1 Apr 2022 | Hungary, News, Uncategorized
LGBTQI rights. Gender equality. Media freedom. The fate of liberties in Hungary hang in the balance as the nation heads to the polls on Sunday. With a falling currency, a mismanaged response to the pandemic still fresh to mind and a stronger opposition under United For Hungary – a coalition of six parties spanning the political spectrum – the election campaign has been the closest in years. But the war in Ukraine, right on Hungary’s border, has changed its course in unexpected ways. Below we’ve picked the most important things to consider when it comes to the April 2022 elections.
Basic rights could worsen
Since his election in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has whittled away fundamental rights in the country to the extent that Hungarian activist Dora Papp told Index in 2019 free expression had no more space “to worsen”.
Orban’s main targets have been people who identify as LGBTQI. Last year, amid global outcry, he passed a law that bans the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change. Seeking approval for this legislation, Hungary is holding a referendum on sexual orientation workshops in schools this Sunday alongside the parliamentary elections.
Orban also takes aim at the nation’s Roma and immigrants, and has revived old anti-Semitic tropes in his attacks on George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist who Orban claims is plotting to flood the country with migrants (an accusation Soros firmly denies).
As for half of the population, Orban’s macho-style leadership manifests in rhetoric on women that is dismissive, insulting and focuses on traditional roles. Asked in 2015 why there were no women in his cabinet, he replied that few women could deal with the stress of politics. That’s just one example. The list goes on.
His populist politics have seeped into every democratic institution and effectively dismantled them. The constitution, the judiciary and municipal councils have all been reorganised to serve the interests of Orban. Education, both higher and lower, has seen huge levels of interference. Progressive teachers and classes have been removed. Even the Billy Elliot musical was cancelled after Orban called the show a propaganda tool for homosexuality.
But the media can’t freely report much of this
In response to claims of media-freedom erosion, the Hungarian government likes to point out that there are no journalists in jail in Hungary, nor have any been murdered on Orban’s watch. But as we know only too well there are many ways to cook an egg. Through gaining control of public media, concentrating private media in the hands of Orban allies and creating a hostile environment for the remaining independent media (think misinformation laws and constant insults), the attacks come from every other angle. Orban has even been accused of using Pegasus, the invasive spyware behind the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi, to target investigative journalists.
It’s little wonder then that in 2021 Reporters Without Borders labelled Orban a “press freedom predator”, the only one to make the list from the EU.
As election day approaches the attacks continue. In February, for example, pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet said it had obtained recordings showing that NGOs linked to Soros were “manipulating” international press coverage of Hungary, a claim instantly rejected by civil society groups.
Ukraine War has shifted the narrative, for better and worse
Given Orban’s track-record on rights, it comes as no surprise that he’s the closest EU ally of Vladimir Putin. This wasn’t a great look before 24 February and it’s even less so today, as the opposition are keen to highlight. They are pushing Orban hard on his neutral stance, which has seen him simultaneously open Hungary’s borders to Ukrainian refugees and oppose sanctions and the sending of weapons.
But Orban is playing his hand well. Fears of becoming embroiled in the war appear to be stronger in Hungary than anger at Putin’s aggression, many analysts says. Orban is claiming a vote for him is a vote for stability and neutrality, while a vote for the opposition is a vote for war. He’s even tried to cast his February visit to Moscow as a “peace mission”.
And though he has condemned the invasion, he has yet to say anything bad about Putin himself. Worse still, Hungarian media is blasting out Russian propaganda. Pundits, TV stations and print outlets are pushing out lines like the war was caused by NATO’s aggressive acts toward Russia, Russian troops have occupied Ukraine’s nuclear plants to protect them and the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis.
Anything else?
Yes. Orban met with a coalition of Europe’s far-right in Spain at the start of the year. They discussed the possibility of a Europe-wide alliance. What that looks like now in a post-Ukraine world is hard to tell. We’d rather not see.
Then there’s the fact that Serbia also goes to the polls Sunday. Like Orban, the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), led by president Aleksandar Vučić, has been unnerved by growing opposition. Also like Orban, they’re close to Putin and using the Ukraine war to their advantage – reminding people of the 1999 Kosovo war when NATO launched a three-month air strike. Orban and Vučić have developed close ties and will no doubt be buoyed up by each other’s victories should that happen on Sunday.
So will the Hungary elections be free and fair?
If the 2018 elections are anything to go by, they will be “free but not fair”, the conclusion of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), who partially monitored the 2018 election process. That’s the optimistic take. Others are fearful they will be neither free nor fair, so much so that a grassroots civic initiative called 20K22 has recruited more than 20,000 ballot counters – two for each of Hungary’s voting precincts – to be stationed at polling centres on election day with the aim of stopping any voting irregularities.
News from yesterday isn’t confidence-boosting either. Hungarian election officials reported a suspected case of voter fraud to the police. Bags full of completed ballots were found at a rubbish dump in north-western Romania, home to a large Hungarian minority who have the right to vote in Hungary’s elections. Images and videos shared by the opposition featured partially burnt ballots marked to support them. As of writing, no details have been provided of the actual perpetrators and their motives, and Orban has been quick to accuse the opposition of being behind the incident. Either way, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
29 Mar 2022 | News, Russia, Ukraine
Celebrated Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov. Photo: Juerg Vollmer
After five days of silence, my friend, a writer, journalist, and historian in occupied Melitopol, finally sent me a message. I’d been afraid something had happened to her, that I would never hear from her again. But, thank God, it turned out that she’d simply had no internet access or telephone reception. I asked her to keep a diary of life under occupation, to take photos on her smartphone, and to send all that to me. I would keep it safe. The original diary could then be destroyed.
She’s been living under occupation for more than two weeks and doesn’t set foot outside, for fear of being captured. The director of the Melitopol History Museum, Leyla Ibragimova, a Crimean Tatar, has already been kidnapped. They terrorised her, interrogated her, confiscated her and her family’s phones and computers — then released her. The next morning they picked her up for another interrogation. Activists and journalists are disappearing in the occupied territories. FSB agents walk the streets with lists of names and addresses in hand. These lists were prepared before the start of the war.
Oleg Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka, was abducted by the Russian military. Eventually, he was released — after eight days of beatings and torture, of demands to go over to the Russian side, of hunger and thirst, of humiliation. Those who beat him hid their faces and forbade him to raise his head and look at them. Is this today’s Russia? Yes. But it is also the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These are the practices of the Gulag. The Ukrainian author Stanislav Aseyev wrote an entire book about the torture camp in Donetsk. After two years of captivity in this camp and in the prison run by separatists, he had plenty of material. He studied closely those who beat and abused Ukrainian prisoners of war and others who had been seized on the streets and brought to this already infamous concentration camp, called “Isolation.” Years ago, the place had been a factory for the manufacture of insulation for electrical wires. Later, under the same name, it became a contemporary art centre. When the separatists, aided by the Russian military, captured Donetsk, they converted it into a concentration camp, with a set of chambers in which all their detainees were tortured. Stanislav Aseyev’s book has already appeared in several languages, including English. I highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to better understand what went on and continues to go on in the separatist “republics” since 2014. And now the same things are happening in the territories occupied by the Russian army.
We’re well into 2022. Books about what is happening now in Ukraine are already being written, but are not yet published.
The unsuccessful attempt to annex or, to put it plainly, occupy all of Ukraine has angered Putin and now, judging by the military actions of the Russian army, Russian generals have been ordered to destroy cities and villages, to kill civilians, and simply to make sure that Ukraine ceases to exist.
This is not the first attempt to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. In the late 1920s, Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms, and for this the Soviet government deported 250,000 families to Siberia. In 1932-1933, as punishment for the same individualism and unwillingness to become part of Soviet collective agriculture, all reserves of wheat and, indeed, all sources of nourishment were confiscated from Ukrainian peasants, leaving them with no food for the winter. Some seven million Ukrainians perished during this artificial famine organised by Moscow.
In those same years, the Soviet government decided to destroy Ukrainian culture. Nearly all the country’s leading writers, poets, and playwrights were arrested, sent to Solovki in the north of Russia, and shot. In Ukrainian literary history, the authors of this period are referred to as the “Executed Renaissance.” These people had tried to revive Ukrainian culture after decades of official prohibitions on the use of the Ukrainian language and on anything distinctly Ukrainian in tsarist Russia. Soviet communists had decided that the revival of Ukrainian culture posed a danger to the Soviet Union. And alongside the writers, poets, and playwrights they executed, the NKVD also shot many artists and theatre directors. The works of Mykhaylo Semenko (1892-1937), Maik Yohansen (1895-1937), Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), and dozens of other Ukrainian writers killed in that purge could only be published again after the collapse of the USSR.
Today’s Ukrainian intellectuals face the same danger. That goes for writers and journalists and historians. Anyone who believes that Ukraine should remain independent and become part of Europe is already an enemy of Russia. Culture is what cements a nation. Ukrainian culture has only just begun to revive after 70 years of Soviet rule, 70 years of censorship and persecution.
But today that culture and its representatives are the targets of Russian bombers. The attacks on Kyiv have killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famed actress Oksana Shvets. Near Kyiv, in the village of Bucha — home to a number of writers and composers— Oleksandr Kislyuk, a well-known translator from Ancient Greek and other languages, a teacher at the Theological Academy, and a professor at the Drahomanov Pedagogical University, was shot by Russian soldiers on the threshold of his house. It is thanks to him that Ukrainians can read the works of Aristotle, Tacitus, Thomas Aquinas, and other classic authors in their own language.
Now Oleksandr Kislyuk has been murdered and one wonders who will finish the translations he was working on in his final days.
Among those killed in this war are at least three painters. There are also photographers and scientists, musicians and architects, schoolteachers and university professors.
For almost a month, now, Russian bombers have been aiming directly at schools and universities, theatres and libraries.
Near Kyiv, in the village of Ivankiv, a bomb hit a historical museum that housed the works of famous Ukrainian primitive artist Maria Prymachenko (1909-1997). While the museum burned, locals carried her paintings out of the fire. Now those canvases are kept in the homes of people who live next to the ruined museum.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has sent an order to all museums to prepare their exhibits for evacuation to Western Ukraine. Some museums managed to pack up their collections, others simply lowered them into basements and underground rooms. But none have so far been evacuated. The most important thing is to evacuate people from cities under constant bombardment and artillery fire.
For two weeks, Ukrainian writers tried to extract their colleague, the Russophone prose writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, from the village of Klavdiyevo, which was practically destroyed by the Russian army. He is a refugee twice over. First, in 2014, he had to leave his apartment in Donetsk. Since then, he and his wife had been living in Klavdiyevo, at the dacha of the Ukrainophone writer and translator Andriy Bondar. Klavdiyevo has been all but flattened by Russian artillery and is surrounded by their tanks. Volodymyr and his wife spent more than a week in the basement of a half-collapsed house. At long last, they managed to break out of encirclement and volunteers took them to Kyiv.
Kyiv is also being hit by rockets, but not so intensively. The chances of survival are greater in Kyiv. There, in his apartment near the railway station, the publisher Mykola Kravchenko* sits at his table and works. He’s editing a novel by a young woman from Lutsk, titled Porcelain Doll. The novel concerns domestic violence. He knows that he won’t be able to publish it anytime soon, but he continues to work in order to preserve his psychological balance, in order to think less about the war.
Yet the war, including the violent attack on Ukrainian cultural heritage, continues. The number of bombed-out churches is already in the tens.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture is still at work and every day its employees collect new information about the historical sites and cultural institutions destroyed by the Russian army.
The list of Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian culture is constantly being updated.
* Editor’s note: Not the Ukrainian political figure of the same name who died in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
28 Mar 2022 | News, Russia, Ukraine
Photo: Reporters inside Kyiv’s Buena Vista Social Bar
There’s always a bar. In Kyiv, in 2022, it’s the Buena Vista Social bar, bang next to a Ukrainian police checkpoint which is both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar because there is a nationwide ban on the sale of alcohol. Sssh. It’s a joyful shebeen, Cuban-themed, run by Maks, and you never quite know what’s available to drink and who’s going to be there. All the women have a past; all the men have no future. You get the vibe.
Early on in the war, a fellow regular was a big bloke with a thick moustache and a mane of bubbly, curly hair, often seen with his fixer, a Ukrainian freelancer. I never spoke to him but I clocked him as someone who had presence, who was an interesting character, who I had probably seen in Sarajevo or somewhere like that. He was Pierre “Zak” Zakrzewski, she Sasha Kuvshynova, and they were both killed on 14 March 2022 when their vehicle came under fire in Bucha – pronounced Butcher – to the northwest of Kyiv. British journalist Ben Hall was wounded in the same attack. They were working for Fox News, something Zak, 55, who had been brought up in Ireland, had mixed feelings about. But he knew the risks of war too well and made a decision that working for a big corporate was better risk-management than being freelance. His co-workers at Fox loved him, giving him an award as “Unsung Hero” after he helped get Afghan freelancers out of Kabul.
Sasha was 24, bold and fiercely smart. After her death, her dad said that she learnt to read at the age of three and picked up English from reading restaurant menus while on family holidays. She was a fanatical photographer with five stills cameras, had founded a music festival for up-and-coming jazz musicians, worked as a DJ and wrote poetry. She wanted to make movies.
If you don’t like free expression in a democracy, you blow up the TV tower. The Kremlin’s first journalist victim was Yevhenii Sakun, 49, a camera operator for Ukraine’s LIVE station, on 1 March. The Russian army sent in four missiles in the evening, killing a worker in the TV tower complex and four civilians. The next morning I saw the people from the morgue take away the bodies of a middle-aged man and a mother and her child with my own eyes.
The most dangerous area of Kyiv is the northwest suburbs, where the Russian army’s offensive, driving down through Chernobyl, has come closest to the capital. Reporters seeking human stories, of refugees fleeing with their dogs on a lead or their cat in a box, went repeatedly to Irpin. Fearing further Russian advance, the Ukrainian army flooded the river plains near the suburb and blew up the most southerly bridge, leaving people to pick their way across the skeleton remains. Once beyond that crossing, there is a second bridge. That’s where US film maker Brent Renaud, 50, originally from Little Rock and formerly of the New York Times, found himself, filming refugees running for their lives. Brent knew what he was doing, having filmed and reported man’s cruelty to man in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya: all the nice places.
At Irpin, at the second bridge, the Russian army shot him in the neck and he died of his wounds.
Oksana Baulina was one of those intensely brave Russians who were on Team Navalny before their champion was arrested on fake charges and the organisation broken up. Oksana, 43, was declared a “terrorist” by the Kremlin and had to flee Russia. She set up as a reporter and film maker in Poland and reported on the war. When Russian artillery smashed into a shopping centre in Podil, in the northwest of the city, she was killed.
To be honest with you I have done my best to avoid writing this piece for days now because it can only fill one with gloom to think of these brave truth-tellers sent early to their graves by the mobster in the Kremlin. But my pals and I in the Buena Vista are buoyed up the thought that we are in Ukraine exactly because Vladimir Putin does not want us to be here. And on that point, Mr Putin, do fuck off.
And the rum is good.
There is, also, the line from Tom Stoppard’s great play, Night And Day, which I quoted on Twitter while hurrying back from the bar just before – well, actually, just after curfew – had fallen. This, from memory, is how it goes, how the lover of the dead young journalist, played by Diana Rigg, killed on the frontline denounces the false romance of journalism, “it’s not worth the heart-break beauty queen or the crossword and it’s definitely not worth the leader.”
And the old hack, played by John Thaw, replies: “Yes, you’re right. But also the other thing. People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.”
RIP Zak, Sasha, Yevhenii, Brent and Oksana.
25 Mar 2022 | Czech Republic, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine, United States
“We will not be intimidated or pushed off the world stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the fight against disease, poverty and terrorism.” — Madeleine Albright (1937-2022)
This week one of those special people passed away. A woman who broke glass ceilings, whose leadership inspired so many others, a woman who knew what she stood for and was determined to fight for what she knew to be right. She had a life well lived and has left her mark on the world. The reality is our society is lessened by her passing, but we were lucky to have her, and we so nearly didn’t.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Photo: Fiona Hanson/PA Images
Madeleine Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelová, in Prague in 1937, to a Jewish family. Her family fled to London in 1939 when the Nazis invaded. They converted to Roman Catholicism and hid their true identity for decades. The first female US Secretary of State only discovered the truth and the fact that 26 members of her family had been murdered in the Holocaust as an adult. At the end of the war her family chose to return to Czechoslovakia, but this proved short-lived and they were forced to flee the Communist regime in 1949 and seek asylum in the States.
As traumatic as her early life was, Marie Jana Korbelová did more than most to shape the future, to find hope and to cherish the democratic values that were stolen from her and her family. Her personal story and her impact were exceptional. But reflecting on her life has caused me to think a lot about the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum.
There is a single candle surrounded by mirrors. The reflection of each flame represents a life not born – a story not told. It highlights, in simply imagery, the lives that were extinguished, the families that were destroyed and, heartbreakingly, the children never born because their parents had been murdered. We have no idea of what the world lost because of the Shoah. The poetry and books not written, the art not created, the scientific discoveries not made.
Which brings me to the horrors we see every day on our news. The images of the death and destruction in Ukraine. Lives of every Ukrainian citizen have been turned upside down. We see daily reports of war crimes. Of children being killed, of journalists being kidnapped, of humanitarian aid being blocked.
In Ukraine today, the daily horrors shock and upset us all but for me it is also the devastation of the lives not lived. The talent that is being brutally removed from our world. Our collective society is being lessened because of their deaths and those that will now never be born. We will never know what we have lost. We can only hope that among those that survive there will be someone as inspirational as Madeleine Albright.
