A Syrian-native who was studying journalism in London when war broke out in Syria in 2013, Zaina Erhaim decided to return permanently to report and train citizen journalists in the war-ravaged country. Between the violence and deadly misogyny of IS and the bombing raids of Russian allies of Assad the danger of living in the region as a female reporter is immense. However, Erhaim has trained hundreds of journalists, including many women.
In this photo essay, Erhaim explains her work and her life in Syria.
After the revolution in 2011, many Syrians became citizen journalists to report the regime’s crackdown on the demonstrations. Without any background in journalism or reporting, hundreds of activists became the main source of news and information for the rest of the world. I felt a responsibility to pass the knowledge and skills I had in journalism to them, and this is the first training I did in the suburbs of Edlib. Two of the trainees passed these skills to 40 other activists, some of whom are now publishing features and reports for the Syrian media.
There were only a couple of female citizen journalists living in the rebel-held areas in the northern Syria, so I decided to offer the training to those interested in learning (unlike the men who, who were mostly already citizen journalists). I was surprised how many women were actually interested. Some are now making a living from writing for our website Damascus Bureau and other websites, which turned their conservative, closed-minded husbands from opposing to supporting their work.
Writing was the easier choice for the women interested in being citizen journalists as it could be done anonymously with no need to grab attention holding a camera in the street, but some wanted to learn.
The woman in this picture – a schoolteacher – told me: “I want to report myself for the school instead of asking for a male citizen journalist to come whenever we have an activity, and I know the women teachers would speak to me much more comfortably in an interview.”
Besides journalism, through the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, we’ve established women-only internet cafes where women can come and learn how to use social media, surf the internet and use the computer. All means of communication have been cut by the regime for years, and the satellite internet cafes existed are male dominated. This means women are disconnected, so providing these centres is like giving them a window into the world.
Some might consider me biased because I stand with the freedom revolution in my home. On my blog, my slogan is: “I am biased to humanity and I am proud to be so.” I don’t think any journalist can be impartial when reporting about IS or Kim Jong-un’s crimes, so why with Assad? I was interrogated by his military security forces in 2008 because of an article I wrote and because I was active in a civil society organisation. I am forbidden from going home to Damascus, because I am a journalist and not a propagandist.
To document the human side of our war I started filming people, streets, life behind the frontline, death and horror. I chose to document the heroines who are facing extra difficulties because they are women, so I made five short films and named them Syria’s Rebellious Women.
“You pass the Kalaase massacre mark then turn right you will find me waiting for you there… .” Somehow destroyed buildings and massacres become part of the daily view and even marks to guide people to places. At this particular spot, I got engaged. Someone wrote “Heaven” on the wreckage with an arrow directed to the sky. There we exchanged our vows to keep loving life and to not forget the sacrifices of those who have gone in order for us to live free in a democratic country.
This is my husband Mahmoud, doing what he does every day: running toward bombed areas to rescue victims and provide first aid to those who need it. He has been injured many, most recently two weeks ago in a Russian air attack in Kallaseh grocery market. Three bits of shrapnel are still in his leg. Despite being a pioneer activist, a giving person who is ready to give his life for to protect and help people he doesn’t even know, and in spite of his work for international organisations, his visa to the UK has been rejected fearing that he “won’t leave the UK”.
Peter Kellner speaks at the Winter 2015 Index on Censorship magazine launch event at the British Library in February 2015. The panel discussion coincided with the publication of Drafting freedom to last: The Magna Carta’s past and present influences to mark the 800th anniversary of the document’s drafting.
Peter Kellner is president of YouGov and a contributor to Index on Censorship magazine. Kellner discusses the results of a YouGov survey about rights across seven European democracies and the United States. Full results are available here.
As far as I know, North Korea is the only significant country whose citizens have never been polled. Everywhere else, it is possible to discover what people think on at least some issues; and in the world’s democracies we can ask about the most sensitive social and political topics and obtain candid answers. In less than a century, and in many countries less than half a century, opinion polls have given people a voice of a kind they never had before.
It is against this backdrop that I chose the topic for my final blog for YouGov, before stepping down as president. The rise of polling in different countries has accompanied the spreading of democracy and human rights. We can do something that our grandparents never could: find out which human rights matter most to people – and to do it, simultaneously, in a number of countries. In this case we have surveyed attitudes in seven European democracies and the United States.
This is what we did. We identified thirty rights that appear in United Nations and European Council declarations, in the British and American Bills of Rights and, in some cases, are the subject of more recent debate in one or more countries. To prevent the list being even longer, we have been selective. For example, we have omitted “the right of subjects to petition the king”, and the right of people not to be punished prior to conviction, which were promised by Britain’s Bill of Rights. Matters requiring urgent attention in one era are taken for granted in another.
Even so, thirty is a large number. So we divided the list into two, and asked people to look at each list in turn, selecting up to five of the 15 rights from each list that “you think are the most important”. This means that respondents could select, in all, up to ten rights from the thirty. This does not mean that people necessarily oppose the remaining rights, simply that they consider them less important than the ones they do select.
This is what we found:
The right to vote comes top in five of the eight countries (Britain, France, Sweden, Finland and Norway), and second in two (Denmark and the United States – in both cases behind free speech). Only in Germany does it come lower, behind free speech, privacy, free school education, low-cost health care and the right to a fair trial.
In all eight countries more than 50% select free speech as one of the most important rights. It is the only right to which this applies.
Views vary about the importance of habeas corpus – the right to remain free unless charged with a criminal offence and brought swiftly towards the courts. It is valued most in Denmark (by 49%) and the United States (40%). In Britain, where habeas corpus originated in the seventeenth century, the figure is just 27%.
Rights to free school education and low-cost health care are selected by majorities in six of the eight countries. The exceptions are France and the United States. In the US, this reflects a different history and culture of public service provision. In France, unlike the other six European countries we surveyed, financial rights (to a minimum wage and a basic pension) come higher than the rights to health and education.
France is out of line in three other respects. It has by some margin the lowest figure for the right to live free from discrimination – and the highest figures for the right to a job and the “right to take part with others in anti-government demonstrations”
Few will be surprised that far more Americans than Europeans value the right to own a gun (selected by 46% of Americans, but by no more than 6% in any European country) and “the right of an unborn child to life” (30%, compared with 13% in Germany and no more than 8% in any of the other six countries).
The French and Americans are also keener than anyone else on “the right to keep as much of one’s own income as possible with the lowest possible taxes”. In the case of the United States, this is consistent with limited expectations of public-sector provision of health, education and pensions. With France it’s more complex: public services do not rank as high as in the six other European countries, but jobs, pay and pensions matter a lot. In their quest for security, income AND low taxes, many French voters appear to make demands on the state that seem likely to lead to disappointment. Perhaps this, as well as the lingering memory of France’s revolutionary past, explains the enthusiasm of so many French voters on both Left and Right to mount anti-government demonstrations.
In Europe, property rights matter less than social rights. In Germany only 6% regard ‘the right to own property, either alone or in association with others’ as one of their most valued human rights. The figures are slightly higher for France (14%) and Britain (16%) and higher still in the four Scandinavian countries (20-29%). Only in the United States (37%) is it on a par with the rights to free school and low-cost health care.
There are striking differences in views to rights that are matters of more recent controversy. In most of the eight countries, significant numbers of people value “the right to communicate freely with others” (e.g. by letter, phone or email) without government agencies being able to access what is being said). Four in ten Germans and Scandinavians regard this as one of their most important rights, as do 35% of Americans. But it is valued by rather fewer French (29%) and British (21%) adults.
Much lower numbers choose the right of gay couples to a same-sex marriage: the numbers range from 10% (Finland) to 19% (US). This is a clear example of a reform that, separate YouGov research has found, is now popular, or at least widely accepted – but not considered by most people to be as vital a human right as the others in our list.
In six of the eight countries, many more people value “the right of women to have an abortion” than “the right of an unborn child to life”. The exceptions are France, where both rights score just 13%, and the United States, where as many as 30% choose the right of an unborn child to life as a key human right, compared with 21% who value a woman’s right to an abortion. The countries with the strongest support for abortion rights are Denmark and Sweden.
Those are the main facts. Each of them deserves a blog, even a book, to themselves. It’s not just the similarities and differences between countries that are significant, but the variations between different demographic groups within each country. (For example, British men value free speech more than women, while women place a higher priority on the rights to free schooling and low-cost health care. Discuss…)
Nor does this analysis tell us about direct trade-offs. How far are people willing to defend free speech in the face of social media trolls – and habeas corpus when the police and security services seek greater powers to fight terrorism? (Past YouGov surveys have generally found that, when push comes to shove, most people give security a higher priority than human rights.)
The results reported here, then, do not provide a complete map of how human rights are regarded in the eight countries we surveyed. But they do give us a baseline. They tell us what matters most when people are invited to consider a wide range of rights that have been promoted over recent decades and, in some cases, centuries. It is, I believe, the first survey of its kind that has been conducted.
It won’t be the last. Understanding public attitudes to human rights, like promoting and defending those rights, is a never-ending task. It is also a vital one, just like giving voters, customers, workers, patients, passengers, parents – indeed all of us in our different guises – a voice in the institutions that affect our lives. Which has been the purpose of YouGov for the past fifteen years and will continue to be so.
Seamus Heaney with his family and at a party at home in Dublin, 1979. Photographer: Bobbie Hanvey
It’s the 17th annual World Poetry Day, which was first declared by Unesco in 1999 to help meet the world’s aesthetic needs by promoting the reading, writing and teaching of poetry. This year, Unesco director-general Irina Bokova said: “By paying tribute to the men and women whose only instrument is free speech, who imagine and act, Unesco recognises in poetry its value as a symbol of the human spirit’s creativity. […] The voices that carry poetry help to promote linguistic diversity and freedom of expression.”
One poet of this calibre was Seamus Heaney.
The Irish poet, playwright and lecturer was as prolific a translator of poetry as he was a writer. In September 1998, his translation of Gile na Gile, a poem written by Irish language poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille (1670–1726) was published exclusively in Index on Censorship under the title The Glamoured.
“It is a classic example of a genre known as the aisling (pronounced ashling) which was as characteristic of Irish language poetry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as rhymed satire was in England at the same time,” Heaney wrote in Index. “The aisling was in effect a mixture of samizdat and allegory, a form which mixed political message with passionate vision.”
This month, Heaney, who died in August 2013, offers us a gift from the afterlife: the publication of his translation of Aeneid’s Book VI, the Roman poet Virgil’s epic on mythic Trojan Aeneas’s journey to Hades. In the poem, Sibyl of Cumae, a guide to the underworld, “chanted menacing riddles” in an attempt to confuse our hero:
Then as her fit passed away and her raving went quiet,
Heroic Aeneas began: ‘No ordeal, O Sibyl, no new
Test can dismay me, for I have foreseen
And foresuffered all. But one thing I pray for
Especially: since here the gate opens, they say,
To the King of the Underworld’s realms, and here
In these shadowy marshes the Acheron floods
To the surface, vouchsafe me one look,
One face-to-face meeting with my dear father.
In the introduction to Aeneid’s Book VI, published posthumously, Heaney describes the poem – which he began working on in 1986 after the death of his father – as “like classics homework, the result of a lifelong desire to honour the memory of my Latin teacher at St Columb’s College, Father Michael McGlinchey”.
St Columb’s is a Roman Catholic grammar school for boys in Derry. Heaney formed part of the school’s “golden generation” in the 1940s and 1950s, which included the dramatist Brian Friel and politician John Hume.
When I attended St Columb’s between 1999 and 2006, pupils were reminded of the school’s alumni illustrissimi — especially Nobel laureates Heaney and Hume — at many a class, assembly and function. One of the highlights of my time as a pupil was attending an after-school discussion with Heaney and the classicist Peter Jones. They spoke of the positive effect reading poetry has on thought processes and the irrelevancy of the poet’s intention when a reader encounters the poem. It is, he said, our own unique experience with a work that truly matters.
Afterward, Heaney signed my copy of Redress of Poetry, a collection 10 lectures he gave between 1989 and 1994 while a professor of poetry at Oxford.
“Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy at being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world,” Heaney writes in the opening chapter. “[P]oetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life.”
Redress of Poetry’s predecessor, the collection of literary criticism essays from 1978-1987 titled Government of the Tongue, discusses in much more depth those who have been denied such expression in their political and social lives. The book is perhaps best known for its celebration of poets of the Eastern Bloc, the former communist states of central and eastern Europe. The discovery of poets such as Czesław Miłosz, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky and Zbigniew Herbert had an impact on Heaney’s own work. As a Northern Irish Catholic, Heaney could easily identify with the religion, culture and history of Polish poets Miłosz, whose work was banned by Poland’s communist government, and Herbert, who organised protests against censorship in the Eastern Bloc.
One poem Heaney references is Miłosz’s Child of Europe, which reads:
We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in
paroxysms of pain.
We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge.
It brings to mind the experiences of many in Northern Ireland. Throughout the Troubles, Heaney was known for expressing both clarity and humanity amid chaos. He tells a story in Government of the Tongue, however, of his personal difficulties in creating art amid violence. He was on his way to a recording session at the BBC studios in Belfast sometime in 1972 with folksinger David Hammond when the pair heard bombs go off.
“[T]he very notion of beginning to sing at the moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering,” he wrote.
This tension in the poet’s mind seemingly had no bearing on his ability to capture the mood of an entire nation through his work. In The Cure at Troy, Heaney’s telling of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the story of how Odysseus tricked Achilles’ son into joining the Greek forces at Troy, expressed the hope felt by many in his country in 1991, a year of ceasefires and all-party talks.
The poem contains the often-quoted and poignant words:
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]While journalists and citizens fled, Syrian-native Zaina Erhaim returned to her war-ravaged country and the city of Aleppo in 2013 to ensure those remaining were not forgotten. She is now one of the few female journalists braving the twin threat of violence from both ISIS and the president, Bashar al-Assad.
Erhaim has trained hundreds of journalists, many of them women, and set up independent media outlets to deliver news from one of the world’s most dangerous places. In 2015 Erhaim filmed a groundbreaking documentary, Syria’s Rebellious Women, to tell the stories of women who are helping her country survive its darkest hour.
“In 10 years time, I want a young woman who looks on the internet to find out what happened in Syria to find evidence of the roles women played.” — Zaina Erhaim[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1501491286724-cd18e683-18e7-6″ taxonomies=”8091″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
While journalists and citizens fled, Syrian-native Zaina Erhaim returned to her war-ravaged country and the city of Aleppo in 2013 to ensure those remaining were not forgotten. She is now one of the few female journalists braving the twin threat of violence from both ISIS and the president, Bashar al-Assad.