11 Jul 2014 | Awards, News, Turkey
Meltem Arikan
Three months have passed since the 2014 Index Awards and we caught up with arts nominee, Meltem Arikan. The Turkish playwright and author told Index she has finished the script of a new play, Sheep Republic. She hoped it would be staged in Turkey, but the political situation in the country prevents this from happening. She looks forward to hopefully having it staged in the UK with the team who brought her previous play, “Mi Minor” to life.
Index: What projects have you been working on since the Index Awards?
Arikan: I wrote a performance piece for The International Performance Festival Cardiff called “Recalling love: And woman and man” and it was performed in June by Memet Ali Alabora and Pinar Ogun, whom I created Mi Minor with. Then I finished writing the script of my new play “Sheep Republic” which is about oppression and how easily it’s accepted by people.
The play was written to be staged in Turkey originally, however it doesn’t look like it is going to be possible because of political reasons. So we want to stage it here with the creative team of “Mi Minor”.
Nowadays I am working on another theatre piece where I’m questioning the concept of “belonging” through my own experiences, feelings and observations of nationalities, races, languages and communities; this time to be performed in Welsh language, and quite unusually English language will be the foreign language. It will be previewed in Eisteddfod Festival as part of Theatr Genedlaethol’s Cwt Drama on 7 August.
Index: What do you hope for the future of these projects and your life in the next coming months?
Arikan: I always find questions about hope quite difficult to answer. So much that I have even named one of my novels “Hope is a curse.” My agent Meg Davis has introduced my banned book “Stop hurting my flesh” to publishers in the UK. It’s an ongoing process but the idea of my novel being published, excites me very much, just like the thought of “Mi Minor” to be staged in the UK.
Index: Before the awards, did you feel you had less recognition?
Arikan: After being nominated by Index, in February 2014, I was invited to PEN Ethiopia 3rd congress with Julia Farrington from Index, where I met the President of German PEN, Josef Haslinger, who has recently invited us to Frankfurt Book Fair in October to introduce my story and my work.
It was great to be nominated by Index and it surely gave me more recognition. Moreover, being a part of the Index family and to be able to write articles about freedom of speech and expression is just as important for me.
Last year during Gezi Park demonstrations it was hard enough to deal with the false allegations made in various media about my play and the “Mi Minor” creative team. We were accused of rehearsing Gezi park demonstrations with our play. We were completely exhausted, and didn’t feel safe to leave our houses in Istanbul. They were making a lot of TV shows about “Mi Minor” which included an edited version of one of my speeches that I made six years ago about secularism. As a result of these accusations I have received thousands of death and rape threats. The fear I witnessed in my son’s eyes and the anxiety that my partner was living through was what upset me the most. I still feel fragile when I recall the moments I had to leave them behind and come to the UK to stay alive. Because of the notorious recognition, I was even being cautious while walking on the streets of London in the first couple of months of coming here.
Index: How has your life changed since being nominated for an Index Award?
Arikan: I came to the UK with one piece of luggage, leaving everything behind, then I met Julia Farrington and she offered to do an interview with me. So we archived my story with three interviews which was very difficult and encouraging for me at the time.
Later I was nominated for an Index Award, and I met Index staff through the Index Awards and when they asked me to write for the website, I was delighted. Writing is what keeps me sane. I don’t know how to survive without writing so I am thankful to be supported as a writer by Index On Censorship.
This article was posted on July 10, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
10 Jul 2014 | Europe and Central Asia, Ireland, News
(Image: Quka/Shutterstock)
A recent court ruling in Ireland could have reintroduced the concept of criminal libel to the state, despite criminal defamation offences being abolished as recently as 2009.
The case itself was one of a particularly grim relationship break up. Names are not available as the people involved were also locked in a criminal case in which the male partner was accused of rape and false imprisonment, though he was acquitted of both.
But the details available are: couple breaks up in January 2011. They remain in touch. In April 2011, man goes to woman’s house to, according to the Irish Times’s report “confront her over a perceived infidelity”. Man later leaves woman’s house, but not before stealing her phone. Man goes through woman’s messages, which suggest she has started a new relationship. Man opens woman’s Facebook on phone and posts remarks from her account, making it appear that she is presenting herself as a “whore” who would take “any offers”. Drink was a factor, as the Irish court reporting phrase goes.
This action led to a charge under the Criminal Damage Act 1991, under which “A person who without lawful excuse damages any property belonging to another intending to damage any such property or being reckless as to whether any such property” can find themselves liable to a large fine and up to 10 years in prison.
In this case, the defendant was found guilty and fined €2,000.
The judge, Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan, is reported to have asked how to assess the “damage” when nothing had actually been broken. Prosecutors replied that the case was in fact more akin to harassment and that the “damage” had been “reputational rather than monetary”.
The first question here is obvious: if the facts of the case were more akin to harassment, then why were charges not brought under Section 10 of Ireland’s Non-Fatal Offences Against The Person Act, which would cover anyone who “by his or her acts intentionally or recklessly, seriously interferes with the other’s peace and privacy or causes alarm, distress or harm to the other”? Wouldn’t this be the obvious piece of legislation to use?
But after that, there are a few more: Who actually owns a Facebook profile? And does reputation count as property? And crucially, has Mr Justice Sheehan created a criminal libel law?
Ireland has a complicated relationship with social media. On the one hand, to be plain about it, the big online companies create a lot of employment in Ireland. Facebook, Twitter and Google all employ a lot of people in the country. On the other hand, it is susceptible to the same moral panics as anywhere else, and in a small, largely homogenous country, panics can be enormously amplified.
When government minister Shane McEntee committed suicide in Christmas 2012, the tragic story somehow became conflated with social media and online bullying. McEntee’s brother blamed the minister’s death on “people downright abusing him on the social networks and no names attached and they can say whatever they like because there’s no face and no name”. But his daughter later refuted that claim, saying: “Dad didn’t use Twitter and wasn’t a huge fan of Facebook. So I don’t think you can blame that and I’m not going to start a campaign on that.”
The subsequent debate on social media bullying was almost tragic in its simplicity, the undisputed highlight being Senator Fidelma Healy-Eames describing to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Transport and Communications how young people are “literally raped on Facebook”.
As ever in discussions that involve social media, a generation gap opens up, or is invoked, between younger “natives” who supposedly instinctively understand the web, and a political and judicial class who are apparently hopelessly out of touch. There is certainly an element of truth to this (I have sat in courts and watched judges express utter bafflement at the very concept of Twitter), but in general, what is actually happening is legislators, magistrates and the judiciary are desperately trying to apply existing, supposedly universal laws to phenomena to which they are simply not suited. This is where controversy usually arises, for example in the UK’s use of public order laws when the only threat to public order is a Twitter mob — as in the case of jailed student Liam Stacey; or use of laws against menacing communications in instances where it’s clear no menace was intended — such as Britain’s now infamous Twitter Joke Trial.
In the current Irish case, it seems obvious that harassment would have been the more relevant charge, but in this instance, that’s not what we have to worry about. The real concern is that by apparently putting reputation in the category of property which can suffer damage, the court has now created a precedent where damage to a person’s reputation, whether by “fraping”, tweeting, or even just the getting facts wrong in a news story, could lead to criminal sanction.
And the very worst thing is that no one seems to have noticed.
From the introduction of the new blasphemy law onward, Ireland has seen a slow, stealthy erosion of free speech. It’s not clear what will get people to start paying attention, but the country needs to be more vigilant.
This article was posted on July 10, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
26 Jun 2014 | Azerbaijan, Azerbaijan News, News
The Baku Court of Grave Crimes announced the verdict for the NIDA movement activists in May 2014. The human rights defenders Rashadat Akhundov, Zaur Gurbanly and Ilkin Rustamzadeh to 8 years’ imprisonment, Rashad Hasanov and Mamed Azizov – to 7.5 years. Protesters were detained and victimised by police. (Photo: Aziz Karimov / Demotix)
In a bleakly comic turn at the beginning of Ilham Aliyev’s address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe this week, Assembly president Anne Brasseur asked press photographers to leave the chamber and reminded those present that they were not permitted to vocalise their approval or disapproval during the Azerbaijani dictator’s stand. It appeared that Brasseur hadn’t quite meant what she said, as in the end photographers at the front of the room were merely required to move their tripods to ensure everyone in the room could see Aliyev as he spoke.
Aliyev’s speech was given to mark the Azerbaijan’s taking up of the chair of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers last month. And what a speech it was!
The man who promises to “turn initiatives into reality” (still no idea) told of Azerbaijan’s enormous progress in all fields, not just oil fields. He spoke of the country’s “very positive atmosphere” and listed the country’s great freedoms: freedom of political activity, freedom of expression, freedom of media… Azerbaijan was proud of these freedoms, he said. Azerbaijan knew that an uncensored internet and independent newspapers were important for democracy.
It was a lovely speech, and also one that contained barely a word of truth beyond the conjunctions. Aliyev may as well have praised the nation’s Quidditch team for defeating Ravenclaw on penalties at the World Cup. He could have told us about his new motorcar, and his adventures with Ratty, Mole and Badger, and been more believable.
Watching Aliyev, the only time one got the sense he even believed what he was saying himself was when discussing the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, and even then he was only drily insisting that the regions “geographical toponyms” (place names?) were Azeri in origin: All Your Geographical Toponyms Are Belong To Us, so to speak.
The truth about Azerbaijan is quite different from the picture painted by its president this week. As Human Rights Watch pointed out ahead of the Council of Europe speech, “In the past two years, Azerbaijani authorities have brought or threatened unfounded criminal charges against at least 40 political activists, journalists, bloggers, and human rights defenders, most of whom are behind bars.” Search for Azerbaijan stories on Index, and you will find more details of those arrests and abuses.
And this isn’t exactly obscure knowledge. People know three things about Azerbaijan: it has a lot of gas and oil; it takes Eurovision very seriously; and it has a poor human rights record. After his speech, Aliyev was confronted by Michael McNamara of the CoE socialist group, who quoted Amnesty’s statistic that there are currently 19 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Not so, said Aliyev. There are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan. The people who came up with these statistics were lying. There was a programme of “deliberate provocation” against Azerbaijan — though it was unspecified who was leading this programme.
Aliyev swore that this plot to undermine Azerbaijan would fail.
The Azerbaijani president is not alone in his capability for bare-faced falsehood. It’s a specific strain of Soviet and post-Soviet behaviour, learned from the Communist Party and the KGB. If the leader says something, it is true, no matter what the evidence to the contrary. There are no political prisoners in Azerbaijan, says Aliyev, and we encourage a free media because it is important to our democracy; Ukraine has been taken over by fascists, says Vladimir Putin, and Russia has no choice but to fight them. There is no point in putting on a play about depression in Belarus, an Alexander Lukashenko apparatchik tells the Belarus Free Theatre, because there is no such thing as depression in Belarus.
“So what?” you may say. “Politicians and institutions lie.” And you’d be right. But this is a form of lying that goes far beyond “I was perfectly within my rights to claim those expenses”/”I did not have sex with that woman”. Political lies in functioning democracies tend to have to do with cover ups of personal or institutional failings. In an authoritarian society, with power utterly concentrated to the leader and his cadre, there is no such thing as an isolated failure. As a result, every aspect of life must be spun. All triumphs belong to the leader, all criticisms are propaganda, all failures sabotage. When there is no balance of power, is there really an objective truth? When, for example, the dictator Lukashenko told a journalist that journalist Irina Khalip, under house arrest, could leave Belarus any time she wanted, was that actually true? Was it true the moment he said it? Did it become true after he said it? And did it remain true?
This state of things raises a question for those of us seeking to better the lot of people living under regimes such as Belarus and Azerbaijan: can we pounce on the moments when autocrats declare as fact something we know to be untrue, cling on until they actually make it true? Or does this merely confirm the idea that truth is whatever their whim makes it?
This article was posted on June 26, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
20 Jun 2014 | News, Volume 43.02 Summer 2014
A woman chips away at the Berlin Wall, November 1989. Credit: Justin Leighton / Alamy
Our latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine includes a look at “Generation Wall” – the young people who grew up in a free eastern Europe. Tymoteusz Chajdas, 23, from Poland, is one of our contributors. Here, he looks back at what has changed and remembers his family’s excitement when packages arrived from an uncle in the West
The delivery of a package, the size of a small fridge, from abroad was rare in 1980s Poland. My family was fortunate enough to have this privilege. Every month, my two-year-old sister, Joanna, sat on the rubber flooring in the hallway of our two-bedroom apartment. She waited for a package from Jerzy, my uncle who lived in Cologne, West Germany.
The unpacking was always an occasion. But my parents have a particularly strong memory of the first time a package was delivered. When the postman arrived, Joanna opened the box and immediately started playing with the contents. “Balls. I’ve got so many! Come play with me!” It was the first time my sister had seen oranges.
This was the reality of that time. Poland became isolated from the rest of Europe when the Soviets erected the Berlin Wall in 1961. The ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy remained unattainable for an average Pole for the next 28 years. Some only experienced these ideals remotely by having family in the West, and occasionally receiving “samples” of what Western life was like.
Over on the eastern side of the wall, Poles couldn’t buy basic material goods easily, such as food or hygiene products. Large chunks of everyday life consisted of tedious searches and hours standing in long lines to buy essentials. Store shelves were frequently empty, and it seemed the only item always in stock was vinegar. Even if a product was available, it could only be purchased upon presentation of a ration card.
“Jerzy was devastated by this,” says my mother, Jadwiga, talking about her brother. In 1979, my uncle was invited by a friend for a three-week holiday in the Netherlands. After two weeks, Jerzy decided to stay on the other side of the wall. He applied for political asylum and never came back.
“He could stay there under one condition: he had to reject Polish citizenship,” she tells me. “So he did. Within two years he started sending us food and clothing.”
A few years later, another relative of ours emigrated to the United States. While the Berlin Wall divided Europe into two worlds,
Poles could not reveal any connections they had with the West. It was around this time my father started his career at the Silesian Police Department.
“We started to fear our own shadows,” says my mother, remembering that having family in the West was both a blessing and curse. Any association with capitalist Europe posed a threat to the authorities of communist Poland and was seen as political espionage and violation of the communist ideology. “[Your father] had to renounce family mem- bers living in the West if he wanted to stay employed,” says my mother. “Our phone was tapped so we had little contact with them.”
Despite this, my family still received packages. Only those who worked two jobs or were communist party members could afford to live comfortably, so my mother had to lie about her income to cover up for the extra goods we received from relatives abroad.
Less privileged Poles had little or no un- derstanding of what life looked like on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Jolanta Sudy, a high school teacher and family friend, re- members those times very well. She says the majority of Poles were victims of communist propaganda and were unaware of what was happening in their own country.
“As far as censorship is concerned, the Soviets presented the Eastern Bloc as an El Dorado where everything was perfect and no problems existed,” she says. The government spread its ideology through newspapers, magazines, books, films and theatre productions. Popular radio and tel- evision broadcasts were also censored and reinforced the views of the communist party.
Every year on 1 May, all Polish citizens were obliged to attend a street parade celebrating the International Worker’s Day. A register of attendance was kept.“It looked like a country fair or circus,” recalls Sudy. “Everyone was dressed up to show how joy- ful it was to live in Poland, how happy we were because of the socialist system. But the party stood above us with a whip.”
The elections worked similarly and at- tendance was also mandatory. Many saw them as an ironic spectacle organised by the authorities. The ballot paper featured only one name. “I always signed the register but I never put the card in the box,” says Sudy. “This was my battle with communism.”
Such oppression, constant fear and invigilation had a strong influence on the Poles. Some listened to Radio Free Europe, which broadcast unbiased news from Western countries.
In 1989 the situation changed drastically: the Berlin Wall was torn down.
“The store shelves filled up again with foreign goods,” says my mum. “Travel agents started organising vacations to other coun- tries. This was very difficult before then.”
Some Poles found the change shocking. Sudy says that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the amount of uncensored news was overwhelming. “It was hard to believe that we could have lived differently since the end of World War II.”
The overturn of the uniform culture of communist Poland gave birth to a cul- tural explosion which had skillfully been repressed by the Soviets. Free expression in the arts in Poland did not exist during the communist period, according to Kasia Gasinska, a 24-year-old graphic designer. Some Polish citizens listened to music from non-authorised radio stations but it was only “after the wall fell down that [Polish] art became liberated,” recalls Gasinska.
Gasinska says that Western music suddenly became available in Poland, and Poles set up new bands. “New music genres were introduced, such as rave or techno, which embodied the feeling of freedom shared by many at the time.”
The collapse of communism also brought with it one of the most powerful artistic forms – street art, says Gasinska. Many Poles made the journey to the remnants of the Berlin Wall where they could freely express themselves through graffiti.
This expanded as an artistic movement to major cities in Poland. Lodz, the third largest city and a post-industrial centre, became one of many hubs for street art, famous for its colourful murals and playful graffiti that covered many bleak estates.
olish cinema was liberated from communist propaganda as well. There were new movies that referred to the Polish romantic ideals of the previous epoch, as well as comedies and films that dealt with everyday life in the wake of the political transformation.
Today, the events that led to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall seem like a distant memory for many young Poles, myself included. I was born in 1990 and I only learnt about those times by listening to the stories my parents told. Some were scary, some funny. But mostly, they feel unreal, as does the idea of getting shot at for attempting to cross the western border.
Although the Berlin Wall was torn down 25 years ago, divisions can still be felt. An in- visible wall divides us into those who are too young to remember and those who suddenly woke up in a capitalist country. Some made up for the lost time and found themselves in the new system. Others still tend to talk about the good old communist times when the pace of life was less hectic.
But even these Poles wouldn’t deny that the Berlin Wall has become a symbol of an unrealistic system, gradual economic decline and political oppression. Today, its ruins remind me of the adversities many eastern Europeans had to go through to experience living in a free, democratic country. Few remember that, at the time, only hope kept the Poles dreaming of a better life.
My mother told me that when she was a child, she received a present from her friend who was leaving for West Germany. “It was a pair of knee-high socks with blue and red stripes at the top. Today, I would say they were unsightly,” she says. “But back then, I wore them every day. Every time I looked at them, I promised myself that it was going to be better one day.”
This article appears in the summer 2014 issue of Index on Censorship magazine. Get your copy of the issue by subscribing here or downloading the iPad app.
