8 Nov 2024 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News, Poland
There is a grainy photograph on the first page of the January 1990 edition of Index on Censorship magazine showing a group of twenty or so smiling friends of various ages. They are dressed in the non-descript shabby style favoured by most European intellectuals of the period. They could easily be mistaken for a group of academics on a field trip if it weren’t for the sign in Polish behind them which reads: State Border: Crossing Forbidden.
The picture was taken on 9 July 1988 at a secret location on the Polish-Czech border. This unruly band of comrades has been brought together by the bitter and often lonely struggle against Stalinism, their friendship formed in an underground network of Polish-Czech solidarity. The cause often seemed hopeless and at the time the picture was taken this obscure group of writers and activists could never have imagined that the whole edifice they had spent their lives opposing was about to collapse.
As it turned out, this photograph represented one of the most extraordinary gatherings of dissidents in the whole of the Cold War. Look closely and you can see Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, who would become President of Czechoslovakia just 20 months after the photo was taken. Ján Čarnogurský, a Catholic anti-communist activist, who became the Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1991 is also there as is Jan Ruml, who went on to become the Czech interior minister from 1992 to 1997. Jan Urban led the Civic Forum campaign in the elections of 1990, but decided not to become Prime Minister in the new government. A year on, Jacek Kuroń, known as the godfather of the Polish opposition, would be the minister for employment in the first Solidarity government.
Mirosław Jasiński, a leading member of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity became a prominent Polish diplomat. Among them also are opposition journalists Petr Pospíchal and Petr Uhl, who founded the East European Information Agency and Adam Michnik, perhaps Poland’s most celebrated journalist, who became the first editor of the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 1989 and later an MP before returning to journalism.
The only woman in the photo is Anna Šabatová who went on to become the ombudsman of the Czech parliament and was the first East European woman to receive the United Nations Human Rights Prize.
No one predicted the events of 1989, the 35th anniversary of which, will be celebrated this year. The first signs came in the spring of that year, when the Polish government and Solidarity reached an agreement to legalise the free trade union and hold elections. In June, the Communists were humiliated at the polls and in August Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister.
A parallel process in Hungary saw the creation of independent parties in February 1989. By the beginning of May, the authorities had dismantled the barbed wire on the frontier with Austria. The borders of the old Communist bloc started to fray and then come apart at the seams. In September, Budapest announced that East Germans would be given passage through Hungary into Western Europe. Young people across Eastern Europe began to make their way in numbers to Vienna to get their first taste of western consumer goods and freedom. Then, in November, the
movement became irresistible as the Berlin Wall itself crumbled and fell under the weight of sledgehammers. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution ushered in the peaceful transition to democracy and by Christmas, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was gone. Crucially, unlike in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet army did not intervene.
For young people across Europe, these were life-changing events. As a wide-eyed 23-year-old journalist, I travelled across Eastern Europe in December 1989. In East Berlin, I spoke to students loyal to the regime whose world had been turned upside down, who asked me to reassure them about the key role played by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the fight against racism and the National Front. In Leipzig I saw the thousands of people taking part in candlelit demonstrations around the city. In Prague I grumbled to two journalists who worked for the trade union newspaper that there would soon be a McDonald’s on Wenceslas Square and witnessed their pure delight as they looked me in the eye and said “Yes!” I remember a mixture of emotions among the people I met: hope and optimism about the future of an undivided Europe, certainly, but also a degree of fear and uncertainty about whether the transition would remain peaceful. Common to everyone though was the feeling of pure surprise. Absolutely no one had expected this, even a year earlier.
Index’s co-founder, the poet Stephen Spender, captured this feeling well in his speech to English PEN at a party for his 80th birthday on 6 December 1989, published in the February 1990 edition of Index magazine. He suggested that a motto for his kind of writer, opposed both to Stalinism and McCarthyism, should be “the politics of the unpolitical”, but asked what the role of such writers should be after the end of the Cold War.
“It is essential to ask this question because we are now entering what less than even a year ago was an almost unthinkable period,” he said. “How unthinkable is to me made vivid by recalling that at the beginning of 1989 I remarked to Isaiah Berlin, who, like me, has in 1989 reached his 80th year – he and I each other’s oldest living friend – that the one thing I wished to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He agreed but said that this would not happen in our lifetimes. Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering.”
How bewildered might Stephen Spender be 35 years later. No one talks about “the politics of the unpolitical” anymore. But those of us who were there in 1989 still remember the sense of surprise that everyone who thought they could predict the future was wrong and that feeling, for a short while, that everything was possible.
31 Oct 2024 | Iran, Middle East and North Africa, News
For many of us, specifically those who have experienced prison, Toomaj Salehi is the symbol of resistance against an autocratic regime’s oppression, and whose honest and unapologetic voice cuts through the sheer reality of a society suffering from repression and corruption.
To us, condemning Salehi to death for his songs and lyrics is the equivalent of declaring war against the people of Iran.
The first time I heard Salehi was right at the beginning of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. He seemed like an ordinary man with a real voice in his music, suddenly thrown into the national and international spotlight while holding onto his truth. His music showed the power of ordinary voices in Iran and beyond.
Salehi has long challenged the Islamic Republic of Iran’s establishment. Through his songs and lyrics, he has condemned the state’s political repression, injustice, corruption and violation of women’s rights for many years. As a result, he has gained fans amongst Iranians inside and outside the country while managing to outrage the government.
Salehi condemns the Islamic state for its corruption, which increases the gap in society where the poor get poorer and the rich become richer. In his song Normal, he speaks bluntly about a rampant poverty which is inflicted on a resource-rich country. Salehi articulates how sanctions, as well as self-inflicted international isolation, have resulted in a huge part of society hardly being able to make ends meet while those in power are busy building tower blocks and pocketing wealth at home and abroad.
Salehi tells of his ambitions for living in a normal country, where people can have the freedom to speak and criticise their political leaders and to defend their basic rights without being harassed, prosecuted or imprisoned.
At the heat of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran in September 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the morality police, Salehi released several songs in support of the movement, which increased his popularity amongst the people but also the anger of the authorities. He was arrested, and he was released on bail only after the Supreme Court overturned the charges in November 2023.
The state has systematically used forced confession to silence and repress dissent for decades and on his release, Salehi posted a YouTube video in which he described the torture and forced confession he went through while in detention. Three days later, the security forces raided his house in Isfahan and arrested him again. Salehi was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court of Isfahan in April 2024.
After an Index-led campaign the Supreme Court ruled out the death penalty but at the time of publication, Salehi remains behind bars. Like many others, he finds himself trapped in this circle of corruption and power. Freedom for Salehi is a world where he is allowed to articulate his vision without being punished; in which the government is willing to improve people’s daily lives, and a regime which does not indoctrinate its citizens and ensures they have the means to live dignified lives.
Through his music, he tries to be the voice of those terrified to speak up, and it is only fair to echo his voice beyond his country’s borders.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a former hostage in Iran and author of the forthcoming book A Yard of Sky: A Story of Love, Resistance and Hope. Below is a translation of Toomaj Salehi’s song Normal.
Normal
By Toomaj Salehi
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
A labourer’s annual wage is worth a dinner abroad
Yes! Of course, Sir! Life is normal
We don’t dare say otherwise, lest we get in trouble
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
Some have to sleep in tombs, others own 10 high-rises
Yes! Of course, Sir! Life is normal
We don’t ask for what is ours, lest it be a crime
Sir, have you seen down there? The empty plates?
You are so enlightened, have you seen the dark city?
Have you seen these quarters where the waists are so narrowed, from your blood-sucking
These quarters where you dump your waste from above
Have you seen how different we are?
Be my guest, no need to buy tickets to watch
Kid! Go back to your room, you are scaring the gentleman
He is not used to seeing ragged and worn clothes, not even from afar
Are you watching Sir?
You shine like a star, with the glimmering light of the ones you executed
Instead of being reprimanded, you have been promoted for your mistakes
You cut off any dissident at will
Sir! My words are sour, have some sweets to wash off the taste
Here, people are just alive, they don’t have a life
Our kids sleep with empty stomachs
Sorry, how do you sleep with a clear conscience again?
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
A labourer’s annual wage is worth a dinner abroad
Yes! Of course, Sir! Life is normal
We don’t dare say otherwise, lest we get in trouble
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
Some have to sleep in tombs, others own 10 high-rises
Yes! Of course, Sir! Life is normal
We don’t ask for what is ours, lest it be a crime
While the rest of the world is supporting their citizens
Our government denied responsibility and kept complaining
It called protesters insurrectionists
Did it stop at imprisonment? No, it committed atrocities (as well)
No doubt “We broke records”!
We are the only country, where the (COVID) vaccine was different for the rich and poor
In the age of science, women are beaten for their beauty
Thrown in the back of a police van, taken to unnamed prisons
Our shopping cart is empty, no more oil left to export
The rest of the world are shooting for the moon and mars, while we are in the abyss
We are the dead who can’t die
Since we can’t pay for the burial and the tombstone
I’m ringing the alarms, hoping ears burn
We have people who are on the verge of death from starvation
They have kissed the lips of death, where are they?
Perhaps someone should sing them lullabies
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
A labourer’s annual wage is worth a dinner abroad
Yes! Of course, Sir! Life is normal
We don’t dare say otherwise, lest we get in trouble
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
Some have to sleep in tombs, others own 10 high-rises
Yes! Yes Sir! Life is normal
We don’t ask for what is ours, lest it be a crime
We are constantly worried about the rent
We are scared for roofless schools in the desert
A bird can’t fly without food and water
Is this a normal life, or are we sick?
Cheap products cost a fortune
Labourer is working overtime, yet the car he wants to buy is getting further away
In this corrupt cycle, he is struggling
The regime sacrifices a million for one
For the deeply corrupt regime apologists in the US
Those who compensate for their inferiority by debauchery
There is no Left and Right here, they are all the same
We say we are trapped in a swamp, they say they hope to reform it
Is there anything that makes you feel ashamed?
Do you think citizens are your slaves?
You expect people not to eat bread so yours is buttered?
Did I confuse you by calling you Sir?
Oil tankers in a queue, on their way
Red tulip covered lands, green dollar bills
The poverty ridden city, the only sound is the cry of death
To hell with the regime officials
We are all united, We want freedom
Locked hands, human chains
We are all united, We want freedom
The power of unity is ours
Oil tankers in a queue, on their way
Red tulip covered lands, green dollar bills
The poverty ridden city, the only sound is the cry of death
To hell with the regime officials
Toomaj Salehi is an Iranian rapper who received an Index Freedom of Expression Award in 2023. A year later after he was sentenced to death in Iran. Index launched a petition signed by leading cultural figures calling for his death sentence to be immediately and unconditionally quashed and for him to be released from detention, with all other charges dismissed. At the time of publication the Supreme Court has reversed his death sentence, but he is still behind bars. Lyrics translated by TurfHeadClic on Lyricstranslate.com
