28 Mar 2025 | Belarus, Egypt, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, News, Russia
On Sunday 30 March, I and mothers like me across the UK, will be waking up to a chorus of “Happy Mother’s Day!”, handmade cards and flowers thrust in our faces as we curse whoever made the decision to put the clocks forward on today of all days.
As anyone who is a mother knows, it’s a hard job. The balancing of family life, careers and – dare I say it – our own social lives; the emotional and mental load that falls to us; attempting to raise tiny people into well-rounded grown-up humans.
Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise all this, in ourselves and in our own mothers. But this Mother’s Day, I’d like to think about those who are mothering in extreme situations. Those who are fighting for the release of their children, who are held in prison in autocratic regimes after raising their voices. Those who are campaigning for the release of partners, after they stood up to autocrats. And those who are behind bars themselves after speaking out, and have been ripped away from their families.
One of those mothers is Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who ran for president against Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2020 in Belarus. She is now in exile in Lithuania, where she leads the opposition coalition.
Tsikhanouskaya never wanted to be a politician. She describes herself as having been an “ordinary woman”, where her family was her world. The change of course was thrust upon her when her husband Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was a willing opposition leader, was arrested in May 2020 then sentenced to 18 years in prison in December 2021.
With her husband incommunicado, Tsikhanouskaya has led the campaign for his release, taken up his political reins and continued to raise their two children.
On Belarus Freedom Day (25 March), just a few days before Mother’s Day, Lukashenka chose the national awareness day to be sworn in after his sham election. Meanwhile, Index on Censorship organised a protest outside the Belarusian embassy in London, writing the names of political prisoners in chalk on the pavement. Meanwhile, Tsikhanouskaya continued to raise the issue of Belarusian freedom on the international stage. From her office in Lithuania, she took time out to talk to me about what happens when the worlds of motherhood and campaigning collide.
“Raising children is a heavy duty, even if you’re an ordinary person,” she told me. And for her, there is an additional toll.
“You always live with the feeling of guilt, because you are not spending enough time with the children,” she said. A relatable feeling. “Very unexpectedly for them, I became […] the person who is defending their daddy, who is defending the country, the leader that had to travel a lot just to raise the alarm about the situation in Belarus.”
She tries to pack in time with her children when she can, but is conscious of not overwhelming them.
“All these years, we are also living with the pain,” she said. Her daughter was only four when her father was imprisoned, and Tsikhanouskaya does everything she can to make sure she remembers his voice and what he looks like. Her daughter writes letters, but they go unanswered.
“It’s very painful for her, and she’s asking, ‘Mum, maybe he is not alive anymore, and you are lying to us, or maybe he doesn’t love us anymore’,” she said.
Tsikhanouskaya is forced to have conversations with her children that no mother would ever want to conduct, about brutality and torture in prisons. Meanwhile her son, who is older, tries not to ask painful questions. He doesn’t want to write letters to his father, because he doesn’t want to flaunt his own freedom.
“I hope, I really believe that they’re learning a lot from these difficult lives. They’re learning how people can sacrifice their lives, their freedoms, a comfortable life, just for something bigger and more important,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Beyond this, she said she feels the Belarusian people are learning something – that women can lead movements. This, she said, is not the message that was left to them from their Soviet Union past. Meanwhile, she is nourished by the Belarusian people, and by international communities.
This Mother’s Day, Tsikhanouskaya has a message for other mothers fighting similar battles: “Don’t even dare blame yourself that you are a bad mother because you have to be a good leader of your campaign. Your example is the best lesson your children can learn.”
She spares a thought too for the mothers who are political prisoners themselves, and describes how this tactic of separating mothers from their children is “like they cut a piece of your life”.
One of those women is Antanina Kanavalava, a member of Tsikhanouskaya’s campaign, who was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for preparing to take part in a mass riot, related to her role in running a Telegram channel. Her husband was also detained for the same reason, leaving behind their son and daughter, who are both under the age of eight and were taken abroad by their grandmother.
“Dictators know that children are the most effective leverage,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
In fact, Tsikhanouskaya herself had her children used against her. She was told to leave the country, and was threatened with prison if she refused.
She said that she was told: “Your husband’s already in prison. Your children will be in an orphanage.”
The winner of the Trustees Award at our Freedom of Expression Awards in 2024 also knows what it means to campaign for your husband’s release while continuing to raise children. Russian human rights activist Evgenia Kara-Murza, the advocacy director of the Free Russia Foundation, continued to raise her three children while she took up the campaign to fight for her husband’s release.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was arrested and jailed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in April 2022, after he’d already been poisoned twice. His wife spent the next two years travelling the world and speaking out against her husband’s imprisonment and Putin’s regime. In August 2024, he was finally freed as part of a prisoner exchange.
In Turkey, the Saturday Mothers have held sit-in vigils in Istanbul since 1995, for loved ones who have been forcibly disappeared or murdered. They have spent more than 1,000 Saturdays conducting peaceful demonstrations. After their 700th vigil in August 2018, they faced a crackdown, their peaceful protest broken up with tear gas, water cannons and arrests. Finally in March 2025, 45 members of the Saturday Mothers who had been arrested were acquitted.
Elsewhere in Turkey in 2024, mothers of Crimean political prisoners held a series of exhibitions called I Will Always Wait For You, My Child, demonstrating how their lives had been devastated by the Russian occupation of Crimea. Photos and captions were displayed on easels and online, each with the photo of a mother whose child was ripped away from her, detained and taken to Russia.
The exhibition was supported by Ukrainian NGO Human Rights Centre ZMINA, the Office of the Ombudsman of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Turkey, and the Crimean Tatar diaspora.
“My children are my air. I will fight for them until my last breath,” wrote Dilyara Abdullaeva, a 70-year-old mother whose sons Uzeir and Teymur were sentenced to 12.5 and 16.5 years in a strict regime colony.
On the UK’s shores, Laila Soueif has been putting her life at risk for her son, British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
El-Fattah has been in and out of prison in Egypt for the last decade, after becoming a vocal pro-democracy campaigner. When his most recent sentence of five years came to an end last September, he was not released. His mother went on a hunger strike for the next five months, and was eventually told by doctors that her life was at risk.
When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer finally made a call to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in February this year, she switched to a partial hunger strike, to give the negotiation process time to take its course.
Soueif spoke to me over a video call this week, and she described herself as “functioning”.
“I realised that both the Egyptian and the British government are not going [to act], except when there is a crisis. So, I decided to create the crisis,” she said.
While in the past she has felt enthusiastic about campaigning, albeit sometimes exhausted and bored by the situation, since September she has felt very angry.
Soueif’s hunger strike lasted an incredibly long time before she deteriorated, but she doesn’t think that what she has done is particularly extraordinary.
“I really believe that most mothers would be willing to take that kind of risk for their kids,” she said. She is probably right. Regardless, it’s a position no mother wishes to be in.
A hunger strike was not Soueif’s first port of call. She had taken legal routes, staged demonstrations and spoken to the British government.
“In the end, none of it worked,” she said.
She is now worried she made the wrong choice coming off her hunger strike, as the momentum seems to have been lost. She is considering taking it up again, and can only hope there are motions of clemency from the Egyptian government around the end of Ramadan in a few days’ time. If she does go back on a hunger strike, she will be putting herself at huge risk.
Her message to other mothers fighting for their loved ones is this: “If you start a fight, don’t give up. Because however hard the fight is, to give up without achieving your objective will probably be much, much harder.”
In this fight, she has never been alone. She spoke about the incredible solidarity she has had, and the difference it has made.
From exile in Lithuania, Tsikhanouskaya acknowledged that mothers like herself need some time, care and a listening ear too. While she fights for freedom in Belarus, she also continues to be an ordinary woman.
“Save yourself first, and then go and ruin dictatorships,” she said.
Mothers, even when they’re not fighting autocrats, have incredible strength and resilience. Perhaps, as some of these women show, it is the mothers who will get dissidents out of prison, and take down oppressive regimes.
6 Mar 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News
The beauty and power of Iran’s music is being strangled, with many musicians jailed and tortured purely for raising their voices against the regime’s viciousness and in harmony with those protesting against it.
The case of rapper and Index Freedom of Expression award-winner Toomaj Salehi has been the highest profile case of Iran cracking down on freedom of expression among the country’s musicians but he is not alone. Index was at the heart of the campaign to get Salehi’s sentence commuted and he was eventually released but the country’s other musicians still face persecution.
Musicians like Salehi are regularly thrown in jail for highlighting the brutality and hypocrisy of Iran’s government. Even after release from prison, if they are lucky, these musicians still face surveillance and control.
Singer Mehdi Yarrahi, whose song Roosarito (Your Headscarf) gained widespread attention and became an anthem of resistance, was jailed in early 2024 for challenging “the morals and customs of Islamic society”. After his release on medical grounds, he was forced to wear an ankle tag to track his movements. A source told Index that this has only recently been removed. This week, it was reported that Yarrahi had been sentenced to the inhumane torture of 74 lashes to end the criminal case against him.
In May last year, rappers Vafa Ahmadpour and Danial Moghaddam were sentenced to prison for “propaganda against the regime”. Our source tells us they are serving their sentences under house arrest and must wear ankle tags to restrict movement away from their homes.
These sentences and treatment, for simply writing songs of protest, are unjust.
Another recent case involves musician and activist Khosrow Azarbeig who was arrested in Tehran on 17 February for “insulting” former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad following a protest performance in Tehran’s metro.
The lawyer Amir Raesian shared the news on X: “Mr. Khosrow Azarbeig, a daf player, was arrested on Monday evening on a street in Tehran. His family has been informed that his charge is ‘insulting Bashar al-Assad’.”
It follows a string of other actions against musicians and singers in the country.
Last July, Zara Esmaeili was arrested by Iranian security forces at her home in Karaj. Her arrest came after online footage emerged of her on the streets of Tehran singing the Amy Winehouse hit Back To Black without wearing a hijab.
According to a friend, just one day before her arrest, she tried to prevent the security police from detaining one of her friends in Tehran. This escalated into a confrontation with security forces, ultimately resulting in her violent arrest.
The exiled Iranian filmmaker Vahid Zarezadeh, now in Germany, told Index: “Zara Esmaeili was not widely known in the media, which meant that her voice remained largely unheard. She has been in detention for several months now, yet her family has received no information about her whereabouts or the reason for her arrest – a scenario all too familiar for many detainees in Iran.”
“Since then, there has been no official information about the charges against her, her legal status, or even where she is being held. Meanwhile, her Instagram account was suspended by order of the Iranian judiciary – a common tactic used to silence activists and dissidents.”
He added: “Our best assumption is that she is being held in solitary confinement in Ward 209 of Evin Prison, as no one inside the prison has seen or heard from her. Her situation remains shrouded in uncertainty, and, like many others, the complete silence surrounding her case could indicate that she is under severe pressure in detention.”
In December, the singer Parastoo Ahmadi was arrested along with two band members for performing a livestream concert in the symbolic venue of an old caravanserai (an inn which provided lodging for travellers) without wearing a hijab, violating Iran’s strict rules on dress for women.
Posting the concert on her channel, she wrote: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately. Here, in this part of our beloved Iran, where history and our myths intertwine, hear my voice in this imaginary concert and imagine this beautiful homeland… I am grateful to all those who have supported me in these difficult and special circumstances.”
The other members arrested were Iranian composer Ehsan Beyraghdar and guitarist Soheil Faghih Nasiri.
The Iranian authorities issued a statement saying that the concert took place “without legal authorisation and adherence to Sharia principles” and that appropriate action would be taken against the singer and production team. Since it was posted, the video has attracted 2.5 million views and was widely shared on Iranian social media, despite YouTube being banned in the country.
Ahmadi and the others have since been released on bail pending a trial.
Meanwhile, the controversial Iranian rapper Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo (better known as Amir Tataloo) is facing up to 15 years in prison.
The singer, known for being completely covered in tattoos, fled to Istanbul, Turkey in 2018 following repeated arrests by the Iranian authorities. In December 2023, he was deported by Turkish authorities, seemingly for visa violations although some reports say that his return to Iran was of his own volition. On crossing into Iran at the Bazargan border crossing, he was arrested.
While he was in Turkey, controversy swirled around Tataloo including allegations of attempts to groom young girls.
In 2020, Tataloo’s Instagram profile was suspended after he was accused of inviting young girls to join his “harem”. He later allegedly posted an audio file on Telegram justifying his position in which he said: “What I discussed was legitimate by the laws of our country and our religion. It is in our religion that you can have… four wives and 40 concubines. Also, marriage above the age of nine is allowed in Islam. But I said 15 to 16 years of age. Then I said with the consent of the parents, so that there would be no controversy.”
Since his return to Iran, he has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for “promoting corruption and prostitution”, a sentence upheld by the Court of Appeal. He faces a further five years for “insulting religious sanctities” but this is currently under review by the Supreme Court.
Some reports have claimed that Tataloo has been sentenced to death for blasphemy against the Prophet (“Sabb al-Nabi”). However, the Iranian judiciary’s media centre has denied this, stating that his final sentence has not yet been issued.
“Many individuals and social groups hesitate to support him due to his unpredictable character,” said Zarezadeh. “His supporters and critics alike constantly anticipate his next move – one day he performs a concert on the deck of an Iranian military vessel, another day he poses alongside President Ebrahim Raisi, and then at another moment, he positions himself as an opposition figure. All of these contradictions have made his case even more ambiguous.”
Despite the controversy surrounding Tataloo and his alleged crimes, the fact is that Iran has a problem with the freedom of expression of its musicians. Music was never intended to be silenced but heard. This systemic persecution has to stop.
5 Feb 2025 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
This article first appeared in Volume 53, Issue 4 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Unsung Heroes: How musicians are raising their voices against oppression. Read more about the issue here. The issue was published on 12 December 2024.
In around 2009, Golazin Ardestani was preparing to go on stage in Tehran. The venue was sold out. She and her university classmates had been through months of rehearsals for their traditional concert and had followed all the rules: they had their songs cleared by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the lead singer was male, the musicians would be seated on the floor and everyone was dressed appropriately, including the correct hijab protocols. And yet, as Ardestani – who goes by the stage name Gola – walked towards the stage, she was told: “No, you can’t perform with them. No female musician can go on stage tonight.”
She stood at the side of the stage and watched her friends perform without her, clutching the formal permission papers which should have allowed her to sing, and which had been wilfully ignored. This is just one of the heartbreaking memories she has of being a female musician in Iran.
A few years later, Ardestani left Iran for good. Now in her 30s, she is based between Europe and the USA, where she creates music that speaks out against the regime. In 2018, she founded her own record label, Zan Recordings, so that she could finally release music on her own terms.
Ardestani was born in Isfahan, in Iran. She taught herself to yodel as a child and grew up in a house filled with a mix of the traditional Persian music favoured by her parents, and the Iranian and Western pop smuggled in by her older siblings, whose musical preferences were inspired by their desire for freedom.
“My teenage years were full of those stolen moments listening to forbidden songs on satellite,” she told Index over email. “Music, and especially female performers, gave me a sense of freedom that was completely absent on our heavily censored government TV.”
Growing up, Gola had never seen a woman on an Iranian stage. At age 19, fed up with trying to conform to traditional norms and still being prevented from singing, she joined some friends and a group of three sisters to create Iran’s first girl band, Orchid.
They wanted to challenge the narrative of female singers being “provocative”, and to resist patriarchal and authoritarian forces. Behind their music was a deep understanding of the history of Iranian music from before the Islamic revolution of 1979, when female singers like Googoosh and Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri had been celebrated and were free to perform to mixed audiences.
Orchid was only allowed to perform for female audiences, who had to remain seated. Gestures or movements that could be interpreted as dancing were strictly forbidden. The performers themselves had to avoid showing emotion on stage.
“There were female morality police at the end of each row, watching us and the audience,” Ardestani recalled.
The memory of those performances, in front of thousands of women, is still vivid.
“It was such a powerful experience that I remember making a promise to myself that night: that I would sing, I would sing solo, and I would one day sing for a mixed audience,” she said. “I held onto this vision of a day when our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons could feel proud of the women on stage.”
Whilst in Iran, Ardestani was arrested three times by the morality police, experiences which she said shaped her music and her determination to keep fighting.
The first occasion was when she was just 16, when she was arrested because her hijab wasn’t covering the front of her hair. She sat terrified in a cell and sang to distract herself. A woman shouted at her: “Shut up, close your mouth, shut your ugly voice!”
The last time she was arrested was particularly brutal and was due to the clothes she was wearing. “As they were about to push me into the van, I put on my fighting face, but chaos quickly ensued,” she said. A crowd began to form, and she hit something hard, breaking her arm. With the situation out of control, the police’s superior told her to go home in a taxi.
“All of this because of my ripped jeans, even though I was wearing a long manto [overcoat] and a scarf covering my hair.”
Ardestani considers herself lucky to have escaped alive. Under similar circumstances, Mahsa “Jina” Amini died in custody in September 2022, the moment that sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.
Iranian singer Golazin Ardestani demonstrating in Washington DC. Photo by Nathan Napolitano
Before leaving Iran in 2011 both to perform without persecution, and to study for a master’s in music psychology in London, Ardestani made a final attempt to plead her case and gain permission to record an album.
“I had to trick my way through the system just to get my foot in the door of the Department of Direction, where the man who granted permissions for male singers worked. But when I finally met him, he wouldn’t even look at me, staring at the floor as he spoke,” she said. She was told that Iran didn’t need a Céline Dion.
Ardestani knew then there was no coming back. “Once I started singing freely, I would lose my home forever,” she said. On the day she left, after Norouz (Persian New Year) in 2011, she decided she would dedicate everything to fighting for change.
“I promised myself that my music would carry the voices of those who can’t be heard,” she said. “There was no way for me to be fully myself as a musician, as a singer or even as a woman. They controlled every aspect of my voice, my body, my agency.”
She knows that she cannot return, and is confident that if she did, she would be arrested and charged with Mofsed fel-Arz, or “spreading corruption on earth”, due to her open challenges to what she calls Iran’s “fabricated religious theocracy”. This charge could carry a death sentence.
The songs she has finally had the freedom to create include Haghame, meaning “It’s My Right”, which is about the freedom to choose whether or not to wear the hijab. Another, Khodavande Shoma, translates to “Your God”, and includes the lyrics: “Your god is sick, it seems – a sick, dangerous criminal. Your religious beliefs, death, and destruction. Your prayers are for murder and blood.”
For female musicians in Iran, freedom is still out of reach. Many women rely on underground scenes, Ardestani told Index, but this comes with its own risks. Posting performances on social media can also lead to arrests, intimidation and the charge of Mofsed fel-Arz.
And censorship does not always respect borders. At a concert in Canada in 2023, designed to support the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, Ardestani was told she could not sing Khodavande Shoma, because the organisers believed it was “attacking people’s religion”. This, she said, is not what the song is about. Rather she is “confronting the twisted version of religion that the Islamic regime has created”.
“I am an Iranian woman fighting for freedom and, specifically, for women’s freedom of choice and speech. Yet here I was, outside of Iran, being told by an organiser – of a concert for freedom, no less – that I couldn’t sing a song in a free country,” she said.
She told the male Iranian organisers that she would sing that song, or not sing at all. They relented.
For every performance Ardestani gives, another song in Iran is silenced. She often posts on social media about the plight of imprisoned Iranian musicians. She condemned the arrest of Zara Esmaeili, who often sang covers of international pop hits in public with her hair uncovered. One social media video showed Esmaeili performing Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. She was arrested on 25 July 2024, and it is believed that she has not been heard from since.
Ardestani is a huge admirer of Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who won an Index Freedom of Expression Award in 2023. He was first arrested in 2022, and after being detained multiple times and tortured, he was charged with “corruption on earth”, jailed and given the death sentence. The death sentence was dropped after campaigning from prominent musicians and human rights organisations including Index, and Salehi was released in early December.
“It’s unimaginable that a musician, simply expressing himself through lyrics, could be sentenced to death for his art,” Ardestani said. “Iranian music is powerful and resilient; it’s the heartbeat of a people who have been silenced in many other ways. Each song is a form of resistance, a declaration of our existence and our hope.”
As to why Salehi and other musicians are targeted, she has a strong theory: “They know the power of a good song, the potential of meaningful lyrics and the way music can unite people to inspire change.”
For Ardestani now, everything is about fighting for freedom for all – not just in Iran, but globally. She describes music as a way to transform personal struggles into a collective moment. In another of her songs, Betars Az Man, or Fear Me, she sings:
“The butterfly is fleeing its cocoon.
Fear me, as I am that butterfly.
Fear me, as freedom is my voice.”
In her upcoming song Zaloo, she says she will offer her vision for ending theocracy in Iran – a musical call to action. For Ardestani, music is a form of rebellion. And as she told Index, far from being afraid herself: “Those who wish to silence me should be the ones who are afraid.”
See also: Science in Iran: A catalyst for corruption
31 Jan 2025 | Africa, Music, News, Uganda, Volume 53.04 Winter 2024
Yoweri Museveni’s most formidable challenger refuses to be silenced and remains on the frontline of protest
