12 Aug 2022 | Magazine, News and features, Student Reading Lists
Salman Rushdie. Credit: Fronteiras do Pensamento
On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie, the author of the book The Satanic Verses, was attacked as he prepared to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, an arts and education centre in New York state.
Index on Censorship has supported Rushdie’s right to express himself ever since he came into the public eye more than three decades ago.
On 14 February 1989 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to execute Rushdie over the publication of The Satanic Verses, along with anyone else involved with the novel.
Published in the UK in 1988 by Viking Penguin, the book was met with widespread protest by those who accused Rushdie of blasphemy and unbelief. Death threats and a $6 million bounty on the author’s head saw him take on a 24-hour armed guard under the British government’s protection programme.
The book was soon banned in a number of countries, from Bangladesh to Venezuela, and many died in protests against its publication, including on 24 February when 12 people lost their lives in a riot in Bombay, India. Explosions went off across the UK, including at Liberty’s department store, which had a Penguin bookshop inside, and the Penguin store in York.
Book store chains including Barnes and Noble stopped selling the book, and copies were burned across the UK, first in Bolton where 7,000 Muslims gathered on 2 December 1988, then in Bradford in January 1989. In May 1989 between 15,000 to 20,000 people gathered in Parliament Square in London to burn Rushdie in effigy.
In October 1993, William Nygaard, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, was shot three times outside his home in Oslo and seriously injured.
Rushdie came out of hiding after nine years, but as recently as February 2016, money has been raised to add to the fatwa, reminding the author As that for many the Ayatollah’s ruling still stands.
As his supporters around the world, including Index, pray for a positive outcome, we highlight key articles from our archives from before, during and after the issue of the fatwa, including two from Rushdie himself.
Cuba today, the March 1989 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
World statement by the international committee for the defence of Salman Rushdie and his publishers
March 1989, vol. 18, issue 3
On 14 February the Ayatollah Khomeini called on all Muslims to seek out and execute Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, and all those involved in its publication. We, the undersigned, insofar as we defend the right to freedom of opinion and expression as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declare that we also are involved in the publication. We are involved whether we approve the contents of the book or not. Nonetheless, we appreciate the distress the book has aroused and deeply regret the loss of life associated with the ensuing conflict.
Read the full article
Islam & human rights, the May 1989 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Pandora’s box forced open
Amir Taheri
May 1989, vol. 18, issue 5
‘What Rushdie has done, as far as Muslim intellectuals are concerned, is to put their backs to the wall and force them to make the choice they have tried to avoid for so long’. Last year, when poor old Mr Manavi filled in his Penguin order form for 10 copies of Salman Rushdie’s third novel, The Satanic Verses, he could not have imagined that the book, described by its publishers as a reflection on the agonies of exile, would provoke one of the most bizarre diplomatic incidents in recent times. Mr Manavi had been selling Penguin books in Tehran for years. He had learned which authors to regard as safe and which ones to avoid at all costs.
Read the full article
Islam & human rights, the May 1989 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Jihad for freedom
Wole Soyinka
May 1989, vol. 18, issue 5
This statement is not, of course, addressed to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, except for a handful of fanatics, is easily diagnosed as a sick and dangerous man who has long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam. It is useful to address oneself, at this point, only to the real Islamic faithful who, in their hearts, recognise the awful truth about their erratic Imam and the threat he poses not only to the continuing acceptance of Islam among people of all religions and faiths but to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter the differing colorations of their piety. Will Salman Rushdie die? He shall not. But if he does, let the fanatic defenders of Khomeini’s brand of Islam understand this: The work for which he is now threatened will become a household icon within even the remnant lifetime of the Ayatollah. Writers, cineastes, dramatists will disseminate its contents in every known medium and in some new ones as yet unthought of.
Read the full article
South Africa after Apartheid, the April 1990 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Reflections on an invalid fatwah
Amir Taheri
April 1990, vol. 19, issue 4
Broadly speaking, three predictions were made. The first was that Khomeini’s attempt at exporting terror might goad world public opinion into a keener understanding of Iran’s tragedy since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The fact that the Ayatollah had executed thousands of people, including many writers and poets since his seizure of power in Tehran had provoked only mild rebuke from Western governments and public opinion. With the fatwa against Rushdie, we thought the whole world would mobilise against the ayatollah, turning his regime into an international pariah. Nothing of the kind happened, of course, and only one country, Britain, closed its embassy in Tehran – and that because the mullahs decided to sever.diplomatic ties. In the past twelve months Federal Germany and France have increased their trade with the Islamic Republic to the tune of II and 19 per cent respectively. The EEC countries and Japan have, in the meantime, provided the Islamic Republic with loans exceeding £2,000 million. The stream of European and Japanese businessmen and diplomats visiting Tehran turned into a mini-flood after Khomeini’s death last June.
Read the full article
South Africa after Apartheid, the April 1990 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Salman Rushdie and political expediency
Adel Darwish
April 1990, vol. 19, issue 4
When I reviewed Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in September 1988, it never crossed my mind to make any reference to possible offence to Muslim readers, let alone to anticipate the unprecedented international crisis generated in the months that followed. I do not think I was naive – as an LBC radio reporter suggested when she interviewed me at the first public reading from The Satanic Verses in June 1989. On the contrary, I can claim more than many that I am able to understand what Mr Rushdie was trying to say in his book, and the way the crisis has developed. Like Mr Rushdie, I am a British writer, born to a Muslim family. Born in Egypt, I was educated and am employed in Britain, and have been preoccupied and engaged, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, with the issues that Mr Rushdie has fought for and with which he seemed to be very much concerned in his book.
Read the full article
Azerbaijan, the February 1991 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
My decision
Salman Rushdie
February 1991, vol. 20, issue 2
A man’s spiritual choices are a matter of conscience, arrived at after deep. reflection and in the privacy of his heart. They are not easy matters to speak of publicly. I should like, however, to say something about my decision to affirm the two central tenets of Islam — the oneness of God and the genuineness of the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad —and thus to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it. Although I come from a Muslim family background, I was never brought up as a believer, and was raised in an atmosphere of what is broadly known as secular humanism. I still have the deepest respect for these principles. However, as I think anyone who studies my work will accept, I have been engaging more and more with religious belief, its importance and power, ever since my first novel used the Sufi poem Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-din Attar as a model. The Satanic Verses itself, with its portrait of the conflicts between the material and spiritual worlds, is a mirror of the conflict within myself.
Read the full article
20th Anniversary: Reign of terror, the June 1992 issue of the Index on Censorship magazine.
Offending the high priests
Gunter Grass
June 1992, vol. 21, issue 6
When George Orwell returned from Spain in 1937, he brought with him the manuscript of Homage to Catalonia. It reflected the experiences he had gathered during the Civil War. At first, he was unable to find a publisher because a multitude of influential, left-wing intellectuals had no wish to acknowledge its shocking observations. They did not want to accept the Stalinist terror, the systematic liquidation of anarchists, Trotskyists and left-wing socialists. Orwell himself only narrowly escaped this terror. His stark accusations contradicted a world image of a flawless Soviet Union fighting against Fascism. Orwell’s report, this onslaught of terrible reality, tarnished the picture-book dream of Good and Evil. A year later, a bourgeois Western publisher brought out Homage to Catalonia; in the areas of Communist rule, Orwell’s works – among them the bitter Spanish truth – were banned for half a century. The minister responsible for state security= in the German Democratic Republic, right to its end, was Erich Mielke. During the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the Communist cadre to whom purge through liquidation became commonplace. A fighter for Spain with an extraordinary capacity for survival.
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Russia’s choice, the November-December 1993 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
The Rushdie affair: Outrage in Oslo
Hakon Harket
November 1993, vol. 22, issue 10
The terrorist state of Iran must face the consequences of refusing to lift the fatwa that condemns Salman Rushdie, and those associated with his work, to death. When someone, in accordance with the express order of the fatwa, attempts to murder one of the damned, the obvious consequence is that Iran must be held responsible for the crime it has called for, at least until there is conclusive proof that no connection exists. The shooting of William Nygaard has reminded the Norwegian public of what the Rushdie affair is really about: life and death; the abuse of religion; the fiction of a free mind. This war of terror against freedom of speech is not one we can afford to lose. Since the nightmare clearly will not disappear of its own accord, it must be engaged head-on.
Read the full article
New censors, the March 1996 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
From Salman Rushdie
March 1996, vol. 25, issue 2
This statement is not, of course, addressed to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, except for a handful of fanatics, is easily diagnosed as a sick and dangerous man who has long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam. It is useful to address oneself, at this point, only to the real Islamic faithful who, in their hearts, recognise the awful truth about their erratic Imam and the threat he poses not only to the continuing acceptance of Islam among people of all religions and faiths but to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter the differing colorations of their piety. Will Salman Rushdie die? He shall not. But if he does, let the fanatic defenders of Khomeini’s brand of Islam understand this: The work for which he is now threatened will become a household icon within even the remnant lifetime of the Ayatollah. Writers, cineastes, dramatists will disseminate its contents in every known medium and in some new ones as yet unthought of.
Read the full article
The Rushdie affair: Outrage in Oslo
Hakon Harket
November 1993, vol. 22, issue 10
The terrorist state of Iran must face the consequences of refusing to lift the fatwa that condemns Salman Rushdie, and those associated with his work, to death. When someone, in accordance with the express order of the fatwa, attempts to murder one of the damned, the obvious consequence is that Iran must be held responsible for the crime it has called for, at least until there is conclusive proof that no connection exists. The shooting of William Nygaard has reminded the Norwegian public of what the Rushdie affair is really about: life and death; the abuse of religion; the fiction of a free mind. This war of terror against freedom of speech is not one we can afford to lose. Since the nightmare clearly will not disappear of its own accord, it must be engaged head-on.
Read the full article
New censors, the March 1996 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
From Salman Rushdie
March 1996, vol. 25, issue 2
This statement is not, of course, addressed to the Ayatollah Khomeini who, except for a handful of fanatics, is easily diagnosed as a sick and dangerous man who has long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam. It is useful to address oneself, at this point, only to the real Islamic faithful who, in their hearts, recognise the awful truth about their erratic Imam and the threat he poses not only to the continuing acceptance of Islam among people of all religions and faiths but to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter the differing colorations of their piety. Will Salman Rushdie die? He shall not. But if he does, let the fanatic defenders of Khomeini’s brand of Islam understand this: The work for which he is now threatened will become a household icon within even the remnant lifetime of the Ayatollah. Writers, cineastes, dramatists will disseminate its contents in every known medium and in some new ones as yet unthought of.
Read the full article
Tolerance and the intolerable, the May 1994 issue of Index on Censorship magazine
Bosnia on my mind
Salman Rushdie
May 1994, vol. 23, issue 1-2
When the Balkans War broke out, Rushdie had never been to Sarajevo, but felt that he belonged to it. He imagined a Sarajevo of the mind, whose ruination and torment exiled everyone.
He wrote: “Sarajevo’s truth is that its citizens, who reject definition by religion or confession, who wish to be simply Bosnians, have for their pains been labelled by the outside world as ‘Muslims’. It is instructive to imagine how things might have gone in former Yugoslavia if the Bosnians had been Christians and the Serbs had been Muslims, even Muslims ‘in name only’. Would Europe have supported a ‘Serbian Muslim’ carve-up of the defunct state? It’s only a guess, but I guess that it would not. Which being true, it must also be true that the ‘Muslim’ tag is part of the reason for Europe’s indifference to Sarajevo’s fate.”
Read the full article
The right to publish
Peter Mayer
December 2008, vol. 37, issue 4
As publisher of The Satanic Verses, Peter Mayer was on the front line. He writes here for the first time about an unprecedented crisis:
Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses six months before Ayatollah Khomeini issues his fatwa. When we decided to continue publishing the novel in the aftermath, extraordinary pressures were focused on our company, based on fears for the author’s life and for the lives of everyone at Penguin around the world. This extended from Penguin’s management to editorial, warehouse, transport, administrative staff, the personnel in our bookshops and many others. The long-term political implications of that early signal regarding free speech in culturally diverse societies were not yet apparent to many when the Ayatollah, speaking not only for Iran but, seemingly, for all of Islam, issued his religious proclaimation.
Read the full article
Emblem of darkness
Bernard-Henri Lévy
December 2008, vol. 37, issue 4
As publisher of The Satanic Verses, Peter Mayer was on the front line. He writes here for the first time about an unprecedented crisis:
Salman Rushdie was not yet the great man of letters that he has since become. He and I are, though, pretty much the same age. We share a passion for India and Pakistan, as well as the uncommon privilege of having known and written about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Rushdie in Shame; I in Les Indes Rouges), the father of Benazir, former prime minister of Pakistan, executed ten years earlier in 1979 by General Zia. I had been watching from a distance, with infinite curiosity, the trajectory of this almost exact contemporary. One day, in February 1989, at the end of the afternoon, as I sat in a cafe in the South of France, in Saint Paul de Vence, with the French actor Yves Montand, sipping an orangeade, I heard the news: Ayatollah Khomeini, himself with only a few months to live, had just issued a fatwa, in which he condemned as an apostate the author of The Satanic Verses and invited all Muslims the world over to carry out the sentence, without delay.
Read the full article
40 years of Index on Censorship March 2012
Last chance?
Salman Rushdie
March 2012, vol. 41, issue 1
Salman Rushdie’s first memories of censorship are cinematic: screen kisses brutalised by prudish scissors which chopped out the moments of actual contact. (Briefly, before comprehension dawned, he wondered if that were all there was to kissing, the languorous approach and then the sudden turkey-jerk away.) The effect was usually somewhat comic, and censorship still retains, in contemporary Pakistan, a strong element of comedy. When the Pakistani censors found that the movie El Cid ended with a dead Charlton Heston leading the Christians to victory over live Moslems, they nearly banned it until they had the idea of simply cutting out the entire climax, so that the film as screened showed El Cid mortally wounded. El Cid dying nobly, and then it ended. Muslims 1, Christians 0.
Read the full article
The winter 2013 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
Defending the right to be offended
Samira Ahmed
December 2013, vol. 42, issue 4
The tensions between freedom of speech and religious belief remain acute – and they are systematically exploited by political groups of all stripes, from the English Defence League to radical Islamists who threaten to disrupt the repatriation of dead British soldiers at Wootton Bassett. The story consistently makes the headlines. The idea that there is an Islamist assault on British freedoms and values is widespread.
The Muslim campaign against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 was the crucial moment in all this. It forced writers and artists from an Asian or Muslim background, whether they defined themselves that way or not, to take sides. They had to declare loyalty – or otherwise – to the offended.
Read the full article
14 Apr 2022 | News and features, Russia, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022 Extras
The story of Index on Censorship is steeped in the romance and myth of the Cold War.
In one version of the narrative, it is a tale that brings together courageous young dissidents battling a totalitarian regime and liberal Western intellectuals desperate to help – both groups united in their respect for enlightenment values.
In another, it is just one colourful episode in a fight to the death between two superpower ideologies, where the world of letters found itself at the centre of a propaganda war.
Both versions are true.
It is undeniably the case that Index was founded during the Cold War by a group of intellectuals blooded in cultural diplomacy. Western governments (and intelligence services) were keen to demonstrate that the life of the mind could truly flourish only where Western values of democracy and free speech held sway.
But in all the words written over the years about how Index came to be, it is important not to forget the people at the heart of it all: the dissidents themselves, living the daily reality of censorship, repression and potential death.
The story really began not in 1972, with the first publication of this magazine, but with a letter to The Times and the French paper Le Monde on 13 January 1968. This Appeal to World Public Opinion was signed by Larisa Bogoraz Daniel, a veteran dissident, and Pavel Litvinov, a young physics teacher who had been drawn into the fragile opposition movement during the celebrated show-trial of intellectuals Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (Larisa’s husband) in February 1966. This is now generally accepted as being the beginning of the modern Soviet dissident movement.
The letter itself was written in response to the Trial of Four in January 1968, which saw two students, Yuri Galanskov and Alexander Ginzburg, sentenced to five years’ hard labour for the production of anti-communist literature.
The other two defendants were Alexey Dobrovolsky, who pleaded guilty and co-operated with the prosecution, and a typist, Vera Lashkova.
Ginzburg later became a prominent dissident and lived in exile in Paris, Galanskov died in a labour camp in 1972 and Dobrovolsky was sent to a psychiatric hospital. Lashkova’s fate is unclear.
The letter was the first of its kind, appealing to the Soviet people and the outside world rather than directly to the authorities. “We appeal to everyone in whom conscience is alive and who has sufficient courage… Citizens of our country, this trial is a stain on the honour of our state and on the conscience of every one of us.”
The letter went on to evoke the shadow of Joseph Stalin’s show-trials in the 1930s and ended: “We pass this appeal to the Western progressive press and ask for it to be published and broadcast by radio as soon as possible – we are not sending this request to Soviet newspapers because that is hopeless.”
The trial took place in a courthouse packed with Kremlin supporters, while protesters outside endured temperatures of 50 degrees below zero.
The poet Stephen Spender responded to the letter by organising a telegram of support from 16 prominent artists and intellectuals, including philosopher Bertrand Russell, poet WH Auden, composer Igor Stravinsky and novelists JB Priestley and Mary McCarthy.
It took eight months for Litvinov to respond, as he had heard the words of support only on the radio and was waiting for the official telegram to arrive. It never did.
On 8 August 1968, the young dissident outlined a bold plan for support in the West for what he called “the democratic movement in the USSR”. He proposed a committee made up of “universally respected progressive writers, scholars, artists and public personalities” to be taken not just from the USA and western Europe but also from Latin America, Asia, Africa and, ultimately, from the Soviet bloc itself. Litvinov later wrote an account in Index explaining how he had typed the letter and given it to Dutch journalist and human rights activist Karel van Het Reve, who smuggled it out of the country to Amsterdam the next day. Two weeks later, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.
On 25 August 1968, Litvinov and Bogoraz Daniel joined six others in Red Square to demonstrate against the invasion. It was an extraordinary act of courage. They sat down and unfurled homemade banners with slogans that included “We are Losing Our Friends”, “Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia”, “Shame on Occupiers!” and “For Your Freedom and Ours”.
The activists were immediately arrested and most received sentences of prison or exile, while two were sent to psychiatric hospitals.
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and first president of the Czech Republic, later said in a Novaya Gazeta article: “For the citizens of Czechoslovakia, these people became the conscience of the Soviet Union, whose leadership without hesitation undertook a despicable military attack on a sovereign state and ally.”
When Ginzburg died in 2002, novelist Zinovy Zinik used his Guardian obituary to sound a note of caution. Ginzburg, he wrote, was “a nostalgic figure of modern times, part of the Western myth of the Russia of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when literature, the word, played a crucial part in political change”.
Speaking 20 years later, Zinik told Index he did not even like the English word “dissident”, which failed to capture the true complexity of the opposition to the Soviet regime. “The Russian word used before ‘dissidents’ invaded the language was ‘inakomyslyashchiye’ – it is an archaic word but was adopted into conversational vocabulary. The correct translation would be ‘holders of heterodox views’.”
It’s perhaps understandable that the archaic Russian word didn’t catch on, but his point is instructive.
As Zinik warned, it is all too easy to romanticise this era and see it through a Western lens. The Appeal to World Public Opinion was not important because it led to the founding of Index. The letter was important because it internationalised the struggle of the Soviet dissident movement.
As Litvinov later wrote in Index: “Only a few people understood at the time that these individual protests were becoming a part of a movement which the Soviet authorities would never be able to eradicate.” Index was a consequence of Litvinov’s appeal; it was not the point of the exercise and there was no mention of a magazine in the early correspondence.
The original idea was to set up an organisation, Writers and Scholars International, to give support to the dissidents. It was only with the appointment of Michael Scammell in 1971 that the idea emerged to establish a magazine to publish and promote the work of dissidents around the world.
Spender and his great friend and co-collaborator, the Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire, were still reeling from revelations about CIA funding of their previous magazine, Encounter.
“I knew that [they]… had attempted unsuccessfully to start a new magazine and I felt that they would support something in the publishing line,” Scammell wrote in Index in 1981.
Speaking recently from his home in New York, Scammell told me: “I understood Pavel Litvinov’s leanings here. He understood that a magazine that was impartial would stand a better chance of making an impression in the Soviet Union than if it could just be waved away as another CIA project.”
Philip Spender, the poet’s nephew, who worked for many years at Index, agreed: “Pavel Litvinov was the seed from which Index grew… He always said it shouldn’t be anti-communist or anti-Soviet. The point wasn’t this or that ideology. Index was never pro any ideology.”
It has been suggested that Index did not mark quite such a clean break – it was set up by the same Cold Warriors and susceptible to the same CIA influence. In her exhaustive examination of the cultural Cold War, Who Paid the Piper, journalist Frances Stonor Saunders claimed Index was set up with a “substantial grant” from the Ford Foundation, which had long been linked to the CIA.
In fact, the Ford funding came later, but it lasted for two decades and raises serious questions about what its backers thought Index was for.
Scammell now recognises that the CIA was playing a sophisticated game at the time. “On one level this is probably heresy to say so, but one must applaud the skills of the CIA. I mean, they had that money all over the place. So, I would get the Ford Foundation grant, let’s say, and it never ever occurred to me that that money itself might have come from the CIA.”
He added: “I would not have taken any money that was labelled CIA, but I think they were incredibly smart.”
By the time the magazine appeared in spring 1972, it had come a long way from its origins in the Soviet opposition movement. It did reproduce two short works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and poetry by dissident Natalya Gorbanevskaya (a participant in the 1968 Red Square demonstration, who had been released from a psychiatric hospital in February of that year). But it also contained pieces about Bangladesh, Brazil, Greece, Portugal and Yugoslavia.
Philip Spender said it was important to understand the context of the times: “There was a lot of repression in the world in the early ’70s. There was the imprisonment of writers in the Soviet Union, but also Greece, Spain and Portugal. There was also apartheid. There was a coup in Chile in 1973, which rounded up dissidents. Brazil was not a friendly place.”
He said Index thought of itself as the literary version of Amnesty International. “It wasn’t a political stance, it was a non-political stance against the use of force.”
The first edition of the magazine opened with an essay by Stephen Spender, With Concern for Those Not Free. He asked each reader of the article to say to themselves: “If a writer whose works are banned wishes to be published and if I am in a position to help him to be published, then to refuse to give help is for me to support censorship.”
He ended the essay in the hope that Index would act as part of an answer to the appeal “from those who are censored, banned or imprisoned to consider their case as our own”.
Since Index was founded, the Berlin Wall has fallen and apartheid has been dismantled. We have witnessed the “war on terror”, the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin and the emergence of China as a world superpower.
And yet, if it is not too grand or presumptuous, the role of the magazine remains unchanged – to consider the case of the dissident writer as our own.
25 Feb 2022 | Belarus, News and features, Russia, Statements, Ukraine
We, the undersigned organisations, stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, but particularly Ukrainian journalists who now find themselves at the frontlines of a large-scale European war.
We unequivocally condemn the violence and aggression that puts thousands of our colleagues all over Ukraine in grave danger.
We call on the international community to provide any possible assistance to those who are taking on the brave role of reporting from the war zone that is now Ukraine.
We condemn the physical violence, the cyberattacks, disinformation and all other weapons employed by the aggressor against the free and democratic Ukrainian press.
We also stand in solidarity with independent Russian media who continue to report the truth in unprecedented conditions.
Join the statement of support for Ukraine by signing it here.
#Журналісти_Важливі
Signed:
- Justice for Journalists Foundation
- Index on Censorship
- International Foundation for Protection of Freedom of Speech “Adil Soz”
- International Media Support (IMS)
- Yerevan Press Club
- Turkmen.news
- Free Press Unlimited
- Human Rights Center “Viasna”
- Albanian Helsinki Committee
- Media Rights Group, Azerbaijan
- European Centre for Press and Media Freedom
- Association of European Journalists
- School of Peacemaking and Media Technology in Central Asia
- Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan
- Reporters Without Borders, RSF
- Association of Independent Press of Moldova, API
- Public Association “Dignity”, Kazakhstan
- PEN International
- Human Rights House Foundation, Norway
- IFEX
- UNITED for Intercultural Action
- Human Rights House Yerevan
- Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly – Vanadzor, Armenia
- Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, Norway
- Society of Journalists, Warsaw
- The Swedish OSCE-network
- Hungarian Helsinki Committee
- Legal policy research centre, Kazakhstan
- Public Foundation Notabene – Tajikistan
- HR NGO “Citizens’ Watch – St. Petersburg, Russia
- English PEN
- Public organization “Dawn” – Tajikistan
- International Press Institute (IPI)
- The Union of Journalists of Kazakhstan
- ARTICLE 19
- Human Rights House Tbilisi
- Rights Georgia
- Election Monitoring and Democracy Studies Center, Azerbaijan
- International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
- Bulgarian Helsinki Committee
- Global Forum for Media Development (GFMD)
- European Federation of Journalists
- Social Media Development Center, Georgia
- Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia
- OBC Transeuropa
- The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
- Journalists Union YENI NESIL, Azerbaijan
- Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA) , Istanbul
- Baku Press Club
- Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development
- Union Sapari
- The Coalition For Women In Journalism (CFWIJ)
- Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, Armenia
- FEDERATIA SINDICATELOR DIN SOCIETATEA ROMANA DE RADIODIFUZIUNE, Bucharest, ROMANIA
- CD FILMS (FRANCE)
- CFDT-Journalistes
- Belarusian Association of Journalists
- SafeJournalists network
- Association of Journalists of Kosovo
- Association of Journalists of Macedonia
- BH Journalists Association
- Croatian Journalists’ Association
- Independent Journalists Association of Serbia
- Trade Union of Media of Montenegro
- Analytical Center for Central Asia (ACCA)
- Trade Union of Croatian Journalists
- European Press Prize
- Ethical Journalism Network
- European Journalism Centre
- Slovene Association of Journalists
- Investigative Studios
- PEN Belarus
- Public Media Alliance (PMA)
- Estonian Association of Journalists
- Federación de Sindicatos de Periodistas (FeSP) (Spain)
- DJV, German Journalist Federation
- Free Russia Foundation
- Association for Human Rights in Central Asia – AHRCA
- “Human Rights Consulting Group” Public Foundation, Kazakhstan
- Committee to Protect Journalists
- Ski Club of International Journalists (SCIJ)
- Women In Journalism Institute, Canada – associate of CFWIJ
- Romanian Trade Union of Journalists MediaSind
- Romanian Federation Culture and Mass-Media FAIR, MediaSind
- New Generation of Human Rights Defenders Coalition, Kazakhstan
- Coalition for the Security and Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Activists, Kazakhstan
- Legal policy Research Centre, Kazakhstan
- Eurasian Digital Foundation, Kazakhstan
- Legal Analysis and Research Public Union, Azerbaijan
- German Journalists Union
- Digital Rights Expert Group, Kazakhstan
- Bella Fox, LRT/Bellarus Media, Lithuania
- Syndicat national des journalistes CGT (SNJ-CGT), France
- Karin Wenk, Editor in Chief Menschen Machen Medien
- Press Emblem Campaign
- Federacion de Servicios, Consumo y Movilidad (FeSMC) – UGT (Spain)
- Sindicato dos Jornalistas, Portugal
- International media project Август2020/August2020 (august2020.info), Belarus
- Independent Association of Georgian Journalists (journalist.ge)
- Independent Trade Union of Journalists and Media Workers, Macedonia
- Adam Hug, Director, Foreign Policy Centre
- Zlatko Herljević, Croatian journalist, lecturer of journalism at University VERN, Zagreb, Croatia
- Independent Journalists’ and Media Workers’ Union (JMWU), Russia
- The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation
- Hungarian Press Union (HPU), Hungary
- Lithuanian Journalists Union
- National Union of Journalists UK & Ireland
- Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana (Italy)
- Dutch Association of Journalists (NVJ)
- Uzbek Forum for Human Rights
- Association of Journalists, Turkey
- Slovak Syndicate of Journalist, Slovakia
- GAMAG Europe (European Chapter of the Global Alliance for Media and Gender)
- Slovenian Union of Journalists (SNS)
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- Associació de Periodistes Europeus de Catalunya (APEC)
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- FREELENS e.V. – German Association of Photojournalists & Photographers
- LawTransform (CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation, Bergen, Norway)
- Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio & Communication
- Platform for Independent Journalism (P24), Turkey
- Novi Sad School of Journalism (Serbia)
- Col·legi de Periodistes de Catalunya (Catalunya)
30 Nov 2020 | News and features
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Judith Vidal-Hall at the 2017 Freedom of Expression Awards. Credit: Dimitri Lauder/Index on Censorship
“The invasion of privacy is the reverse side of censorship. If you don’t feel that your privacy is immune, you’re not going to speak out, you’re going to hold your tongue. Or not talk about certain things. So it has this strange underbelly of censorship,” said Judith Vidal-Hall, former editor of Index on Censorship from 1993 to 2007. I meet Vidal-Hall on a sunny afternoon at a river-side cafe in West London to discuss her experiences of editing the magazine. We’re chatting about the internet and the privacy concerns that come with it, a concern that went from almost non-existent to ubiquitous during her time as editor.
“One of the greatest threats to free expression at the moment is privacy,” she added.
Vidal-Hall worked at Index at one of the most pivotal eras in recent world history. In 1993 the Twin Towers still stood, the world wide web was in its infancy and South African apartheid continued to be enforced. By 2007 the political and social landscape had become almost unrecognisable.
Under Vidal-Hall’s stewardship, Index navigated this global metamorphosis, identifying those in power who obscured the truth, those who were being shut out of the narrative, and gave the “voiceless a voice”.
How did Vidal-Hall find herself editing the magazine in 1993?
“It’s quite a long story, it’s a bit of a saga,” she told me over sausage rolls and tea. And a bit of a saga it really is. Returning to the UK in 1976 after a couple years of travelling, Vidal-Hall approached the Guardian, on behalf of a Bangladeshi friend, to start the Guardian Third World Review. It was, she said, “an absolutely pioneering supplement where third world people told their own stories”.
She remembers a Guardian journalist at the time asking her: “Don’t you think we treat the third world fairly?”. “That’s not the point.” she had replied. “You’re keeping their voices out…I didn’t use the word at the time I don’t think, but they’re censored. You keep them out.
Without skipping a beat, she added: “We then started a magazine called South.” South: The Voice of the Third World, was a monthly magazine which was about including other voices. South closed its doors in 1989 and, Vidal-Hall chuckled, “my husband buggered off at the same time so I was left with no husband, no income”.
Shortly after, she received a call from Philip Spender, who was running Index, asking for a reference for Andrew Graham-Yooll, who had been an editor at South. Graham-Yooll became the editor of Index, and it was he who brought Vidal-Hall into the fold.
It was not the best time for Index. Many of Index’s funders had seen it as “a Cold War weapon” and, believing communism to be over with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, they had withdrawn their funding. By the early 1990s Index was “basically bankrupt”.
Inside the axis of evil, the spring 2003 issue of Index on Censorship magazine
Enter the Fritt Ord Foundation, a group of Norwegian newspaper owners “ashamed of the takeover of their media by the Nazis in the [19]40s, and they had made a resolution, never again to work for anyone but themselves and to support independent media.”
And so in 1993, supported by funds from the Fritt Ord Foundation, Index was relaunched with Vidal-Hall as the editor, who had some big plans.
“One was to make it an attractive, readable magazine.”
Next: “I wanted it to be much more diverse…it did have a sort of Cold War focus and I wanted to bring in a much more global focus.”
“The third thing I wanted was to get rid of the idea that censorship was what they did out there, not what we did. They censor, we don’t. So I wanted to make it universal, the concept of censorship.”
I discuss with Vidall-Hall an Index article from 2002 by Noam Chomsky, Confronting the Monster. In this article Chomsky, writing in the wake of 9/11, examines how the West considers only actions taken by the enemy to be war crimes, while believing their own actions are always justified.
“He was so much my hero,” Vidal-Hall said on hearing Chomsky’s name.
“The them and us, it’s a good way to put it [referencing Chomsky’s article]. They do it, we don’t. And I wanted to break that, so that was my main [aim], to make Index inclusive not only of all genders, colours etc and creeds, don’t forget creeds, but also to make it inclusive of us, as guilty as them in a different way.”
Underexposed, the November 1999 edition of Index on Censorship magazine, which was Vidal-Hall’s favourite to work on
As we discuss Chomksy’s article, I ask what was the most important global event that happened while Vidal-Hall was at Index.
She says gathering around the television in the office to watch events on 9/11 unfolding live: “And that in some ways was the beginning of what I would call a series of events. It changed the balance, the perspective, relationships and priorities in the world. So, off the cuff, I would say that the sequence of events between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq…that was the changing moment.”
The conversation turns to media coverage of that time. How were the narratives controlled by the states in question? What did it mean for freedom of expression?
“[In 2001-2003] people thought they had freedom of expression but they didn’t know the facts. And why didn’t we know the facts? We were lied to, there were no weapons of mass destruction.”
She added: “For me, and it’s very personal, what that invasion did was destroy a level of what seemed like stability in international relations. And I think the revelations of the inquiry into the lies that have been told was quite shocking… Are governments transparent? No! When they need to lie they will lie if it defends them.”
While the events of 2001 to 2003 were the most important during Vidal-Hall’s time as editor, her favourite issue predates them. It is a 1999 issue called Underexposed, which explored the censorship of photographs.
“It was fascinating. I didn’t go to the office for days. I spent weeks searching [for images]…some of the ones I remember most clearly, visually, are the ones from the early 30s when Hitler was coming to power. The photos that were never published. I’ll give you one example. Never published in Germany! Photos of him. There’s this one photo where he’s being coached in sort of rhetoric and he didn’t want people to know that he was being coached.”
Vidal-Hall also reflects on interviews she conducted in the early 1990s, one with a key player in modern European far-right politics.
“When the [Berlin] Wall came down I went out to Hungary and various other places…I did some rather interesting interviews…One of them was with a man you might have heard of, Viktor Orban. I interviewed him back when the Wall had come down, communism had fallen and him and another young man whom I’m still in touch with, Peter Molnar, I interviewed them together. They were the founder of Fidesz, the party that has now gone extreme right. And Orban seems to have undergone a personality change.”
Meditating on far right politics in Europe today, Vidal-Hall said: “How much of it is our mistake in thinking that democracy can just be delivered to the door by Amazon in a parcel with a smile?”
This gloomy take is offset by Vidal-Hall’s praise for Index: “As a publication you are unique, there is nobody else who is doing what index is doing. And that is extraordinary, to remain so. I feel strongly about that.”
The interview wraps up and I leave, my mind awash with the battles Index has won alongside all of those that we are still fighting today. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
