26 Jul 2007 | Statements
Jailed Tunisian dissident, writer and lawyer Mohamed Abbou was released from prison in Le Kef, where he had been held since his arrest in March 2005. He was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half years for exposing torture in Tunisian prisons on the Internet. His release and that of more than 20 other political prisoners came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic of Tunisia, marked on 25 July.
It led to speculation that the release of the country’s highest profile domestic critic was timed simply to prevent the case from spoiling the international response to the independence celebrations.
Index on Censorship and other members of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) have long campaigned for his release – including trying to visit him in prison in March.
Index chief executive Henderson Mullin urged the Tunisian authorities to cease the kind of aggressive and intimidating surveillance that Abbou’s wife Samia has endured since he was jailed in 2005.
‘Policemen have been climbing over the Abbou family balconies in the middle of the night, repeatedly, purely to terrorise them,’ said Mullin. ‘Police officers often harassed Mrs Abbou and the friends who accompany her for weekly visits with her husband at Kef prison, and they only let up when representatives of Index and other TMG members were watching in person.
‘It would be a disgrace if this kind of aggressive harassment is allowed to continue now Mr Abbou is free. He must be allowed to express his opinions freely.’
TMG Chair Carl Morten Iversen of Norwegian PEN assured Abbou that the TMG and other human rights groups will keep a close eye on the way Tunisian authorities will treat him and his family in the future. Tunisia’s repression of free expression is seen by many as the sole stain on the country’s otherwise tolerant and peaceful system. Increasingly its poor free speech record has become an issue that obstructs Tunisia’s routine relations with the EU and France.
Significantly, new French president Nicolas Sarkozy had raised Abbou’s case in meetings with Tunisian head of state Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali the week before.
Abbou told al Jazeera TV on the day of his release: ‘As a former prisoner of conscience, I would like to thank all those in Tunisia and the rest of the world who stood by my side during the ordeal I have been through. My release is the result of actions of resistance to oppression undertaken by Tunisians capable of saying no to a regime in violation of basic human rights. The Tunisian Constitution and international human rights law guarantee the right to criticise the government, as long as there are human rights abuses and corruption.’
But he added: ‘The lack of freedom led some young people to use violence which I strongly denounce.’
Abbou was jailed for three-and-a-half-years for posting an article on the Tunisnews website in August 2004 comparing the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to that perpetrated by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But observers at his trial suspected the sentence was imposed in response to a different article he had posted online a few days before his arrest, in which he criticised an invitation to Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to attend a UN summit in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG continues to call on the Tunisian authorities to allow writers, journalists, web loggers and publishers to express themselves freely without fear of persecution or imprisonment in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Tunisia is a signatory.
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18 Jul 2007 | Comment, News
Yemen and Kuwait have both bound themselves to a number of international human rights treaties guaranteeing freedom of expression, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right to ‘seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds’. But journalists and activists in both these countries have been arrested many times for exercising this right.
Just last month in Yemen, a prominent editor of an opposition newspaper was jailed for allegedly having ties to a terrorist group. In Kuwait, an outspoken human rights advocate was confined for two weeks in a mental hospital for burning a flag in a public protest.
On 20 June, Yemeni security services raided the home of Abdel Abdul Karim al Khaiwani, the editor of Al Shora, a leading Yemeni opposition newspaper.
According to the International Herald Tribune, Yemeni officers pulled al Khaiwani from his home in his night clothes and beat him. Local journalists, including Mohammed al Asaadi, former editor of the Yemen Observer, and Ebtihal Mubarak of the Arab News, suggested several possible motivations for the arrest. These range from al Khaiwani’s vocal opposition to government tactics during the recently quelled rebellion around the northern city of Sa’dah, to his plan to publish an article decrying perceived manoeuvring to ensure that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s son succeeds him in office.
The government justified the arrest by claiming that al Khaiwani had ties to 18 people recently arrested for belonging to a terrorist cell. This claim was based largely on his possession of documents related to the recent rebellion. Despite protests by journalists, the penal court ruled that al-Khaiwani will be held for a month without bail while authorities investigate his alleged ties to terrorism.
This is not al Khaiwani’s first trip to prison in Yemen. In 2005, he was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, after being found guilty on charges of incitement, insulting the president, publishing false news, and causing tribal and sectarian discrimination. President Saleh pardoned al Khaiwani two days after sentencing, but the incident caused severe damage to al Khaiwani’s reputation and his other interests; according to reports by Reporters sans Frontières, his newspaper was shut down for six months, and thereafter it was forced to retreat to online-only form. Prior to al Khaiwani’s tenure as editor, Human Rights Watch reported that Al Shora had been shut down for six months for allegedly defaming the leader of a mainstream political party, and one of its journalists received 80 lashes and a year-long ban from writing.
Al Khaiwani’s arrests are part of a pattern of intimidation in Yemen, Michael Kozak, Acting US Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, noted in testimony before the US Congress. And Yemen’s press law affords little if any refuge for those seeking to express their views. For example, it only allows licensed individuals to work as journalists and prohibits criticism of the head of state, albeit with the proviso that the prohibition does not ‘necessarily apply to constructive criticism’.
While Yemen has the essential structures of democracy in place, including contested elections and an independent legislature, the lack of a truly free press leaves the country without a marketplace of ideas to compete with the incumbent government’s preferred policy views. In the words of one activist quoted on local website NewsYemen, civil society in Yemen is governed by a ‘totalitarian mentality’.
In what appears to be another blatant infringement on freedom of expression, on 21 June an activist and journalist was arrested and sent to a mental institution in Kuwait after burning a flag in a non-violent public protest.
According to the Kuwait Times, Dr Omran al Qarashi burned the British and American flags in front of a mosque as part of his protest at Britain’s decision to award a knighthood to novelist Salman Rushdie. Although flag burning is illegal in Kuwait, the arrest also provided an opportunity to quell al Qarashi’s vocal opposition to human rights violations in the country.
Described by many as a passionate and outspoken political critic, the Kuwait Times reports that al Qarashi has been imprisoned and sent to psychiatric hospitals multiple times over the years for other non-violent protests including carrying signs reading ‘Down with Israel’ and ‘Down with the USA’. According to the Kuwait Times, officials have repeatedly confined al Qarashi in a mental hospital despite medical reports stressing that he was not suffering from any psychological disorder. The Kuwait Times also reports that the Ministry of Interior confiscated al Qarashi’s passport more than five years ago, and that he was forced to retire from teaching at Kuwait University. Al Qarashi has a PhD in chemical engineering.
According to a member of the Kuwait Journalists Association, al Qarashi was released at 3:00 am on 4 July after a member of the Kuwait parliament personally requested that he be freed.
The Kuwaiti Constitution asserts that ‘the right to express opinions freely is guaranteed’, yet according to the US Department of State, the Kuwaiti government has significantly restricted these rights in practice. The Printing and Publications Law prohibits, among many other things, criticising the emir and ‘attacking friendly countries’.
And recently, in a broader step at limiting freedom of speech, the Kuwait Times reported that the Interior Ministry compiled a detailed list of articles, advertisements and banners that could no longer be printed without official approval, including displaying ‘slogans that glorify some countries against others’.
These actions by the Kuwaiti government would be considered violations of fundamental liberties in many countries, even by some of the most conservative viewpoints. For instance, in the landmark case of Texas vs Johnson, the US Supreme Court held that political speech should receive the highest level of protection from interference by the government. The court overturned the conviction of a man who was prosecuted for burning an American flag in violation of a state law that criminalised ‘the desecration of a venerated object’.
The court held that the government cannot criminally punish flag burning because it is a legitimate form of political expression. Even though some might have considered the flag burner’s acts offensive, the constitution’s ban on laws ‘abridging the freedom of speech’ protects expressing dissatisfaction with government in this non-violent way.
The arrests of al Khaiwani and al Qarashi follow in the wake of an alarming trend of governments restricting the non-violent expression of ideas through censorship. Both Yemen and Kuwait have publicly acknowledged the illegitimacy of such censorship, however, by binding themselves to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which forbids it. It is time for these countries to acknowledge their international and moral obligations – and to nurture their own fledgling democracies along the way – by freeing al Khaiwani and acknowledging the wrong done to al Qarashi.
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26 Jun 2007 | Comment
I’ve got to admit I was thrilled when Alan told me he was thinking of putting in for the Gaza job. I’d left the Strip about a year earlier, and was missing it terribly. Alan is rightly described as a journalist’s journalist – and discovering he wanted to be a correspondent there was akin to discovering your younger sister just got the best and most inspiring teacher on staff at her school.
It’s not a job for everyone. Gaza is after all the world’s most crowded city state. Its situation is perennially desperate. It’s prone to intense bouts of violence. And psychologically, it can do very strange things to an outsider who settles there.
I had shell shock nightmares when I left. Of a vast archangel, trapped in my room, whose wing span stretched across the breadth of the room, so that its tips scratched the walls. I would lie asleep, imagining I was awake, with this terrifying creature lying in a downy cocoon next to the bed.
I was told it was a shell shock dream, because it was the kind of dream soldiers had after World War One. The kind of dream when you imagine something beautiful and good turned to evil. The kind of dream that I guess makes sense when you’ve seen children shot, buildings flattened by vacuum bombs, and every funeral comes with a cortege of masked men, and a hail of gunfire.
But it’s the seeing of these things that makes it so important that there are correspondents who work and live there.
When I first began working there, I was shocked that Palestinian journalists never seemed to contact the Israelis to get the other side of the story. I thought at first it was a wilful denial of balance, and poor journalism. I urged the younger journalists I was working with to call the Israel Defence Forces – so that when Hamas or Islamic Jihad faxed out a press release revealing a border skirmish, they could tell the other side of the story as well. But of course, as one of my much wiser colleagues explained, any Palestinian found to be calling Israel on their mobile phones left themselves open to charges of collaboration. And no job was worth the response that would bring.
Balance is a strange beast. As an outsider in Gaza, you can be immune to charges that you’ve become to close to one group or another. Of course, all kinds of things are probably happening that you’re unaware of. Friends, who you think are only that, in fact become sponsors, or at least their clan can form a protective shield about you. The mukhabarat (intelligence) will have a file on you, but their reach is limited, which means that you can operate successfully. You can exist on the fringes, and observe.
Of course, there’ll always be claims of bias, purely by virtue of your reporting from inside the Palestinian territories. But that’s no reason to stop. All kinds of things go on in Gaza which we need to know about. The only way that can happen is if journalists, both Palestinian and foreign, are able to work there.
What’s happened to Alan Johnston is a tragedy. An appalling abuse against a good man, who does his job with grace, humility and courage. He and his family need our support.
But the last thing I’d imagine he would want is for us to let the situation in Gaza drift from our front pages, and from our television screens. Now more than ever is the time to support those who continue to work there, and recognise the vital importance of the work they do.
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19 Jun 2007 | Comment
Lord knows, I’ve had my differences with Ken Livingstone, especially when it comes to the politics of the Middle East – but there’s one issue he’s got absolutely right. Last week, to the enormous surprise of much of London’s Jewish community, the mayor agreed with them – and came out against an academic boycott of Israel.
Unfortunately, his intervention came too late. The very next day, Britain’s University and College Union voted to promote the call for a boycott. Now, I was raised to be respectful of teachers and positively reverential towards academics. Which is why it pains me to say that this decision is almost laughably stupid. But it is. If a student had come up with it, he would find it daubed with a thick red line, from top to bottom.
First, it lacks all logical consistency. Let’s say you accept, as I do, that Israel is wrong to be occupying the territories it won in the Six Day war, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this week. Let’s say that that is your reason for boycotting Israel. Then why no boycott of China for its occupation of Tibet? Or of Russia for its brutal war against the Chechens? Or of Sudan, for its killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, a murderous persecution described by the US as genocide?
If it’s the ill-treatment of Palestinians in particular that concerns you, then why no boycott of Lebanon, whose army continues to pound the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, killing civilians daily? True, the Lebanese government is not a military occupier. But if occupation is the crime that warrants international ostracism, then why no boycott of American universities? After all, the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is Britain. Why do the good men and women of UCU not speak out, by boycotting, say, Oxford, Cambridge and London universities? Why do they not boycott themselves?
Maybe academic freedom is their chief concern. That would make sense, given that they’re academics. But if that was the issue, there would surely be boycotts of Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few places where intellectual freedom remains a fond dream. (The awkward truth is that the freest place in the Middle East for an Arab scholar is Israel.) Yet the UCU sees no “moral implications,” to use the language of last week’s resolution, in institutional ties with Damascus, Cairo or Tehran. Only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
For some reason, the activists pushing for this move believe Israelis should be placed in a unique category of untouchability. Never mind the 655,000 the US and Britain have, on one estimate, killed in Iraq. Never mind the two million displaced in Darfur. Never mind the closed, repressive societies of the Middle East. The Israelis are a people apart, one that must be shunned.
But let’s be charitable and forgive the boycotters their inconsistency. Surely any tactic, even an inconsistent one, is forgivable if it does some good. This, though, is where the combined geniuses of the UCU have really blundered. For a boycott will be hugely counter-productive.
For one thing, Israeli academics are disproportionately represented in Israel’s “peace camp.” The UCU will be boycotting the very people who have done most to draw the Israeli public’s attention to the folly of the occupation, to the very people working to bring an end to this desperate conflict. By their actions, the UCU will embolden the Israeli right who will be able to say, ‘Look, the world hates and isolates us: this is exactly why we have to be militarily strong.’
The second error is more subtle. One of the few things that might make Israel change course would be a shift in diaspora Jewish opinion: those campaigning for Palestinian rights and an end to the occupation need to win over Jewish allies. Yet no tactic is more likely to alienate Jews than a boycott. That’s because the very word has deep and painful resonances for Jews: a boycott of Jewish business was one of the Nazis’ opening moves. No one is equating the current plan with that. But of all the tactics to have chosen, a boycott is the very dumbest one.
Advocates say there’s nothing to worry about, this will be a boycott of institutions, not individuals – a necessary move because no Israeli institution has ever taken a stand against the occupation. This, too, is numb-skulled. When do academic institutions ever take a collective stand against anything? Did Imperial College declare itself against the Iraq war? What was the British Museum’s view of UK policy in Northern Ireland? Of course there was no such thing. Institutions of learning don’t take a stand; individuals do.
Which is why it will be individuals who are ostracised by this action. When you boycott the Hebrew University, you’re not boycotting bricks and mortar but the men and women who teach there. The “institutional” talk is just a ruse designed to make this boycott more palatable. It will still end in the shunning of individuals.
And why? Simply because they are citizens of the wrong country, born with the wrong nationality. In 2003 the Linguistic Society of America declared itself against blacklisting scholars simply because of the actions of their governments. “Such boycotts violate the principle of free scientific interaction and cooperation, and they constitute arbitrary and selective applications of collective punishment.” They also amount to a pretty crass form or discrimination: you can’t come to this conference, because you’ve got the wrong colour passport.
Oh, but none of these arguments stopped the boycott of South Africa, say the pro-blacklisters. Except these situations are completely different. In South Africa, the majority of the people were denied a vote in the state in which they lived. Israelis and Palestinians are, by contrast, two peoples locked in a national conflict which will be resolved only when each has its own, secure state.
Ken Livingstone is right: to launch a boycott of Israel now would hurt, not help the search for the peace that might end this Middle East tragedy. And that, when all the posturing is put to one side, is all that should matter.
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