregious breaches of our human rights. That our leaders will embrace their responsibilities to their citizens and that the values outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be the minimum standards adopted around the world, rather than an aspiration.
This naïve wish typically lasts until I turn the news on.
We are hardly one week into 2022 and already dozens of democratic protesters in Kazakhstan have been brutally murdered, thousands hurt and 3,000 people have been arrested for initially campaigning against the cost of fuel. Russian military forces have been deployed to put down the riots and an internet blackout implemented; Nigerian journalists have received suspended jail sentences for publishing reports of organised crime in Niger; In Sudan military efforts to stop democracy protesters have led to one fatality, numerous injuries and restrictions to the internet and communications systems.
Then there is Hong Kong. There a pro-democracy campaigner has been sentenced to 15 months in jail for trying to organise a vigil to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre and the pro-democracy website Citizen News has closed following the raid on StandNews at the end of last year. They fear a similar fate, and their closure represents another sign of the end of media freedom and plurality in Hong Kong.
Finally, images of the Capitol riots from a year ago are dominating the news, reminding us of when protest became criminal and deadly at one of the iconic centres of liberal democracy.
These stories are those of just the last week, the stories that have managed to break through our ongoing Covid horror.
The situation in totalitarian regimes from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, from Belarus to Kashmir and too many others remains grim. There are simply too many regimes that seek to exploit and suppress their populations.
Our role at Index is to make sure that the voices of the persecuted are heard. That every effort to silence them is countered and that every day they know that they are not alone, that there is support and solidarity with their plight.
Because we must never forget that behind each of the headlines is a person, a family, a story of a life lived and in too many cases a life threatened or taken.
The year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Index on Censorship magazine – 50 years of telling the stories of those who cannot tell their own stories. Fifty years of documenting attacks on free speech and free expression in every corner of the globe. In the coming months Index will be celebrating our birthday, but also commemorating those that we have lost in the fight for free speech during our history. We will telling some extraordinary stories – and we will need you to help us amplify them.
Happy New Year and I hope you and yours have a safe and happy 2022.
06 Jan 22 | Events
In a recent interview with the Guardian, the president of COP26 Alok Sharma expressed concern that the agreements made at the Glasgow summit will end up as “a bunch of meaningless promises”. Two months on from the summit, it is timely to take stock and reflect on the road ahead. What are the key takeaways from the discussions in Glasgow? Who got to speak, and who did not? How can we keep up the momentum from COP26 to ensure positive and inclusive outcomes?
Focusing on the voices of indigenous peoples as a starting point, this event invites activists, experts and legal professionals to review COP26 and reflect on the future of climate action. The conversation will be chaired by Index on Censorship’s CEO Ruth Smeeth and features Darren Jones MP, Kate Gibbons, and Roger Leese with contributions from indigenous activists.
About the speakers:
Darren Jones MP
Darren Jones is the Labour Member of Parliament for Bristol North West and the Chair of the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. He sits as a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy and the Liaison Committee, which scrutinises the work of the Prime Minister. As Chair of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, Darren also scrutinises the Government’s delivery of COP26, the use of its national security and investment powers and monitors regulatory reform across the whole of Government.
Kate Gibbons
Global Knowledge Partner and Finance and Capital Markets Partner, Clifford Chance
Kate Gibbons is Clifford Chance’s Global Knowledge partner as well as being a Finance and Capital Markets partner from which she leads the Practice’s Knowledge function. In these capacities she chairs the Firm’s Knowledge Committee and Thought Leadership Board and is a member of its London and Global Legal Opinion Committees, the Global ESG Board and the London Graduate Recruitment Partner Committee. She is a member and director of the Financial Markets Law Committee, considers issues of security reform and legal opinions for the City of London Law Society, is a distinguished practitioner of Harris Manchester College Oxford and a member of the Chatham House Council.
Roger Leese
Litigation & Dispute Resolution Partner, co-head of Business & Human Rights practice and member of the ESG Risk Leadership Group, Clifford Chance
Roger is a Partner in the firm’s Litigation & Dispute Resolution practice, co-head of the firm’s Business & Human Rights practice and a member of the ESG Risk Leadership Group. Roger advises on a range of ESG-related issues, including the development of policy, due diligence (particularly in the context of M&A), training and shareholder/NGO activism. Roger advises clients across a range of sectors, notably financial institutions and Private Equity. Roger is also a member of the firm’s ESG Board, which co-ordinates the firm’s work for clients in this space. Roger is also a member pf the firm’s Responsible Business Board. In that context Roger has Global responsibility for the Firm’s pro bono and community work and also for delivering on the Firm’s Net Zero 2030 commitment. Roger is the Chair of the UK legal charity, Advocates for International Development (A4ID). During his time as Chair, Roger has encouraged A4ID’s focus on business and human rights, alongside the Sustainable Development Goals
Ruth Smeeth
CEO, Index on Censorship
Ruth Smeeth is the CEO of Index on Censorship. Ruth was a British Labour Party politician and a Member of Parliament from 2015 until 2019 representing the Potteries. Prior to that she was deputy director of anti-racist organisation, HOPE not hate. Ruth is a passionate campaigner and is usually found with a cup of tea in hand (mug made in Stoke-on-Trent obviously).
When: 18.00-19.00, Monday 17 January 2022
Index on Censorship, Clifford Chance
06 Jan 22 | China, Hong Kong, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
Nathan Law has been imprisoned, disqualified from political office and forced to seek political asylum in the UK – all for fighting for democratic rights in Hong Kong, his home city. But, in spite of it all, he remains optimistic.
“As an activist I’m not entitled to lose hope,” he tells Index on Censorship. “I still believe that maybe in a decade’s time I can set foot in Hong Kong, when it’s democratic and free.”
Law, 28, fled to London in the summer of 2020 after the passing of the National Security Law, a draconian piece of legislation that criminalises even a whisper of criticism against Beijing’s rule.
Given the chance, what would he tell Communist Party leaders in Beijing?
“I would say, ‘There is no totalitarian regime that can remain forever. All of them will collapse’, and I’d say, ‘That is your fate if you continue to do what you are doing’.”
Law’s face and name are synonymous with the struggles in Hong Kong. Alongside Joshua Wong, Alex Chow and Agnes Chow, he has helped drive the recent protest movement.
The son of a construction worker and a cleaner, he first became interested in democratic values at secondary school when the late writer and human rights defender Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Liu was serving his fourth prison sentence in China and was unable to accept the prize in person. An image of an empty chair soon went viral, a stark reminder of how bad human rights were in China.
“I grew up in a family that did not talk about politics, did not talk about social affairs,” Law says. Although he studied in a pro-Beijing school, he was “not heavily brainwashed to believe in the Communist Party”. He adds: “I was apolitical. I was not involved.” But when Liu won the prize, the principal of his school publicly denounced the writer in morning assembly.
“It triggered my curiosity because I thought people getting the Nobel Prize are the ones who are good in their field. So how come such a person – a Chinese [person] – would be criticised in that fashion? It really triggered my curiosity and got me to look into the work that he had been doing. He opened up a gate for me to understand all these concepts.”
That gate first led Law to the Tiananmen Square vigil, held in Hong Kong every year since 1989, and then to him leading the 2014 Umbrella Movement (which later landed him in prison on charges of “unlawful assembly”).
After this, Law became the youngest legislator in Hong Kong’s history, a position from which he was quickly disqualified when he modified his oath of allegiance to China during the swearing-in ceremony in October 2016.
In the same year, he founded Demosistō, a pro-democracy political party, with Agnes Chow and Wong.
But time was up when the National Security Law was passed. Demosistō was disbanded, Law was forced out of Hong Kong and Chow and Wong were jailed, alongside scores of others connected to the democracy movement.
Today, dissent is in a straitjacket in Hong Kong. And yet not all have given up fighting. In Law’s recently published book – Freedom: How We Lose It And How We Fight Back – he writes: “Even during this most bitter of times the spirit of ordinary Hong Kong people continues to shine, even if it must do so in the shadows.”
Law lists the people who refuse to have their prison sentences lessened by agreeing to the charges against them and instead “defend themselves in order to narrate their story at the risk of heavy sentencing”. He lists those who attend court hearings to show support to the defendants, those who write letters to the imprisoned and those who advocate for any policy that might remotely challenge the government.
“The hope lies in these people. Even though we are in the darkest time and change is seemingly impossible, people are still doing things because they feel that it is the right thing to do,” he says.
Law might have an admirable sense of hope, but his is not an easy life. He had to publicly sever ties with his family when he moved to the UK and has been unable to talk to Agnes Chow and Wong, too. He misses the people and he misses the place.
“I always dream about Hong Kong,” he says. “You’re familiar with everything. You don’t have to think. Like when you step into the MTR [the subway]. It’s in your muscles, in your memory. You understand everything. You understand all the slang. The background noise with people’s hectic walk, the hectic talk of Cantonese and bus horns, those noises from the stores and from restaurants. It’s just unique.”
Law has been granted asylum in the UK – a move that angered Beijing, which declared him a criminal suspect. Even though he is thousands of miles from Hong Kong, he still has to look over his shoulder. He takes extra precautions: he never mentions where he lives and he takes detours when he leaves and returns home – measures that have come to define the life of China’s dissidents. He simply doesn’t feel safe “because of how extensive China’s reach can be”.
“We’ve got cases like Navalny; the Russian dissident forced to land in Belarus; we’ve also got a lot of cases of Uyghur activists around the world being arrested or extradited back to China. There are a lot of things that can happen to dissidents. It is not a secret that I am almost at the top of the list of national enemies that China portrays, so things like this could happen,” he says.
“On the other hand, I don’t want any of these fears to hinder my activities and my activism. So I will try to be vigilant to protect myself, but I will also try 100% to promulgate the agenda of the Hong Kong democratic movement.”
One of the ways that he wants to do this is through publishing his book. A blend of personal experience and broader context, Law wants it to appeal to as many people as possible and for these people to “act after reading it”.
“I’m an author, of course, but at the end of the day my essential identity is an activist. By definition, an activist is someone who tries to empower people to act in order to precipitate social changes. I intend to appeal to people to be more aware of their own democratic states,” he says.
As for what we can do to help Hong Kong, Law puts it simply: “Get involved. Pay more attention to Hong Kong and to China. Start to look into campaigns that could help, like boycotting the Olympics, supporting political prisoners or even reading news – just supporting the news agencies who produce these fantastic stories for Hong Kong and for China.
“After that, if you really want to be a campaigner that supports Hong Kong then get organised. Find your local grassroots organisation and be a volunteer and try to explain that to your friends and your neighbours.”
It might be the darkest chapter in Hong Kong’s story, but – to channel Law’s optimism – let’s hope it’s not the last.
How I exposed Beijing’s big lie
Young activist Nathan Law’s election to the Legislative Council in 2016 shattered the myth that the people of Hong Kong did not desire freedom and democracy, he says in an extract from his new book
In August 2016, a month before the election, our team were starting to worry. The polls suggested I had little support in the constituency I was running in. Hong Kong Island is a wealthy and generally conservative district, known for electing prominent members of Hong Kong’s professional and elite class – lawyers, public intellectuals and former government officials. To make things more difficult, my constituency happened to have the highest number of elderly residents. It was also an important ‘super seat’ that would return six places in the legislature by proportional representation, so fifteen parties had fielded candidates.
While we were hopeful, our expectations were low. I may have been a public figure, but I was known only as a student activist. Going straight from student activism to the first tier of Hong Kong politics was not easy. I had to adjust my mindset. I was no longer representing students like me, but having to appeal to and present myself as someone who could represent a much broader range of people. I needed to demonstrate that I had the ability to understand the complexity of realpolitik, and accommodate the diverse needs and views of constituents. I also had to convince people that I was able to represent them in the city’s highest chamber.
In the last two weeks of the election, I worked as hard as I could to outline my beliefs and analyse heated debates about policy. I wanted to prove that age, education and experience are not the deciding factors in what constitutes a proper lawmaker: determination, vision and eloquence are what matter most.
The 2016 election saw an unprecedented turnout: 2.2 million voters, 58 per cent of the registered electorate, cast their vote. Despite the constant hectoring of Beijing’s loyalists, the silent majority had spoken, and it was in favour of pro-democracy candidates. A new force had emerged in local politics, with new, progressive localist candidates winning six seats. And I won my seat, by a far greater margin than polls had suggested, to become Hong Kong’s youngest ever lawmaker.
I was so proud of what we had achieved. We had exercised our right to stand for election, and in voting for us the people of Hong Kong had exercised their right to elect representatives who shared their concerns. The legislature may have been designed to ensure a pro-establishment majority, making it more of a debating chamber than a true law-making body. But to be one of thirty-five directly elected legislators still mattered.
My election represented an expression of the limited political rights Hong Kong people enjoyed – an expression of our freedom. I had a democratic mandate and no one in government could claim otherwise. Even if all I could do was be one voice in the chamber, this voice would be heard throughout the city; and for so many people of my generation, and for all those who had voted for me, that mattered.
At twenty-three years of age, I was Hong Kong’s youngest legislator. Often, babies of the House, as the youngest parliamentarians are called in the UK, go on to have long careers in politics. Mine in Hong Kong would be one of the shortest.
Legislative Council members are elected to serve a four-year term. As my team moved into our new offices in the Legislative Council Complex, there was no reason to suppose we would not be there for at least that long. We did our best to make ourselves feel comfortable in room 901. As an activist I had met and worked with many legislators, but to be sitting in the Council building now as one of them felt different. I watched political aides come and go, and my staff hovering busily about, and could not help but wonder if I truly belonged there. Was this the right place for an activist? Could it accommodate us?
Well-known democratic lawmakers stopped by to welcome me. They did their best to make me feel I belonged. Many were politicians and campaigners I looked up to and had worked with during the protests. They had fought hard for a better Hong Kong – for labour rights, civil liberties and for other important freedoms. Still, any pride I might have felt was overridden by the realisation of what I was up against. Though my allies in the democratic camp were capable and respected in the wider community, they were operating within a system designed to ensure they would never have power. And those who did have power would seek to silence and destroy us.
My election had been a terrible loss of face for Beijing and their loyal supporters. It shattered one of their principal lies: that the majority of Hong Kong people are loyal patriots who place the ‘nation’ (meaning the CCP) over local issues and a desire for freedom and democracy. It was a lie that had served the interests of the powerful, from the officials and secret Communist Party members who dominated Hong Kong’s elites to international businesses who had throughout Hong Kong’s history suppressed the will of the people in order to promote so-called stability and a favourable commercial environment. It was a lie that Hong Kong’s last governor, Chris Patten, had bravely challenged by going directly to the people, refusing the assurances of an elite who insisted that Hong Kong people were apolitical. It was a lie that had become increasingly pernicious as Beijing encroached on our freedoms, making democratic representation even more important. And my presence in the Legislative Council, alongside other new and progressive lawmakers, told the world that it was a lie. Beijing would not forgive me for that.
Extracted from Freedom: How We Lose it and How We Fight Back, by Nathan Law, published by Transworld in November 2021
This interview and the extract appeared in the winter issue of Index on Censorship. Click here for more information on this issue
01 Jan 22 | News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”106060″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]We are pleased to receive the news that Trevor Phillips, co-founder of Webber Phillips and Chair of Index on Censorship, was today honoured with a knighthood in the New Year Honours 2022 for his work on understanding Covid-19.
Trevor said:
“It is a privilege to have made a contribution to the understanding of Covid and to have the value of data science in tackling inequality recognised in this way. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues at Webber Phillips, particularly my co-founder Richard Webber; and to Raj Tulsiani and the team at Green Park for their support in this work.
The past two years should have taught us all that the diversity of our people is both a benefit and a responsibility. We should respect difference but also remember that we are at our best when we face our challenges as a single nation.”
For any enquiries about this, please contact Rory Scarfe at the Blair Partnership on [email protected][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
30 Dec 21 | Artistic Freedom, Magazine, News and features, Turkey, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras, Wales
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”118071″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]I am a woman kicked out of Heaven.
I am a writer tried for treason, facing life in prison.
I am an exile defined as others.
I am autistic, pushing myself to be normal.
Only to become invisible.
I’m 52 years old. Since childhood, I have always felt alienated from my environment. The more petulant I became, the more walls I built between myself and the world, the greater the desire to flee grew. Not knowing from whom and from what I’m running away, only having the desire to shelter somewhere else, anywhere else. It is hard to be weird and different to others but not know why.
It has done irreparable damage to my self-esteem. I felt trapped inside a cocoon woven of my unhappiness. I was a thing apart. Other people were strictly separate from me. I felt this separation keenly.
This distinction was so clear in my childhood, as a young girl and even now it is the same…
For years, I established completeness in my inner world with all my broken fragments. Without expectation, motionless, distant, introverted. I drowned in words, definitions, tasks… I forgot my essence. I learned to mask myself because I have always been judged.
I have a lot of voices in my mind, ghosts of decades-old voices. Telling me how I should be…
In 2011 I wrote an absurd play called Mi Minör set in a fictional country called Pinima. During the performance, the audience could choose to play the President’s deMOCKracy game or support the Pianist’s rebellion against the system. The Pianist starts reporting all the things that are happening in Pinima through Twitter, which starts a role-playing game (RPG) with the audience. Mi Minör was staged as a play where an actual social media-oriented RPG was integrated with the physical performance. It was the first play of its kind in the world.
Blamed for the Gezi Park protests
A month after our play finished, the Gezi Park demonstrations in Istanbul started. On 10 June 2013, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak came out bearing the headline ‘What A Coincidence’, accusing Mi Minör of being the rehearsal for the protests, six months in advance. The article continued, “New information has come to light to show that the Gezi Park protests were an attempted civil coup” and claimed that “the protests were rehearsed months before in the play called Mi Minör staged in Istanbul”.
After Yeni Şafak’s article came out, the mayor of Ankara started to make programmes on TV specifically about Mi Minör, mentioning my name.
In one he showed an edited version of one of the speeches that I made six years ago about secularism, misrepresenting what I said in such a way that it looked like I was implying that secularism was somehow antagonistic to religion.
What I found so brutal was that the mayor did this in the knowledge that religion has always been one of the most sensitive subjects in Turkey. What upset me most was the fear I witnessed in my son’s eyes and the anxiety that my partner was living through.
Arikan interviewed over Mi Minor
The play was being discussed regularly on TV, websites and online forums and both Mi Minör and my name were being linked to a secret international conspiracy against Turkey and its ruling party, the AKP. Many of the comments referenced the 2004 banning of my book Stop Hurting my Flesh. I received hundreds of emails and tweets threatening rape and death as a result of this campaign.
For three nightmarish months, we were trapped in our own house and did not set foot outside. One day, I saw that one of my prominent accusers was tweeting about me for four hours. The sentences he chose to tweet were all excerpts from my research publication The Body Knows, taken out of context and manipulating what I had written. Those tweets were the last straw.
Wales is protecting me
I left our house, our loved ones, our pasts. We left in a night with a single suitcase and came to Wales, which had always been my dream country. I never imagined my arrival in Cardiff would be like this; feeling bitter, broken and incomplete.
Two years later my partner, who had remained in Turkey, and I got married. In the first month, I learned my husband had brain cancer. Operations, chemotherapy, radiotherapy followed… Within a year, I lost him. I visited him, but sadly I wasn’t able to go to his funeral because of new accusations levelled against me. This was a turning point in my life. I lost my husband. I lost my trust in people. I lost my savings to pay for his care. I lost everything.
In all of this emotional turmoil, I started walking every day for five or six hours. Geese became my best friend and my remedy. I walked for months. I walked and walked everywhere, in the mountains, in the valleys, at the seaside.
These walks had a transformative effect on me. I had discovered a way to live as a woman who had learned to accept herself, rather than a shattered and a lost woman.
Maybe there is an umbilical cord, beyond my consciousness, between me and the wild nature of Wales. I feel this land always wrapped itself around me, talked to me like a mother during the difficult time in my life. For this reason, I wrote my latest play; Y Brain/Kargalar (Crows), written in Welsh and Turkish and produced by Be Aware Productions. It describes my story, the special place this land has in my life and how it transformed me. The title refers to my constant companions during this time – the crows. One reviewer called it “unashamedly lyrical…even as it touches on dark themes”.
On 20 February 2019, as the play was being staged, a new indictment was issued against 16 people, including me, over Mi Minör; I now face a life sentence. Because of this absurd accusation, I feel ever more strongly that Wales is protecting me.
My diagnosis
It was at this time that I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome/autistic spectrum disorder and I’ve received many answers about myself as a result. From this moment, a new discovery and understanding started. I set out to discover myself with this new knowledge. As soon as I could know who I’m not, I could find out who I am.
I realise that my wiring system simply makes it harder for me to do many things that come naturally to other people. On the flip side, it is important to be aware that autism can also give me many magical perceptions that many neurotypicals simply are not capable of. I believe I was able to write Mi Minör because of my different perceptions.
I have therapy twice a week and I have started to understand what I have been through all my life. My therapists told me that I was manipulated and I was emotionally and sexually abused by whom I love and trust the most; it was a big shock for me. I spent half of my life trying to help abused victims, and I never thought I was a victim. They said this is very common because autistic women are not aware of when they were used. How could I have been so blind?
I couldn’t work out that I was being played by others, like a fish on a line. As an autistic, communication is about interpreting with a basic belief in what people tell me because I don’t tell lies myself. But I have learned how much capacity for lies exists. Autistic people can be gullible, manipulated and taken advantage of. But I learned that regret is the poison of life, the prison of the soul.
The most significant benefit of this process is that I am learning again like a child to re-evaluate everything with curiosity and enthusiasm. It also gives me the chance to reconstruct the rest of my life without hiding myself, being subjugated to anyone, and living without fear.
Autism diagnosis and discovery were liberating for me. There is still not enough autism spectrum awareness even today. That is why I decided to come out about my autism. I strongly believe that if those of us who are on the autistic spectrum share our experiences openly, then it wouldn’t only help other autistic people, it would help neurotypical people to better understand both us and our behaviour.
Looking back at the last few years, I have been thrown into navigating most of the challenging aspects and life experiences and there has been a complete cracking of all masks.
This process is not easy at all, sometimes my soul, sometimes my heart, sometimes all my cells hurt, but it also causes me to recognise a liberation I have never known before.
Fortunately, during this process, I have been learning a lot about myself and how I have masked myself as an Aspie-woman… For me, masking myself is more harmful even than not knowing I’m autistic. Masking means that I create a different Meltem to handle every situation. I have never felt a strong connection with my core. When I am confronted with emotional upset, my brain immediately goes into “fix it” mode, searching for a way to make the other person feel better so I can also relieve my own distress.
For most of my life, I’ve allowed myself to fit in with how I thought others wanted me to feel and act, especially those I loved. My dark night gave me so much pain I broke free and started to care for myself and heal. Taking me back to my primordial self, not the heroic one that burns out, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spiritual parts of nature, my own nature and the person I was at the beginning.
The last two years have been exciting for me. It is as if I died and was reincarnated again. In the end, I understand that my true nature is not to be some ideal that I have to live up to. It’s ok to be who I am right now, and that’s what I can make friends with and celebrate. I learned it’s about finding my own true nature and speaking and acting from that. Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty. That’s what other people respond to. I’m not perfect, but I’m real…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
29 Dec 21 | News and features, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Today’s raid on the offices of Hong Kong media outlet StandNews and the arrest of six individuals linked to it is a brutal crackdown on media freedom. Those arrested include current acting Chief Editor Patrick Lam, Deputy Editor Ronson Chan, pro-democracy activist and lawyer Margaret Ng, and activist and pop star Denise Ho.
The arrests come one day after Jimmy Lai, former owner of Apple Daily and six former Apple Daily journalists were hit with the new charges of “conspiracy to ‘print, publish, sell, offer for sale, distribute, display and/or reproduce seditious publications.”
They are also within days of Tiananmen Square commemoration statues being removed from Hong Kong’s landscape. Each of these actions alone would represent an attack on fundamental freedoms of expression and the media; combined they are an all-out assault, a terrifying combination that seeks to silence any form of dissent and gut the city of media freedom. StandNews has since announced its closure.
Freedom of the press is guaranteed under Article 27 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the constitutional settlement that has governed the city-region since 1997. Clearly Beijing has no intention to honour this article. Please join us in condemning these actions and reminding Beijing of its obligations to Hong Kong.
As always we at Index #StandWithHongKong.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
27 Dec 21 | Artistic Freedom, Magazine, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
In June 2015, a national newspaper in Britain started a campaign to have a play banned. This surprised me for two reasons. One: clearly no one had told the Daily Mirror about the Theatre Act 1968, which abolished the state’s censorship of the stage and did away with the quaintly repressive (if that’s not an oxymoron) notion of the Lord Chamberlain’s red pen. Two: the play in question was mine.
I wrote An Audience With Jimmy Savile to show how the late entertainer managed to get away with a lifetime of sexual offending. But despite the play’s very public service intentions, the Mirror started a petition to stop it. And so, for a moment, I found myself in some exalted, unwarranted company: Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw had plays banned (Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession, respectively). Inevitably, however, the Mirror’s cack-handed attempt at censorship failed and the play went ahead.
The episode was instructive, however. Because while it’s true that “we” – that is, the British state – don’t ban plays any more, a powerful and unhealthy censorious reflex still exists and there are clear signs that the urge to stifle and to repress has been growing stronger over the last few years. That repression takes many forms: a social media backlash here, a not-very-subtle government threat there – but it’s real, it’s unhealthy and it’s profoundly worrying.
Censorship in the West is real
We are not, of course, in the same league as China – where a play bemoaning their treatment of Uyghur Muslims, for example, would never be officially sanctioned – but as playwright David Hare told me in an email exchange for this article, censorship in the West is real. It just isn’t called that anymore.
“Is there censorship in the sense that there is censorship in Iran, Russia or China? Of course not. Nobody’s physical survival is threatened,” he said.
But he does seem to say that the BBC has, in effect, become a censorious government’s useful idiot. (My phrase, not his.)
“The BBC has a current policy of deliberately not alienating the government,” he said. “They have chosen the path of ingratiation rather than asserting their independence. The result is, effectively, a range of subjects [which is] hopelessly narrowed. Hence the ubiquity of cop shows. Even medical dramas are forbidden if they stray into questions of ministerial health policy.”
Some might accuse Hare of pique, given that a TV adaptation of his most recent play, Beat the Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes, was turned down by the BBC. He says it was rejected because of the subject matter: Covid-19. (Hare became gravely ill with the virus and the play depicts him on his sickbed, despairing of the government’s response to the pandemic as they “stutter and stumble” on the airwaves.)
Indeed, when Hare went public with his attack on the corporation for turning him down, it refused to comment and the inference was that this was an editorial judgment and not a political one. But, says Hare, they would say that wouldn’t they?
“Censorship in the West,” he said, occurs “in the impossible grey area between editorial judgment and active prohibition.”
He’s right. The most egregious recent example of censorship-in-all-but-name occurred in 2015 when the National Youth Theatre (NYT) cancelled a production of the play Homegrown, about the radicalisation of young Muslims, two weeks before it was due to open. The executive who made the decision cited “editorial judgment” as a factor.
But, thanks to Freedom of Information requests from Index on Censorship, a fuller explanation emerged soon afterwards. An email from the NYT executive responsible for cancelling the production contained the following line: “At the end of the day we are simply ‘pulling a show’ … at a point that still saves us a lot of emotional, financial and critical fallout.”
In other words: “Yes, we might be censoring an important piece of work featuring the two most underrepresented groups on stage – Muslims and young people – because we are worried about defending ourselves from a backlash which hasn’t happened yet, but we don’t really fancy defending free speech and trying to ride out the storm because it’s too much hassle. So, let’s just cancel it and put it down to editorial judgment. Oh yeah – and safeguarding. Even though putting on work like this should be our raison d’etre.”
The director of the piece, Nadia Latif, was understandably shellshocked. A few weeks after the cancellation she said the creative team were “genuinely still reeling. The gesture of someone silencing you is a really profound one. You give your heart and soul to something, and someone comes and shuts it down. It’s like they’re saying my thoughts and feelings are no longer valid.”
And to refer the audience to my earlier point, it’s happening more and more. Albeit behind the scenes, and sometimes in ways you don’t get to hear about. There are two reasons for this: the pandemic and the nature of the current government.
Covid and censorship
The pandemic first. Although Hare’s Covid-19 polemic made it to the stage, that was the exception not the rule. I can’t find any other examples of plays critical of the current government being either staged or commissioned.
That would seem to be directly related to the fact that, during lockdown, every theatre in the country was desperate for financial assistance from the Treasury. So regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, few gave the go-ahead to works which bit, or even nibbled, the only hand that could feed them.
This isn’t speculation. When the producers of my play The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson – an unashamed takedown of the prime minister – tried to book it into theatres for a national tour post-pandemic, more than one theatre said, in effect: “We are worried we will lose our Covid grants if we put on a play like that.”
Which brings us on to the current Conservative government and its attempt to take a long march through our cultural, creative and editorial institutions.
When the Tories couldn’t get the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre installed as the new boss of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, they simply scrapped the selection process and ordered that it start again, putting Dacre’s name forward once more – even though, first time round, the selection panel described him as “not appointable”. Dacre has now voluntarily withdrawn and gone back to the Mail.
Someone who was appointable and acceptable, however – to the government, that is – was Nadine Dorries, the new secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. Putting Dorries in charge at DCMS was a bit like getting Herod to run the local nursery. Within days of taking over she reportedly started issuing threats against our premier creative organisation – the BBC – which, in her view, was guilty of not sufficiently toeing the line.
After the BBC radio presenter Nick Robinson hectored Johnson in an interview – “Stop talking, prime minister” – it’s said that Dorries told her advisers that Robinson had “cost the BBC a lot of money”.
A bit like the take on Aids policy from the satricial show Brass Eye – is it Good Aids or Bad Aids? – there is Good Censorship and Bad Censorship. The decision to ban Homegrown falls into the latter category.
The social media backlash
But the act of self-editing – in effect, self-censorship – has more going for it. As Hare puts it: “There is all sorts of subject matter I wouldn’t tackle – but entirely because I’m not good enough. I have always refused anything which represents life in Nazi concentration camps, since I don’t trust myself to do it well enough to do justice to what happened. If I don’t think I can do justice to the real suffering of real people, then I avoid, [although] I take my hat off to great writers who are able to expand subject matter at a level where it vindicates the idea of writing about absolutely everything. More power to them.”
But it’s complicated, of course. The worry is that more and more writers, terrified of a vicious social media backlash, are self-editing to an extent that is unhealthy. There are few, for example, who would now dare to pen a play that took a critical, coolly objective look at both sides of the argument over transgender rights – even though tackling difficult subjects and representing “problematic” points of view is, arguably, one of theatre’s prime functions. What could be more relevant, and on point, than a play like that?
One playwright who did sail into these waters was Jo Clifford. Her play, The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, casts Jesus as a trans woman. During its 2018 run at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, an online petition demanding the play be banned garnered a healthy – or rather unhealthy – 24,674 signatures. Soon after that she spoke of how artists and writers were “on the front line of a culture war that will only deepen and strengthen as the ecological and financial crisis worsens and the right feel more fearfully that they are losing their grip on power”.
So, at a time when writers and playwrights need to be bolder, the signs are that they’re becoming more and more cowed; hence Sebastian Faulks’s bizarre announcement that he will no longer physically describe female characters in his novels. Fortunately, most of his peers seem to disagree with him. A recent open letter signed by more than 150 eminent writers, artists and thinkers including JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem warned of “a fear spreading through arts and media”.
“We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement,” it said.
Then again, not everyone agreed with the letter. Author Kaitlyn Greenidge said she was asked to sign it but refused, saying: “I do not subscribe to [its] concerns and do not believe this threat is real. Or at least I do not believe that being asked to consider the history of anti-blackness and white terrorism when writing a piece, after centuries of suppression of any other view in academia, is the equivalent of loss of institutional authority.”
Like I said, it’s complicated.
Promotional material for An Audience With Jimmy Savile. Photo: Boom Ents
The big question for writers, then, is this – if, like me, you believe that anything goes on stage, provided it’s not proscribed by law, how far should you go? Where do the (self-imposed) limits of free expression lie?
Those limits are different for each writer, of course. I would draw the line at, for example, depicting sexual assault on stage. My Jimmy Savile play showed the effects of it, clearly, on the main character – a young woman who’d been abused by him at Stoke Mandeville Hospital – but left the rest to the audience’s imagination. Sometimes it’s more powerful that way.
I would, however, defend the right of other playwrights to go further and include vivid scenes of sexual assault, provided it was for the “right” reasons. There would need to be a coherent dramatic justification for it and the creative team would be advised to have plenty of flak jackets ready. Anyone who tests the boundaries in this way will inevitably face accusations of prurience, unjustified provocation or worse.
The actor’s “thumb”
In 1980, when Howard Brenton showed a scene of homosexual rape in The Romans in Britain, the production found itself being prosecuted for gross indecency by Mary Whitehouse as part of her attempt to “clean up” Britain. (The prosecution failed when a key witness admitted that, from the back of stalls, what he thought was a penis might have been an actor’s thumb.)
A similar court case today would be unlikely. But then again there is always the Court of Public Opinion, powered by the rotten fuel of social media, which is arguably more scary and intimidating than the real thing.
I wouldn’t draw the line at giving free expression on stage to anti-Semitism, either. Sometimes the best way to destroy an argument is to bring it into the light. With one crucial proviso, which I will come to in a moment.
As a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust I am fascinated by the subject. I would love to see a play which explained where anti-Semitism came from. Or whether the definitions of it are justified. Are there internal contradictions there? (We fought the war to preserve our freedoms, but isn’t using the label “anti-Semitic” a destruction of one of our most cherished freedoms? As in, the freedom of speech?)
Any play which seeks to answer these questions would need characters espousing anti-Semitism – the more articulately the better, in my view – if they are to work properly.
My proviso would be that the anti-Semitism would need to be both contextualised and rigorously challenged. This could be done within the play – two characters arguing – or in the form of a post-show debate.
I would, for example, even have defended the right of writer Jim Allen and director Ken Loach to stage Perdition, their controversial 1987 play for the Royal Court, despite its disgusting anti-Semitic tropes.
The play accused Jews of “collaborating” with the Nazis during the Holocaust (is there a more loaded, insulting, inappropriate word in this context than “collaborated”?) and was based on the story of Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to let more than 1,600 Jews flee Hungary for the safety of Switzerland.
Kastner, it is argued, should have done more to warn more Jews (not just the 1,600 that he rescued) of what was happening. Hence Allen’s line: “To save your hides, you [a Jew] practically led them to the gas chambers.” Disgusting, misjudged and morally wrong.
In the resulting furore, the Royal Court cancelled the play. But the decision to ban it, paradoxically, only increased support for it, and the poison it contained. I would have let it go ahead but tried to persuade Allen to make editorial changes. And if that didn’t work (and I doubt it would have done, although some controversial lines were excised during rehearsals) then I would have staged a debate, forming part of the show, which allowed the Jewish community to explain why the play was so offensive and misjudged. Education beats defenestration, every time.
The stage would be the perfect place to explore the arguments on both sides, but in particular to highlight the muddy thinking of the anti-Israel lobby, as personified by Sally Rooney, who recently decided to punish the Jews by forbidding a Hebrew translation of her latest novel. (Although making them read it might have been a more effective punishment.)
British theatre is not in a good place today. Where are the revolutionaries? The new, angry young men and women, the new John Osbornes? We don’t need to Look Back In Anger: it’s all in front of us, now.
Would a film like 2009’s Four Lions, a deeply moral but, to some, hugely offensive Jihadi satire, get made today? I very much doubt it.
We – all of us: writers, commissioners and directors – need to be braver.
21 Dec 21 | Artistic Freedom, Belarus, Magazine, News and features, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
In a skyscraper in the heart of the City of London, a surprisingly airy rehearsal space hosts a group of Europe’s boldest theatre-makers.
In the centre of the room, a woman trudges in a circle with the juddering, formal rhythms of a fatigued sergeant-major, a vacuum-cleaner held out before her like a rifle. On the other side of the “stage”, an actor playing a surgeon is operating on a seemingly conscious patient.
Two stage-managers watch from the front: behind an otherwise conventional rehearsal table littered with sound equipment and notes, someone has hung the white-and-red flag, or byel-chyrvona-byely s’tsyah, which has become the emblem of Belarusian resistance to the dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
I spot a souvenir water-bottle from the Human Rights Foundation’s Oslo Freedom Forum. On a small chair at the side of the room, a voice issues from a Zoom video running on a laptop. This is Nikolai Khalezin, founder with his wife Natalia Koliada of the Belarus Free Theatre company, directing a rehearsal over video link.
Virtual rehearsals
Today Khalezin is leading his company by Zoom because he seems to have a cold – and, in the time of Covid, no one can be too careful. But unlike most directors working in London, he has long practised in making theatre remotely. 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.
Nicolai Khalezin (centre) directs rehearsals of Dogs of Europe pre-Covid. Photo: Mikalai Kuprych
Khalezin was a journalist before he became a theatre-maker, working for three independent Belarusian newspapers successively closed as the autocracy tightened its grip. But in all the years in the UK, Khalezin and Koliada have never stopped co-ordinating their theatre company, keeping in close but covert contact with artists on the frontline of Belarusian resistance, who have risked their freedom and even their lives to perform “unregistered” theatre in garages and private homes around their homeland.
Long before the pandemic, directing his actors by video-link had become Khalezin’s norm. Now, given the vicious repression which followed Lukashenka’s attempt to assert himself in August 2020 as the “winner” of a sixth term as president, the rest of the 16-member Belarus Free Theatre, and their families, have fled their native land to reunite in London.
Ostensibly, the artists of the Belarus Free Theatre are now refugees. “What can foundations and activists in the West specifically do to help?” I ask Khalezin, perhaps naively.
“What can you do to help? Imagine 20 people arriving in a new country without a roof, without spare clothes, with nowhere to go – then it becomes quite easy to picture what you can do to help.”
But they are also rehearsing in London as prestigious invited artists, programmed to premiere their latest production at the Barbican Centre in March 2022. Dogs of Europe, first performed in an early version in Minsk in 2019 – crowds of supporters turned up in spite of the fear of arrest – is an adaptation of Alhierd Bacharevic’s mammoth novel set in a dystopic Europe of 2049.
In the book, most of Asia has fallen under a secret-service dominated Russian “reich”, while an ever more fragmented western Europe grapples with a refugee crisis. The title seems to recall W H Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats: “In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark / And the living nations wait / Each sequestered in its hate.”
The novel was published in 2017, but as a long-term collaborator of Bacharevic, Khalezin first saw a version in 2014 – since then, he says, “it has become closer to our contemporary world even quicker than I had imagined.” He is still working on condensing Bacharevic’s 900 pages into a 150 minute show and on scaling up his company’s flexible rehearsal versions to fit the Barbican Theatre’s 1,162-seat main space.
Not that the Belarus Free Theatre’s audiences have ever been small. Part of the problem of performing for years in secret scratch locations around Minsk has always been the sheer number of people who regularly turn up, hungry for intellectual immediacy. The level of direct intervention by Lukashenka’s thugs has varied on and off – part of any surveillance state’s strategy is always to fuel uncertainty and surprise – but in 2007, for example, the entire company were arrested in the middle of a performance of Edward Bond’s Eleven Vests.
Ironically, Bond’s play for young people explores the abuse of liberty by state institutions, both school and army – the arrests came within three weeks of a summit on political liberty in eastern Europe at which Vaclav Havel had hosted the Belarus Free Theatre at his country home in the Czech Republic.
Theatre on the streets
With the eruption of protests in 2020, however, the theatre company found themselves performing on open streets. “Minsk is full of courtyards,” says Svetlana Sugako, the company’s general manager. “We went on to the streets, and so did everybody else, so there we were, performing to the crowds of protesters, and they were performing back in the form of their protest.”
Sugako discovered the Belarus Free Theatre in 2007, after being taken by a friend to a bar and rolling her eyes at the mere concept of theatre. “I had only seen the official, patriotic stuff – the state produces these long shows of official history and calls it theatre.”
Inside, the company were performing their internationally acclaimed version of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. “It was about suicide, and psychosis, and pain – and the government doesn’t allow us to have plays which show this, because we are supposed to be a perfect society, so officially we don’t have suicide, we don’t have psychosis, we don’t have pain. And it was right up in my face, performed at the bar, just like I’m talking to you now.”
Sugako immediately got involved. Shortly afterwards she was arrested with the group, and when I look at accounts of her imprisonment she has given elsewhere, I read harrowing stories about being humiliated while naked, and forced to listen to male prisoners being raped with objects in the next room. So I don’t press her. But she alludes to that particular stint in prison later in our conversation, when she talks about the experiences of being detained again last year in the aftermath of Lukashenka’s crushing of the courtyard protests.
‘‘It was bad before. But even compared to that first time, now it is hell. There are no human rights outside prison. So imagine what happens inside.”
There are still more than 600 political prisoners in Belarus (Lukashenka, in a recent interview with the BBC, called them “criminals”.) The Belarus Free Theatre have been working with Index on Censorship to smuggle letters from prison and publish them on the Index website as Letters from Lukashenka’s Prisoners.
What feels frustrating, observing the Belarus Free Theatre’s development, is how many times it seems to have dropped from the Western radar over the past few years. Ten years ago, they were a liberal cause célèbre – I first encountered their work at an event at the Young Vic in London hosted by Index on Censorship in 2010, which seemed to have every progressive theatre luminary in attendance.
Many friends have stood firm, including the actor Samuel West and the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, who also has a long-standing relationship with Index. But often, attention seems to flicker fashionably. Khalezin attributes this in part to the sheer wave of people in crisis globally: “You have people in need from Afghanistan, you have people from Syria – we shouldn’t be competing with each other for help, but our stories should all be reason to look beyond your borders, to build more bridges.”
Far from home
Most of the company – all of whom have hair-raising tales about escaping Belarus – are likely to be based in Poland for the foreseeable future, partly because living in London is more expensive.
Conversely, the infectiously hopeful aspect of the Belarus Free Theatre is its unfettered advertisement for the power of theatre as rebellion. Critical conversations about art as freedom of expression inevitably revolve around the naysayers’ question: “yes, but does it actually change anything?”
For 15 years, Khalezin and Koliada have been bringing people together in a nation whose government goes to extreme lengths to keep people apart. Theatre is shared experience – this much we know – and one of the markers of Lukashenka’s regime is his attempt to deny citizens shared experience.
In October 2020, during the height of the election protests, people were forbidden from gathering in public places in groups of more than three and private gatherings were banned outright. (This supposedly was a health measure – but, as Sugako observes, “Belarus has no coronavirus. Officially. We are a perfect country, remember?”).
Whether gathering people in private spaces, or engaging inquiring minds at a public protest, the Belarus Free Theatre brings people together. And when people come together, things begin to happen.
17 Dec 21 | News and features, Norway
A fatwa was issued against all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses. Photo: Adam Butler/PA Archive/PA Images
Norwegian freedom of speech foundation Fritt Ord has called for a state commission to investigate police handling of the attempted murder of a publisher three decades ago.
In 1993 William Nygaard – a former head of NRK and long-time director of the Aschehoug publishing house – was shot outside of his home in the Oslo suburb of Slemdal. Nygaard was left for dead on the street after being hit three times from behind as he opened his car door.
The call to look at the case again comes after one of the prime suspects in the case was tracked down by a team of journalists working for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
Although nobody claimed responsibility for the attack at the time, the shooting was widely believed to be linked to Nygaard’s support for Salman Rushdie and Aschehoug’s publication in Norwegian of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. At the time Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini for heresy. Aschehoug is Norway’s second largest publisher and has a track record of publishing controversial titles.
Fritt Ord director Knut Olav Åmås has suggested that an independent investigation into the handling of the case is warranted due to the longstanding failure of the Oslo police to make progress despite ample evidence. Åmås has singled out what he sees as strange police behaviour and a failure to follow up on key leads.
“[The handling of the case] should be investigated by an independent commission due to the considerable and surprising number of strange things that have happened, not least in the Oslo Metropolitan Police ever since the murder attempt took place in 1993,” Åmås told Index on Censorship. Åmås has specifically been critical of the Oslo’ police’s failure to focus on the fatwa in the crucial period following the shooting, and the decision to let local police investigate a case of national and international significance.
Witnesses to the shooting used photofits to produce an image of the attacker at the time, but until recently nobody was ever publicly identified or charged for the crime. Last month however the name of one of the suspects was revealed by the NRK team after he was tracked down in Beirut. Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi, who was resident in Norway when the attack happened, has been accused, though he denies all claims. As part of the accusations, he is alleged to have been assisted by a still-unnamed employee of the Iranian embassy in Oslo.
“It is a very important case, both as an integrated part of the whole Rushdie affair, and also as an important precursor to the [Danish] cartoon controversy, where Islamic regimes´ pressure on freedom of expression became a dramatic global event.” says Åmås, who is a former culture editor at Norway’s leading broadsheet Aftenposten.
Moussawi lived in Norway until 1996 and regularly attended events at the Iranian embassy. Despite having a son born in Oslo his family were never granted citizenship and he was eventually deported from the country and returned to Lebanon, inadvertently complicating the investigation into the Nygaard shooting.
In 2008 the Norwegian Prosecuting Authority determined that the case should be reopened and responsibility was shifted from the Oslo Metropolitan Police to Kripos, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service .
Åmås says that the latest revelations mean it may finally be possible to bring Nygaard’s attackers to justice.
“It shows that Norwegian police has evidence that they should act upon, by issuing a so-called Red notice through Interpol for example – and also working with Lebanese authorities to make it possible to bring him [Moussawi] to Norway for interrogation. The same should happen to the Iranian who has been charged.” Åmås believes.
If the unnamed Iranian embassy staff member is convicted and a link is proven between Iran’s embassy and the shooting, it would also retrospectively establish the crime as an act of state-sponsored terrorism rather than attempted murder.
The Iranian Embassy in Oslo has denied the claims. “This type of allegation…is completely without basis, and we strongly reject this allegation,” it told NRK.
Moussawi also gave an extensive interview to NRK in Beirut when his identity was revealed, claiming to have been unaware of his status as one of the prime suspects. He also repeatedly denied any involvement with Hezbollah, the Lebanese religious and political movement with close ties to Iran that endorsed the fatwa against Rushdie.
“I have never been active in Hezbollah, either politically, religiously or socially,” Moussawi told NRK. “There was no political activity in the embassy. We drank tea, ate and read from the Koran,” he said.
17 Dec 21 | Afghanistan, Magazine, Media Freedom, News and features, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
As a woman and a journalist, I have been living my worst nightmare since 15 August 2021, the day the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban. Since that Sunday, I have been reporting about what women have lost – and what they continue to lose – as the new regime expands its power.
The Taliban have limited every aspect of women’s lives, from banning them from school and work to introducing long black uniforms that cover them from head to toe. Having grown up in Kabul since 2001, when the Taliban were deposed, I never imagined a return to the days when women were forced to stay home because of their gender.
When I was working as a journalist based in Kabul between 2011 and 2017, the media was the last hope for dissidents. Now the media, which continue to expose wrongdoing, have turned into dissidents. Today, making an editorial decision in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is literally making a decision about life and death.
In our small newsroom at Rukhshana Media, an all-women news website, one recurrent concern is how to tell a story with minimum risk to the people involved. The journalist is often the first to face the consequences of his or her work.
Journalism under the Taliban
Afghanistan has never been a safe country for journalists but, after 2001, the nascent Afghan media were freer than media in neighbouring countries.
Now they can hardly function without getting visits and calls from the new rulers in charge – the group that labelled the media a military target and continued to threaten them before coming to power in mid-August.
Media outlets are closing and journalists are being arrested, tortured and being forced to go on the run.
On 14 August, the day before Kabul fell, Mujeeb Khalwatgar, executive director of the Afghan media advocacy group Nai, told me his organisation had heard from journalists in Baghlan, Kandahar and Herat provinces that the Taliban were searching for them.
The same day, I talked to a young journalist from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan who said his name was on the Taliban’s blacklist. He was hiding outside Fayzabad, the provincial capital.
Days before the Taliban took Fayzabad, one of his female colleagues was attacked by a man who covered his face. She survived the attack, but they were worried whether they could survive the new regime.
I talked to several women reporters from the provinces who sought shelter in Kabul as the Taliban took over, hoping to leave the country on evacuation flights. Many of them didn’t make it.
In early November, a 24-year-old-woman, one of only three female journalists in an entire province – who asked me not to name the province – said she was on a Taliban blacklist, according to a relative who was working with the militants. The radio station she worked for was among more than 150 media outlets forced to close because of Taliban-imposed restrictions and the economic crisis a month after Kabul fell.
As the breadwinner of a family of nine, the change in rulers meant she not only lost her job but is on the run for her life, simply for being a woman journalist. In the past two months, she has been forced to change her place of residence seven times to hide from the Taliban.
Women journalists are disappearing
An Afghan female journalist attends a Taliban news conference. Photo REUTERS/Jorge Silva
Two weeks after the Taliban’s return to power, Reporters Without Borders warned that “women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital”. The organisation noted that, of about 700 women journalists with jobs in Kabul, more than 600 had not returned to work. Some fled while others were forced to stay at home or go into hiding.
Our investigation at Rukhshana Media shows that there are no women journalists in radio or TV working in the western provinces of Herat, Farah, Badghis and Ghor.
The systematic removal of women from the media landscape is not the only immediate consequence of the Taliban’s return to power. Just three weeks after their takeover, the militants arrested 14 journalists, with at least nine of them subjected to violence during their detention, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Among those detained were an editor and four other journalists at Etilaat Roz, a newspaper that was a winner of Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Award in 2020. Two of them were tortured by the Taliban and needed hospital treatment.
Today, journalists – both men and women – are still on the run. In November, I talked to a 31-year-old journalist who for the past eight years has been an investigative reporter for local print and online outlets. Since 15 August, he has been on the run with his family of four, having spent nights in five different places. He is particularly worried about his investigations into the Taliban-run religious schools.
“No one is listening to my calls for help, no one. I am just hoping the Taliban don’t catch me alive,” he said.
Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch have issued warnings about the Taliban censorship of media, especially their “media regulations” which require journalists and media not to produce content “contrary to Islam” and not to report on “matters that have not been confirmed by officials”.
The chief editor of a radio station in Kabul who, despite not having a passport, attempted (unsuccessfully) to get on an evacuation flight out of the country in late August, told me his story. Now he is back at work, where, in one month, the Taliban have visited his office four times. Twice when his colleagues used the word “Taliban” instead of “the Islamic Emirate”, he received calls warning him to be careful with the choice of words.
He says his radio station, like all other Afghan media outlets, is under the Taliban’s scrutiny. Three of his colleagues in other provinces have been ordered by provincial officials to send their news first to the Taliban before it is signed off for broadcast.
With reliable sources of information having dried up and journalists either on the run or operating in an environment of fear, censorship and self-censorship, it is becoming harder to be a journalist.
The new environment creates opportunities for the circulation of false stories and propaganda on social media. Lately, it has become difficult to distinguish between real news and propaganda. Many on social media, including some journalists, are propagating stories that correspond with their biases and social and political prejudices which then will be used by some international media to verify their own assumptions and biases.
Fake news
Exposing false and misleading stories has been one of the primary goals of our team at Rukhshana Media, where we investigated two stories directly connected to misinformation and staged reporting in the past two months.
Many news outlets reported that Mahjabin Hakimi, a 25-year-old professional volleyball player, was beheaded by the Taliban. The reports were based entirely on the claim of her coach in Kabul’s volleyball club who spoke under a pseudonym. But our investigation, in which we interviewed five sources, including her parents and a friend who was present the day her body was found, showed that she died on 6 August – nine days before the Taliban took over Kabul.
In the second story, several people connected to the family of a nine-year-old girl featured in CNN’s bombshell report on child marriage told Rukhshana Media the report was invented.
Our reporters are working on the ground to bring women’s stories to the surface of a male-dominated Afghan media. In the past months, we have partnered with two international newsrooms, The Guardian and The Fuller Project, which has helped amplify the voice of Afghan women to wider audiences outside the country.
With women journalists remaining at risk, we are trying to create opportunities for them to continue their work and tell the stories of women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where they are banned from work and education and have no idea when they will be able to return to public life.
15 Dec 21 | Magazine, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021
Playwright
Meltem Arikan is a Turkish and Welsh author who was short-listed for the Freedom of Expression Award in 2014 by Index on Censorship for her play Mi Minor.
Journalist
Caitlin May McNamara is a journalist and a campaigner who lives in London.
Activist
Nathan Law is an activist and politician from Hong Kong. In 2016, at 23, he was elected to work as a legislator for Hong Kong, being the youngest lawmaker to ever occupy a chair in the Legislative Council of Hong Kong.
