14 Oct 2022 | Opinion, Ruth's blog
Photo: Shima Abedinzade
I went on my first political demo when I was a baby – joining the march against pit closures. For four decades I have been on demos to save jobs; on pickets to support striking workers and; on marches against racism and political extremism. I have participated in political stunts at elections and vigils to mark horrendous and heartbreaking events. Each has been newsworthy to some extent, each was meant to be a mark of solidarity with a community or a group whose voice needed to be amplified in order to be heard. Each was a statement of my personal values and a commitment to make our society a little better.
But none of these acts of democratic participation required me to be brave. Not really. I never once considered if my political views could, on that day, cost me my life. Although in hindsight some of them made me very vulnerable. But I never thought about it seriously because I am so incredibly lucky to live in a democracy, to have basic human rights which protect my right to be heard, to protest, to assemble. To speak truth to power. My biggest threats came from individuals who wished me harm – not a government or a police force or a judiciary.
I am lucky. I know I am. And I am so grateful for it.
Which is why it is so important that people like me, like you, use their voices to promote those who are brave, those who risk everything by walking down the street without a head scarf, those who stage a sit in outside the Kremlin against an unjust war, those who unveil a banner exposing the tyrant that governs them. These people are brave beyond words. They use the only things available to them – usually their bodies – to challenge an unacceptable status quo. And by doing so they build a movement. They move the dial just a little and they place untold pressure on the tyrants and dictators who strive to silence them.
We have a duty to support them, to tell their stories and to amplify their voices. Because otherwise nothing changes.
The tyrants win if we let these acts of protest pass without notice. If we let global news move on and forget the faces of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice to demand their access to the universal values that we hold so dear and so easily take for granted. We have an obligation to support the Iranian women in their demands for equality. We have a duty to tell the stories of those Russian dissidents who push back against Putin’s illegal invasion. We have a responsibility to ensure that the democracy campaigners imprisoned in Hong Kong are remembered. Not just today but every day.
We have to be, today and always, a Voice for the Persecuted.
11 Oct 2022 | Iran, News
The death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Iran following her arrest by the “morality police” has sparked widespread protests across the country, with women taking a prominent role in demonstrating against their unequal treatment in the country. The Iranian regime, led by Ayatollah Khamenei, has responded with deadly violence.
Since Amini’s death on 16 September, precipitated by her arrest for not wearing the hijab correctly, at least 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed in the nationwide protests across Iran, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). The deaths of several young women involved in the protests has led to a growing chorus of outrage, both within the country and internationally.
Among the dead is Sarina Esmailzadeh, a 16-year-old girl who was killed following protests on 22 September in Mehrshahr, just outside Tehran, reportedly due to repeated baton blows by security forces. Authorities have aired “so-called” confessions by alleged family members stating that her death was suicide, which have been called into question.
Nika Shakarami (right) has also died, allegedly at the hands of the Iranian security forces, after she was pictured burning her hijab. The 17-year-old disappeared for nine days before her badly beaten body was identified by her family in a morgue.
Women human rights defenders and journalists are being targeted. Femena reports that women’s rights activist Narges Hosseini, one of the “Girls of Revolution Street”, who protested back in 2017 and 2018 about the compulsory hijab, was arrested on 22 September in Kashan in central Iran. Four years ago, she spent three months in prison on charges of “encouraging prostitution” and “non-observance of hijab”.
CHRI has also reported on the arrest of Niloufar Hamedi, a well-known journalist who first revealed the circumstances surrounding Mahsa Amini’s death that same say. Hamedi has been placed in solitary confinement in the notorious Evin prison.
Others who have been detained include journalist and woman human rights defender, Elaheh Mohammadi, Kurdish writer and filmmaker Mozhgan Kavusi and photojournalist Yalda Moayeri, according to Femena.
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraeei, an Index contributor who was only released from prison in May 2022 after being imprisoned in 2014 on charges of insulting the Supreme Leader and spreading propaganda against the state, has also been rearrested.
The attacks and arrests have so far not managed to silence women, who continue to protest. According to the BBC World Service’s Rana Rahimpour women are walking the streets of Tehran with no hijab and cars are honking their support. School girls have also joined the protests. Social media posts that have gone viral show them going without a hijab and making rude gestures to and removing and covering the images of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in their classrooms.
On 9 October, teenage girls in the city of Arak, southwest of capital Tehran, marched in protest chanting “death to the dictator”, before they were fired on with rubber bullets and tear gas by riot police.
Protests have also sprung up at universities across the country. Shots were fired indiscriminately by security forces at a protest at Tehran’s Sharif University on 8 October, according to CHRI. Students at the city’s University of Art held a demonstration on 10 October where they congregated to spell out the word “blood”. The same day, female students at the Polytechnic University chanted, “Tell my mother she no longer has a daughter” – a shocking reference to the fate that could befall the students for daring to protest.
Students of Amir Kabir university protest against the hijab. Photo: Darafsh Kaviyani
There are signs that support for the protests is spreading more widely. Oil workers in Iran, including port workers in Asaluyeh and refinery workers in Abadan, are striking in support of the protests. This could be significant as such protests have not been seen since the 1979 revolution.
The city of Sanandaj in Kurdistan has become the frontline of the protests and the regime has cracked down brutally, leading some to call the city a “war zone”. The CHRI reports that at least four people have been killed and more than 100 injured on 9 October. The government has deployed forces from outside the region in the city.
News that has emerged from Iran has made it out despite widespread internet and mobile network shutdowns in the country. NetBlocks has reported that the internet national mobile disruptions were in place once again and the internet had been cut in Sanandaj. Speaking to an Index correspondent over the phone from his home city of Sari in the north of Iran, the censored musician Mehdi Rajabian said: “It has become very difficult for me to access the free internet and the speeds of the platforms are very slow and blocked. I have to connect with a filter breaker and many times the filter breakers don’t work. Our communication is very slow.”
Such restrictions mean that the number of those killed, injured or detained is likely to be much higher.
There are signs that Iranians are increasingly looking to virtual private networks (VPNs) to help them circumvent the country’s internet broad censorship. Research by the VPN tracker Top10VPN.com shows that downloads of VPNs in Iran were 30 times higher at the end of September than in the previous 28 days and that demand for the services remains significantly heightened.
CHRI’s executive director Hadi Ghaemi feels that the situation is likely to worsen as Khamenei’s rule comes under growing pressure.
“The ruthless killings of civilians by security forces in Kurdistan Province, on the heels of the massacre in Baluchestan Province, are likely preludes to severe state violence to come,” said Ghaemi in a statement about the protests.
He said, “World leaders must move beyond statements of condemnation to collective action through an international front signalling to the government in Iran that the international community will not look the other way and conduct business as usual while it slaughters unarmed civilians.”
In response, Khamenei has said foreign states are responsible for driving the women’s protests. With support growing fast, he may soon no longer be able to lay the blame outside Iran’s borders.
6 Oct 2022 | News
I had my first taste of Chinese censorship in 2007. I was living in Shanghai and working at a lifestyle magazine. In the journalistic world the gig was about as uncontroversial as it gets – a calendar of spa treatments and interviews with restaurateurs. But there was a features section and – keen to work on something meatier – I pitched an article on the rise of obesity in line with the rise of US fast-food outlets. The editor gave me the thumbs-up and I spent the next month working on it. Only it never got printed. Because the magazine was published from within China, all material had to go through a censor and this censor was not happy. He told the editor that while the article might blame US chains for the problem, ultimate responsibility lay at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. How will it reflect on them if they can’t control their nation’s waistlines?
Little did I know then that this uncommon experience, which felt like dealing with the world’s most pernickety censor, would be fairly typical by 2022. We have, after all, just seen children’s book publishers in Hong Kong sent to jail merely for publishing a series about a flock of sheep resisting a pack of wolves (the series could spread separatist ideas, apparently).
But this was the China of Hu Jintao. Everything felt freer then. Facebook was in its nascence and adopted with enthusiasm, foreign visas were easy to get, VPNs were rarely needed. There were taboo topics to be sure, “the Ts” for example – Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan. I read a copy of Wild Swans in a café, its front cover wrapped in a scarf, because the book was officially banned in China. Superficially, though, it felt open.
But superficiality is the enemy of nuance. Beneath the surface CCP China was always controlling, even under the more “benevolent” leadership of Hu. Shanghai was exhilarating – what I’d imagine New York must have felt like in the 1970s. All promise and enterprise. And yet injustice was everywhere: in the rickshaw drivers hauling goods in 30-degree heat next to those driving their air-conditioned Mercedes; the construction workers who slept in makeshift villages on the outskirts of the ever-expanding city. My friend wanted to send a parcel to someone in Xinjiang Province. She wrote the address in the Roman alphabet and at the post office was ordered to rewrite it in Chinese characters. She pushed back arguing that the language of the Uyghurs was a Turkic one, so numerals made more sense than characters. It got heated, she backed down. We met for lunch after and she was reeling, about the incident as well as the general ill-treatment of Uyghurs. Days later I read about a baby girl who had been left on a doorstep a few miles away from where I was living, a victim of the One-Child Policy. Not the first victim, nor the last. I started to write about these injustices, only by this stage I had wised up – it would have to be with foreign press.
A few years later, in 2011, I was living in Beijing. China’s capital was and is, by many measures, a harder city to live in than Shanghai and I knew that. Brutally cold winters, an urban sprawl that’s unsuited to walking. But the real challenge about Beijing then was how quickly the country’s politics had moved on in just a matter of years. If Facebook was my early barometer of openness, then its blocking in 2009 was a sign that China’s doors were closing. Gmail ran at a sluggish pace, if at all. Communicating with those outside China was seamless one day, impossible the next.
As for the attitude towards foreigners, which was once warm, this too was starting to change. One night I was locked inside a bar – police officers were outside demanding papers of foreigners. In a dispatch I wrote following the event long-time expats told me they’d never been treated with such hostility.
Most memorable of all was the Bo Xilai scandal in the spring of 2012. With the mysterious death of a UK national, a “love nest” traced to Bournemouth, a security officer seeking refuge in Chengdu’s US consulate, and a Chinese power couple and their Harvard-educated son at the centre, it was little wonder the news gripped people outside China. Inside China it was a different matter. Details were tightly controlled and spun. Bo was charged with corruption in a resoundingly clear message – a new era was starting and favouritism would no longer be tolerated. The charismatic figure’s dramatic fall from grace was, if anything, the first real taste of how Xi would treat his opponents – ruthlessly. Today Bo remains in prison, serving a life sentence.
I left China, this time for good, just after Xi Jinping took office. Despite some early warning signs, the mood was still somewhat hopeful as I departed. Maybe the creeping authoritarianism that had come to define the end of the Hu era would recede under Xi? Such hopes were quickly dashed. From the get-go Xi has put in a level of energy to crush dissent that is dizzying to say the least. Ten years on, the ways in which he has attacked civil society is substantial. Here are some headlines:
– In the treatment of Uyhgurs, of which over one million are currently in concentration camps, he has presided over arguably the largest genocide the world has seen since the 1940s. In fact, oppression of minorities is so intense under his leadership that people struggle to keep up. Tibet, once a hot topic for the rights-minded, has dropped off the list – people are too overwhelmed and distracted by the other things the CCP are doing.
– Scores of activists, lawyers, writers, publishers, scholars and employees of NGOs have been rounded up and imprisoned. Many of those detained have also appeared on state-run TV confessing to “crimes” ahead of their trial. The treatment of the “Feminist Five”, a group of women who were arrested in 2015 for simply speaking out against the country’s sexual harassment problem, is just one example in an exhaustive list.
– The number of independent journalists in China has been significantly wheedled down. Foreign reporters have been driven out, either because their visas weren’t renewed or because they couldn’t operate anymore in an environment in which access to information is tightly controlled. Foreign news sites have been blocked, while Chinese sites have been closed. In 2016, for example, news services run by some of China’s biggest online portals, such as Sina’s News Geek, Sohu’s Click Today, and NetEase’s Signpost, were all shut for publishing independent reports instead of official statements.
– Indeed, getting information out of the country has become much harder, almost impossible. I used to report for Index from China. Then I worked at Index with reporters from China. Today I struggle to get anyone to write for us on the ground, let alone talk to us on the record.
– Under Xi’s term, one of the most vibrant and liberal cities in the world – Hong Kong – has been gutted of freedoms. Hundreds are in jail, including high-profile figures like Jimmy Lai and Joshua Wong. Thousands more have fled.
– The tools of repression have spilled beyond China and Hong Kong’s borders. Across the globe, CCP spies harass and threaten dissidents, as highlighted in our Banned By Beijing reports. It’s not just dissidents in Beijing’s firing line. Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, found himself in hot water in 2019 when he tweeted in support of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters. Several Chinese businesses suspended ties with the basketball team, including China’s major sports networks who stopped broadcasting their matches. Basketball is big business in China, with hundreds of millions of fans watching NBA matches. Morey quickly deleted his original tweet and apologised.
As said, these are just the headlines.
In 2018 Xi took the unprecedented move of overturning the two-term limit for the presidency, in place since 1982. On 16 October the 20th Party Congress will be hosted in Beijing in which the leadership will be decided for the next five years. After rounds of purges to sweep up his political rivals, the assumption is Xi will retain the top job. Embarking on his third term in power will make him the longest serving leader in the CCP since Mao Zedong. Ever an optimist I hope that when I reflect on Xi Jinping’s next five years in power I can point to more positive things. Being realistic, the trend of the last 15 years under Hu and Xi would suggest that’s unlikely.
At this moment in time it’s not safe for me to return to China. I hope that changes. I’d love to visit the country again and I’d love my kids to go too. More than my own small hopes of returning are my hopes for those 1.4 billion people from there, alongside the seven million residents in Hong Kong. Living in a pluralistic society that tolerates dissent, that is free and transparent, should be a basic right not a geographical privilege.
It’s poignant thinking back to the fast-food article anecdote from the viewpoint of 2022. The city of Shanghai, which pulsated with life 15 years ago, has been brought to its knees over the last few years. Lockdown after lockdown after lockdown has shown that not only can the CCP control the nation’s waistlines if they want to, they can control just about anything. People have literally been locked in their homes and starved by their government – that is how much control the CCP has amassed under Xi Jinping. I wish we were ushering in a new leader and a better era this weekend. That day will come and until then myself, alongside my colleagues at Index, will continue fighting.
