6 Jul 2023 | China, Hong Kong, News and features, United Kingdom
Pro-democracy activists exiled from Hong Kong will never be silenced despite attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to use transnational repression against them, an urgent press briefing held at the UK House of Commons on Wednesday heard.
This is despite what some are calling a “Chinese fatwa” which has seen the Hong Kong Police Force issue arrest warrants againt eight activists, including Christopher Mung, Finn Lau and Nathaw Law in the UK, and others in the US, Canada and Australia. The authorities have also offered rewards of up to one million Hong Kong dollars for information leading to their capture.
Mung and Lau both spoke at the briefing, which was chaired by Bob Seely MP.
Mung stressed the repercussions of the long reach from the authorities, but vowed he will never be silenced.
He said: “The Chinese and Hong Kong governments are extending their hands abroad, suppressing freedom of speech and silencing activists with a chilling effect.
“But they will never eliminate my voice, or the voice of Hongkongers. For the rest of my life, us Hongkongers will fight together.”
Lau said it wasn’t the first time the CCP had tried to exert transnational repression of speech in the UK, citing the harassment of protestors outside the Chinese consulate in Manchester by staff in 2022.
He also issued a set of demands to the British government in response to the warrants. These included an urgent meeting with both the British foreign and home secretaries, as well as calling for legal action against anybody in the UK who passes on information about the activists for reward.
“We simply need concrete action and measures to tackle this,” he said.
Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, went as far to call the warrants and bounties a Chinese “fatwa”.
He said: “The CCP and their enablers in Hong Kong have crossed a red line here. What they’re saying is democracy is illegal around the world under their National Security Law.
“We need actions because China will keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing.”
When asked why the warrants and bounties were issued now, Lau said that any guess is just speculation.
He continued: “Personally, I think it’s just simply a way of discouraging Hongkongers from fighting for their democracy and speech in the future.”
Benedict Rogers, chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, which monitors freedoms and human rights in Hong Kong, recounted attempts by the CCP to repress his own freedom of speech, while acknowledging these have been less severe than those now faced by the eight activists.
“About a year ago I received a letter from the Hong Kong police informing me that what I do with Hong Kong Watch in the UK violates the National Security Law in Hong Kong, and I could face a prison sentence there,” he said.
“I’ve also received anonymous threatening letters from Hong Kong, some even posted to my mother.”
Finishing off the session, Mark Clifford said that the battle with the CCP’s repression will be a long-term struggle, and to ensure talk of damaging trade relations doesn’t affect it.
“It’s an evil, evil country; and we must remember our values are just more important than economic commerce.”
Read our statement on the arrest warrants and rewards.
5 Jul 2023 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
They shot the children’s poet in the head. Two bullets from a Makharov, the Russian army handgun, his grave identified, his voice stilled. Until, that is, Victoria Amelina turned up at the Izium home of the murdered poet, Volodymyr Vakulenko. Gentle, calm, dogged, Victoria had stopped work as a novelist to become a war crimes investigator, her mission to listen to Ukraine’s bereaved: “That it is not like ‘this happened’ and nobody asks them about it.”
She found Vakulenko’s father, crushed by grief, and over the course of a long conversation, his memory unlocked and he said that his son had told him that he had buried his diary near the cherry tree in the family’s garden. They dug and dug.
Nothing.
And then Victoria, on impulse, opened up the earth a little distance from the tree and they found the dead poet’s diary, wrapped in water-proof plastic, breaking the silence. The diary told of Russian occupation, of a tank squatting outside in the street, the creeping sense of dread, his arrest, release – and then they came for him one last time. But not before he had buried his words by the cherry tree.
Victoria understood that the best stories are the ones that power and money do not want told. That was last year.
In late June Victoria was sitting outside on the terrace at the Ria pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, about thirty miles from Bakhmut. The Ria is an institution, a sweet hiding hole where journalists, aid workers, soldiers and local families unwind from the horrors of the frontline. Driven by my fixer in Ukraine, Dima Kovalchuk, Victoria was escorting Colombian journalists, Héctor Abad, Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez around the war zone. Victoria was doing her best to shine a light on the Kremlin’s dark nonsense. Too many people in the global south have bought into the Russian lie but not these South Americans.
Dima told me: “the awning above is see-through and I saw a shadow overhead, it was the missile, then this intense explosion.”
Jaramillo explained to the Financial Times: “I was sitting right next to Victoria. We had just finished a day in the field, talking to people about the Russian invasion. As the food was brought to us, I bent down to pick up a napkin and, at that moment, the missile struck. Victoria, who had been sitting upright, was badly hit at the back of the neck… the whole room fell to pieces and time stopped.”
Dima said that Victoria never recovered from her head injury. The rest of the team were lightly injured. Thirteen people died, including two fourteen-year-old twins; fifty people were injured. Firing a cruise missile at a pizza restaurant packed with civilians was yet another Russian war crime.
Victoria was born in Lviv, moved to Canada when she was a teenager, worked in IT, got bored with that and became a full-time writer. Her first novel, Fall Syndrome, was about the Maidan revolution, her second, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, established her international reputation. She won the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and was short-listed for the European Union Prize for Literature. Before the big war she set up a literary festival in New York, a village not far from Bakhmut, and a second in Kramatorsk. Her poetry was spare and bleak:
Sirens
Air-raid sirens across the country
It feels like everyone is brought out
For execution
But only one person gets targeted
Usually the one at the edge
This time not you; all clear
I met Victoria once, at a café in Kyiv, this spring. She recognised my silly orange hat and we talked about working together, one day, on a war crimes investigation but our schedules didn’t work out and that never happened. There was a still beauty about her spirit that is haunting, an echo from a friend, calling out the big lie.
I cannot believe they have silenced her.
I cannot believe that she is dead.
17 May 2023
Margaret Atwood is a multi-award winning novelist, essayist, poet and activist from Canada.
7 Apr 2023 | Afghanistan, FEATURED: Katie Dancey-Downs, News and features
“Every single day, the situation is intensifying,” Zan Times editor-in-chief Zahra Nader told an audience this week. Along with Afghan Witness and the Centre for Information Resilience, the Zan Times editor shone a spotlight on the experiences of Afghan reporters with the online event Discrimination, Prohibition and Perseverance: The Reality for Female Journalists in Afghanistan.
Nader started her journalism career in Kabul, but now lives in Canada. From there, she is not only an Index contributor, but also runs Zan Times, a women-led investigative newsroom focused on human rights violations in Afghanistan. She works with journalists in the country who all use pseudonyms, as well as others outside the country.
“Our aim is to report and tell the truth,” she said. She wants to put the power into the hands of women, so that “they define news”.
The laws that prevent women reporting effectively are not always specific to female journalists, she explained. They are impacted by the intersection of being female and of being a journalist. The Taliban issued decrees that women are not allowed to travel alone, that TV presenters and guests must cover their faces, and in some provinces that their voices cannot be heard on the radio. Travelling to meet sources suddenly becomes impossible, while radio presenters and other female voices are silenced in places like Kandahar, where women have been told they cannot phone into radio stations.
Nader explained how journalists in general, female or not, are forbidden from publishing anything contrary to Afghan culture or Islam. The Taliban has a strangling hold on media policy. She described a landscape where the Taliban has tortured people for covering women’s protests, and where more than half of media outlets have closed down due to a lack of funding or the impossibility of working within Taliban restrictions. The Taliban recently closed a women-run radio station in Badakhshan, and Nader is doubtful that any woman-owned media remains.
“The possibility of them to function seems very low,” she said.
Nader also suggested that for media organisations, “the Taliban vice and virtue would knock on their door everyday” is they hired female journalists, assessing what they were wearing and doing. She has heard reports of some organisations telling women that if they want to work as a journalist, they must do so without pay.
“Women are the main target of the Taliban,” she said, asking who, without female journalists, will platform women’s voices.
“The traditional classic work we used to do in Afghanistan no longer functions,” she said, explaining that new ways of reporting are needed, including offering women cyber security training to minimise risk, which is were working with organisations like Afghan Witness comes into play.
Afghan Witness’s Anouk Theunissen works from outside the country with open-source reporting and citizen journalism to de-bunk Taliban narratives. She explained that in the days since the Taliban takeover, online hate speech against women has increased significantly.
“As women have been erased from society, they have taken to social media,” she said. There, they can speak out more freely. But female journalists are beset with hateful comments and messages. Nader recalled one particular instance where a male journalist commented on a post, calling the abuse of women fake news.
Both Nader and Theunissen are doubtful about the situation in Afghanistan improving. What is missing, Nader said, is solidarity from the international community.
For women still working as journalists in Afghanistan, safety is paramount. Nader explained that rather than putting all their Afghan journalists in one WhatsApp group, Zan Times editors keep each conversation separate. Otherwise, if one journalist is arrested and their phone checked, all will be at risk.
Female journalists are forced to work remotely as much as possible for their own safety, and Zan Times advises them to only speak to sources who they can be sure are not linked to the Taliban. Any time they tell someone they’re a journalist, they risk being identified.
Some of Nader’s colleagues on the ground describe leaving their homes and wondering if that is the day they will be arrested, and yet they continue to go out.
“That gives me a little bit of hope, when they are still resisting,” she said. “That resistance might just be keeping the hope alive.”
