Protests against increase in public transportation costs in Rio de Janeiro on 13 February (Image: Mauricio Fidalgo/Demotix)
On Friday 14 February, Brazil’s Minister of Justice, José Eduardo Cardozo, announced a bill to regulate safety measures during protests. The bill allows for use of force by the military police and punishment for violent actions during demonstrations, and will be sent to congress for consideration in the coming days. The move comes after the death of Bandeirantes Network cameraman Santiago Andrade on 10 February, from injuries sustained covering a protest. This is the latest move by Brazil’s government to control popular discontent ahead of this summer’s FIFA World Cup.
The government is rushing vaguely worded, extraordinary bills defining “terrorism” to the floor of congress. Currently, there are no specific laws for the crime of terrorism in Brazilian legislation. Crimes are classified in the National Security Act, created during the military dictatorship. A number of bills tackling this issue, which could potentially penalise protest actions, are now being debated in congress, without input from the population.
A street protest against rising bus fares in Rio de Janeiro on 6 February erupted in violence, when gas bombs and fireworks thrown by some demonstrators injured seven people, including Santiago Andrade. The cameraman was hit by a rocket firework launched by two protesters, which burst over his head. He later died from the injuries, and the two protesters were arrested in controversial circumstances.
The incident generated national uproar. Congressmen called the protest an act of terrorism and promised action. A number of figures within the Brazilian government, including President Dilma Rousseff, condemned the “escalating violence in protests”. Citing public security, congress moved quickly to table bills aimed at defining actions in public places — both violent and non-violent — as terrorism. Bill 499/2013, which has been fast tracked for consideration, defines terrorism as “causing terror or widespread panic” and threatens penalties of up to 30 years. The bill further stipulates that acts of terror committed with explosives increases the penalty by one third. It also criminalises “Black Bloc” protest groups, and wearing masks. Legal experts have criticised the bill for its vague language which leaves room for wide interpretations. Further, critics contend that it shows the government’s intent to use the bill as a tool to suppress popular protests during the World Cup.
The controversial Bill 728/2011 was created to punish “infractions” committed during the World Cup. In its text, acts of terrorism are associated with religious or ideological positions, and it also limits Brazilians’ ability to strike. The bill was nicknamed the AI-5 Cup, after the 1968 AI-5 act, which in gave extraordinary powers to the then-president and suspended key civil and constitutional guarantees for over 20 years. Under pressure from Brazil’s civil society, 728 was shelved.
Still under consideration in congress, however, is Bill 236/2012 — an anti-terror project that promises to modernise Brazil’s penal code, which dates from 1940. While it categorises terrorism, 236 does not define it. Among its most dangerous threats to freedom of expression is the criminalisation of disturbing the peace, and damage to public property by “vandals” and “vagrants”. The bill does not further define or clarify these terms.
Former justice minister Miguel Reale Jr, a renowned jurist and professor of law at the University of Sao Paulo, criticised the law’s “legal nonsense” and labelled it a setback for journalism. The bill would criminalise defamation and impose four year sentences without adequately defining this offence. He has launched a campaign against it, which has gained support from the legal community.
Bill 236 also contains “crimes against sporting and cultural events”. Any person who promotes “tumult” within 5 km of a sporting event would be imprisoned for up to two years, and the bill would also block protest access to the sport or cultural venue for up to three years. If applied, any popular protest on game days could be banned.
But whether or not some or all of the bills are passed, President Rousseff looks set to be able to curtail protests. On 20 December, a manual on the enforcement of law and public order, put together by the Ministry of Defence, entered into force. The manual defines “opponent forces” as persons, groups or organisations that provoke radical and violent actions, and cites the blocking of public streets as a major threat. Under certain conditions, the manual allows the president to give police powers to the armed forces.
Brazilians who wish to take to the streets, could have an interesting spring.
Inna Lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah Willing. Meanwhile if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions. Rouhollah al-Mousavi al-Khomeini.”
On 14 February 1989, 25 years ago today, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran handed down a death sentence not just on British author Salman Rushdie, but on anyone associated with the publication of his novel the Satanic Verses.
It’s always worth writing down exactly what happened. A medievalist tyrant decided a novelist and his editors and publishers should die, because he was offended by a book he could not claim to have read.
Rushdie went into hiding. Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was murdered. Because he had translated a novel.
The controversy did not begin with Khomeini – he merely attempted to capitalise on it. No, the first countries where the book stoked the ire of Islamists were South Africa and India, both countries whose divide-and-rule laws (the Indians’ law inherited from British colonial law, the South Africans’ in a diabolical league of its own) meant it paid to promote communal grievance.
Khomeini’s fatwa seems, in hindsight, a desperate bid to distract the people of Iran, and the rest of the Muslim world, from the fact that his reign, about to end, had been a disaster. Iranians had hoped their 1979 revolution would deliver them from the oppression of the Peacock Throne. Instead they just found their oppressors had simply grown beards.
The disaster was not entirely of Khomeini’s own making, perhaps. He could not be blamed for having the equally psychopathic Saddam Hussein as a neighbour, but nonetheless, he had sent hundreds of thousands of Iranians to their death, promised martyrdom as they marched into Saddam’s poisoned gas during the Iran-Iraq war that raged for almost the whole of the 1980s.
The Iran Iraq War ended in 1988. Neither side could legitimately claim victory. The Islamic Republic had not swept all before it. And Khomeini needed something new to establish his Shia theocracy as the leader of the Islamic world. He found it in harnessing the mounting anger over Rushdie’s book.
In Britain, this was the moment for political Islam. Young second generation South Asian Islamists exploited their parents’ folk memories of anti-Muslim violence during the torturous period before and after partition in 1947 (the subject of Rushdie’s great work, Midnight’s Children) to mobilise Muslims against Rushdie.
Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain wrote in 2007:
So on February 14 1989, when the Iranian Islamic leader, Imam Khomeini delivered his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s death, I was truly elated. It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement. If we were not treated with respect then we were capable of forcing others to respect us.
Yusuf Islam, formerly known as cuddly hippy musician Cat Stevens, told a television audience at the time that he felt Rushdie deserved to die. Some on the British right were pleased, seeing the death sentence as comeuppance for a man who was a vicious critic of the racist establishment.
Khomeini is dead and Rushdie is a knight of the realm (though some, such as Shirley Williams, considered that elevation in 2007 unwise). But it is perhaps on those grounds only that victory can be claimed for free speech. As Kenan Malik has suggested, writing for Index on Censorship, we live still in the “shadow of the fatwa”.
Religious sensitivity has become an excuse for threats. “Offence” is something to be taken greedily, and then pumped back out with a mixture of aggression and self pity.
And the shadow of that fatwa does not only fall on Islam. Every zealot of every creed will now offer up special pleading for their right to be protected from mockery, debate and challenge with the line “You wouldn’t say that about Islam.” What they mean, always, is “We want you to be scared. We want you to be as scared as Salman Rushdie was when he received that threat. We want you to be so scared that you will never question our literalism, our version of events. Truth is ours and ours alone.”
Rushdie’s friend, the late Christopher Hitchens, wrote that the fatwa represented “an all out confrontation between the ironic and the literal mind: between every kind of commissar and inquisitor and bureaucrat and those who know that, whatever the role of social and political forces, ideas and books have to be formulated by individuals”.
Al-sabah al jadeed’s caricature of Ayatollah Khamenei (Image RFE/RL)
Independent Iraqi daily newspaper Al-Sabah Al-Jadeed has survived numerous attempts to destroy it over its 10 year existence. But on 10 February, the newspaper’s Baghdad office was bombed and now its future is in doubt. The daily may need to find a new office, employees are fleeing, and its website is facing one DoS attack after another.
Windows, furniture and equipment were damaged when a bomb went in front of the building at 4.30 am. Later that morning another bomb exploded not far from the newspaper, while an unexploded heavy C4 plastic explosive device was found inside the premises and dismantled by police. No one was injured or killed, as the office was empty – but some neighbours are suggesting that the newspaper should move.
A few hours later that same day a militia-like group entered the building. “They came threatening us in broad daylight, so to speak,” says Ismael Zayer, editor in chief. The group escaped after employees managed to warn the police.
The bomb attacks followed a social media campaign to demand the closure of the newspaper after it published its weekly supplement Zad on 6 February. The supplement was devoted to the 35th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and on the cover featured a caricature of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The cover caricature is a tradition for Zad, a supplement that came into existence in the first months of the Arab Spring. Ahmed al-Rubaie, the newspaper’s cartoonist, has drawn hundreds of caricatures of political and religious figures, from Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, Najaf’s grand ayatollah Al-Sistani and prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to Nelson Mandela and other internationally known figures. These cartoons are never intended to be offensive or convey a negative message, they are just an alternative to uninteresting photos of VIPs.
Zayer believes the caricature of Khamenei is just a pretext to attack the newspaper and have it closed before the parliamentary elections planned for this spring. But there may be yet more reasons for the attacks and threats against the newspaper. Al-Sabah Al-Jadeed recently covered a damning report by Human Rights Watch on the abuse of female detainees in Iraqi prisons. HRW accused the government of illegally detaining wives and daughters of (Sunni) suspects who are on the run, claiming detainees were sexually abused. Zayer wrote an open letter to the government, demanding that the Minister of Justice, Hassan al-Shimmari, be sacked. “I am ashamed of my country,” he commented, “What are we? A whorehouse?”
After some efforts to convince the Ministry of Interior to protect the newspaper and its staff, the office of the newspaper is now under permanent surveillance by the police, but it is unclear for how long. Zayer has left the country temporarily after receiving death threats. This is not the first time the editor has been forced to flee Baghdad.
In the beginning of 2006 when Iraq’s sectarian conflict led to thousands of assassinations a month, Zayer managed the newspaper from a small office in Amman, Jordan. He planned to create an international edition for the millions of Iraqi refugees outside their home country – a project that was almost ready to be launched when on 30 December, Saddam Hussein was hanged in a way that scandalised his Jordanian supporters and made the company that was going to produce the international edition wary of printing a newspaper critical of Ba’athists.
Zayer decided to open a second bureau in Erbil, the relatively safe capital of the autonomous Kurdish Region, and to bring back around a dozen journalists that had escaped to neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The bureau was maintained until the very end of 2009, when Zayer and most of his staff went back to Baghdad.
The newspaper has faced many other challenges. In May 2004, Zayer’s driver and bodyguard were killed during an attempt by fake police to kidnap the editor in chief. Later, one of Zayer’s brothers was kidnapped for a hefty ransom. More than once ministers ordered an advertising boycott – a large part of the advertising in the newspaper concerns government tenders, next to a steady stream of ads by mobile phone companies and real estate firms. Nowadays, a strange rule is in force that says tender ads can only be paid once the tender has been decided – as a result, the newspaper is sitting on hundreds of unpaid bills.
From 2006 until 2008, when Nouri al-Maliki, after having been under siege in Basra himself, finally decided to defeat the Shi’ite militias in the south and the capital, distribution of the newspaper was often prohibited in many cities and Baghdadi neighbourhoods. Distribution north of the capital was completely disrupted during the American siege of Fallujah at the end of 2004 – and for a long time thereafter. The Borsa in Baghdad, a building from where for years, several independent and party newspapers were sold to traders every morning, was occupied for months by Ba’athists. Sometimes printing houses ran out of paper after trucks were stolen on the road from Amman to Baghdad and their drivers killed.
By attempting to create a modern, democratic trade union for journalists, Zayer, who was elected its first president, ran into serious trouble with the old union, one of the many Ba’athist institutions the US occupation’s administration had left intact.
The newspaper has survived several libel cases brought on by various politicians demanding potentially ruinous compensation sums, owing its victories to courageous independent judges. It has survived vicious campaigns on the internet claiming it is in “American-Zionist” hands. Recently it survived the flooding of large parts of Baghdad, as a result of bad maintenance of the sewage system and torrential rain.
Iraqi readers have shown their support for the newspaper after the bomb attack. This February is not the first time there is no Al-Sabah Al-Jadeed in the streets – but this time, as those responsible for the bomb attack didn’t leave a business card, with whom should the newspaper negotiate? Removing the supplement from the website hasn’t helped to assuage the anger about the innocent caricature of Khamenei. In the past the newspaper could hang on thanks to financial help from donors, as well as political support from Iraqi ministers and top officials who think independent media are at least a necessary evil. It certainly needs solidarity now.
Limitations and challenges to freedom of expression and of assembly in Turkey have – once again – come to international attention over the past year. But despite this, censorship of the arts is often under-reported.
Siyah Bant was founded in 2011 as a research platform that documents censorship in the arts across Turkey by a group of arts managers, arts writers and academics working on freedom of expression. The group is concerned that many instances of censorship in the art world, especially in the visual and performing arts, were under-reported and only circulated as anecdotes. Siyah Bant also found the blanket understanding that “it is the state that censors” to be insufficient.
The Gezi Park protests that began in late May 2013 not only highlighted the continued existence of police violence and the institutionalized use of excessive force that has long been a familiar sight in the Kurdish region, and, more recently, in the protests against hydroelectric plants in the Black Sea parts of Turkey. The demonstrations also made apparent the tight grip that the alliance of political establishment and business conglomerates have over Turkish print and broadcasting media, as numerous journalists were fired for reporting on the anti-government protests.
Together with China and Iran, Turkey has been taken the lead in terms of numbers of imprisoned journalists, many of which are charged under anti-terrorism laws. Currently, all eyes are on the amendments to internet law 5651 that passed parliament in early February 2014, now waiting to be signed into effect by President Abdullah Gül.
While the government claims these changes are to ensure privacy and clamp down on pornography, activists maintain that the law will procedurally ease the profiling of internet users and effectively heighten government control over online content. Turkey has already a questionable track record when it comes to internet freedom with access to more than 40,000 internet sites being restricted.
Rather than operating through bans and efforts at complete suppression that marked the 1980 coup d’état and its aftermath, the current censorship mechanisms in Turkey aim to delegitimize and discourage artistic expressions and their circulation.
Siyah Bant’s initial aim was two-fold: Firstly, the group conducted research in five cities to identify and examine different modalities of censorship and the actors involved in censoring motions. Secondly, Siyah Bant wanted to create awareness around censorship in the arts and facilitate solidarity networks in the advocacy for freedom of expression in the arts.
In the course of its research it set up a website that documents arts censorship in Turkey and assembled two publications. The first presents selected case studies of censorship in the arts in Turkey as well as international initiatives in the fight for freedom of expression. The second focuses more closely on artists’ rights and the legal framework of freedom of the arts in Turkey as well as the ways in which these laws are applied–or not applied, in most cases.
