25 Mar 2009 | Uncategorized
Editor’s note: Index on Censorship is committed to facilitating open and vigorous debate. We will endeavour to correct factual inaccuracies wherever they occur.
An article posted on our website on 17 March inadvertently accused the Jewish Chronicle of deliberately ‘outing’ and ‘naming and shaming’ members of the cast of the play Seven Jewish Children, ‘with the intention, it would appear, of impacting on their future careers’ .
We accept that this is untrue.
The following is a corrected version of the original story.
This is a guest post by Sonja Linden
The BBC has declined to broadcast a radio version of Caryl Churchill’s ten-minute stage play Seven Jewish Children on the grounds of impartiality.
The play, written in response to the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and as a fundraising event for the victims of this onslaught, has been described by critics not just as unbalanced but ‘anti-Semitic’. I have seen the play and choose to disagree. My response was underscored by the fact that a Jewish actor friend of mine, who is highly sensitive to criticism of Israel, agreed to take part in the play. Her sensitivities are linked to the fact that she was in the Warsaw Ghetto as a child, and that she spent five formative years in Israel, when it was a nascent state in the early 50s. She told me how keenly she had scrutinised the text before accepting the role but that it was her considered opinion that the statements in Churchill’s play had veracity, and that the play was not anti-Semitic. She was deeply shocked, subsequently, not just at the critique of the play as anti-Semitic, but at the viciousness of the attacks on it in the Jewish press, in particular the Jewish Chronicle.
The increasing viciousness and vituperation of such attacks, in particular attacks by Jews on fellow Jews, such as myself, who dare to hold Israel publicly to account on ethical and human rights grounds, is not only disturbing but begs a number of questions. One of them is the issue of creeping censorship. The cry ‘anti-Semitism’ as a gagging tool in the face of criticism of Zionism or Israel is an issue that needs serious examination.
A small example of the latter is the response I recently had from the artistic director of a leading regional theatre in the USA concerning my play Welcome to Ramallah, co-written with Adah Kay. Impressive as the play was, he said, it would be difficult to get it produced by any mainstream theatre in the States. Personally, he added, he could not get it past his own audience.
This is precisely the line taken by the BBC as regards Caryl Churchill’s play: ‘After due consideration we felt it would not work for our audience’. It’s a statement that needs unpacking. What exactly does it mean? Who is this monolithic audience for whom it ‘would not work’? Does every play have to ‘work’? Surely there must be allowance made for some plays to work less than others? What about the more cryptic plays of Beckett? Do they ‘work’ for what the BBC perceives to be its audience? It is clear that the gauge here is one of content rather than accessibility. In this context a play is deemed not to ‘work’ if it invites a hostile response on the grounds of its contents, as witnessed during the Royal Court’s production of the play. But does such hostility matter? Can the broad shoulders of the BBC not support a degree of flak? It would appear that Seven Jewish Children has been rejected out of fear of furore, a furore that it is ironically even more likely to invoke by its very rejection, as happened very recently with the BBC’s refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal for Gaza, also on grounds of impartiality.
There are a number of further questions here also. Should a play not be judged primarily on its artistic merit? Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer and Radio 4’s drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe both agreed that it was a ‘brilliant piece’. Should a piece of art be required to be balanced? And if the BBC feels that this is its mission, even in the realm of art, what are the implications of Mark Damazer and Jeremy Howe’s view that ‘it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill’s view’. Why? Surely a counter-play could be produced? Caryl Churchill only needed a weekend apparently.
If ‘balance’ is indeed the BBC’s key criterion here, why not build a discussion programme around the broadcast for a mixture of responses? And, crucially, what is the BBC so frightened of that it cannot risk a ten-minute radio play by one of Britain’s leading and internationally renowned playwrights?
Sonja Linden is a playwright and founding artistic director of iceandfire theatre www.iceandfire.co.uk
25 Feb 2009 | Uncategorized
Interesting debate at London’s Frontline Club on Tuesday on Sri Lanka. It was supposed to poll involved media views on the expected defeat of the LTTE Tamil Tiger separatists and – theoretically – the end of the country’s debilitating and corrupting civil war.
Instead it got dug into the rising argument that the savage end days now being fought out in the country’s Vanni region are in fact genocide.
Much worse was expected; the journalists’ club officials say they received death threats after an initial plan to invite a spokesman for the Tamils Against Genocide (TAG) group to join the panel was downgraded to a highlighted spot in the audience. Though the threats had nothing to do with TAG, organisers felt that a debate about whether charges of genocide had legal credence without a Sri Lankan government respondent would be one-sided.
In any case, it felt that such a debate was not what was needed when the humanitarian crisis in the Vanni remains so desperate –– as many as half-a-million civilians are reported trapped in fighting between the Sri Lankan military and the Tigers, two of the world’s most redoubtably vicious civil combatants.
In contrast to the widely reported but otherwise remarkably similar Israeli assault on Gaza the slaughter in the Vanni is totally barred to the media, human rights groups and the humanitarian aid community. What evidence of the cruelty that is being picked up comes from the few refugees able to escape the free-fire zone.
More to the point for a press club they wanted space to address the parlous state of free expression in Sri Lanka, recently illustrated by the murder of Lasantha Wickrematunge. Lasantha’s journalist brother Lal spoke at Tuesday’s debate by videolink to reiterate this.
TAG supporters and others kept up the case from the floor though, echoing the argument made by US activists who accuse the Sudanese government of genocide in Darfur, that genocide is worse than other crimes against humanity, and thus to question whether atrocities qualify as genocide is tantamount to ‘moral cowardice’, by minimizing, denying, or excusing it.
Darfur expert Alex de Waal has noted that in terms of stopping the killing and prosecuting those responsible, use of the term ‘genocide’ may initially help draw attention to the disaster, but in the case of Darfur it subsequently became something of a distraction to effective action.
Mass murder and all the other crimes associated with a brutal military assault through territories packed with refugees do not cease to be crimes, whether or not they are committed as part of a genocide. That includes the kind of violence and humanitarian crises now being inflicted on the Vanni, which TAG allege fits the definition of ‘genocide’ under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, namely the “deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to destroy the group in whole, or in part.”
This was the argument made by the UN inquiry into Darfur when it declined to formally and legally declare Darfur a ‘genocide’. But it did note that ‘international offences such as the crimes against humanity and the war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide’.
Under the broad definition provided by the Convention the crimes committed in Sri Lanka may well be genocidal, and most independent opinion would say there is a prima facie case for hearing a legal test of this charge.
TAG are trying to organize just this, engaging US lawyer Bruce Fein, former associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan, to press for the indictment of Sri Lankan defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa and national army commander Lt.General Sarath Fonseka under the US Genocide Accountability Act.
Rajapakse has joint US-Sri Lankan citizenship, and Lt.General Fonseka, bizarrely, has a green card and US residency rights. Fein delivered a three-volume, 1,000 page model 12-count indictment with a view to persuading the US Justice Department to make the two the first to be charged under the act, which was passed with the vote of then senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2007.
With the clock ticking down on the continuing existence of the Tamil Tigers as a viable conventional army in Sri Lanka, TAG’s urgent aim is to get the US to respond to Sri Lanka in the same way it reacted to Darfur in 2004: to formally determine that an event was genocide while it is in progress.
The catch was that while it partially addressed Darfur campaigners’ demands, the US reading of the Genocide Convention was that even though they recognized Darfur as genocide, that verdict entailed no specific action by the US government under the Convention. As a result US policy on Sudan did not change and the campaigners’ hopes for a UN endorsed US led armed intervention were effectively dashed.
A similar ruling against Rajpakse and Fonseka, even their conviction and sentencing, would likely deliver a similar non-specific result. It would however give enormous weight to TAG’s ambition to raise the same kind of popular outrage against the Sri Lankan government that transformed the Darfur debate in the US, George Clooney led protests and all.
TAG’s popular campaign might bring down enough pressure on Colombo to call a ceasefire in the Vanni and lift the horrors now being inflicted on its citizens trapped there (and as Colombo says and the Tigers know, will give the rebels a chance to regroup and rearm).
But as de Waal said in the Darfur context, ‘the danger of the word ‘genocide’ is that it can slide from its wider, legally specific meaning, to a branding of the perpetrators’ group as collectively evil. In turn, this narrows the options for responding. Having labeled a group or a government as “genocidal”, it is difficult to make the case that a political compromise needs to be found with them.’
It may well be that TAG’s supporters, by emphasizing the term ‘genocide’ over and above other heinous crimes against humanity being committed in the Vanni may have just that objective; to end attempts at compromise and bring an absolute end to Colombo’s blitzkrieg on the Tigers.
While a ceasefire in the Vanni is a moral imperative, isolating Colombo and rejecting dialogue on the grounds that it may be legally guilty of genocide is not.
Even when Sri Lankan army tanks reach the far north and president Mahinda Rajapaksa declares an Iraq-style ‘Mission Accomplished‘ the conflict there, no less than in Iraq, will swiftly turn into a vicious insurgency as the conventional Tiger forces return to their guerilla roots and restore their rarely challenged record as the world’s most ruthless and effective suicide bombers.
It is here –– in what will, nominally at least, be ‘post-war Sri Lanka’ –– that dialogue, international intervention and a free-speaking truth and reconciliation commission will be essential to restore democratic rule of law and true peace to the country, free for ever of the cruelties that Colombo and the Tigers have inflicted on it for decades.
* You can watch the Frontline Club debate on their website: http://frontlineclub.com
