8 May 2007 | Comment
These days no freedom of expression group operates on its own in the way that Nick Fillmore alleges (Have the world’s free press campaigners got their priorities wrong? 3 May) – or indeed would even want to.
There are many ways to approach organising human rights advocacy, but Nick seems unwilling to recognise this.
The international effort to free Gaza hostage journalist Alan Johnston has no core organiser, but is driven by the shared concerns of disparate groups that otherwise have little in common. He chides International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) network members for not all being as ‘activist’ as their fellow member Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), but the “e-mail and the occasional mission to countries” he derides are tools they all use.
Sometimes the subtle intervention works best– asking a military contact in Iraq to put a call in for a colleague held in Abu Ghraib; a promise to a dying hunger striker; a briefing to a well-placed civil servant.
As he correctly says, ‘depending on the circumstances’ a free speech group can make the case for civil disobedience, economic sanctions, aggressive litigation – and if you take Nick’s argument to its natural conclusion – armed resistance.
And ‘depending on the circumstances’ – the case can be made against. Whatever, these are cases that must be made to help those “living with the fear and repression generated by killings, intimidation, censorship and other threats to press freedom”.
But the cases need to be made in London and Washington as well as Khartoum and Baghdad. This is why it is important to maintain the diversity of campaigns for free expression worldwide. There never is just one single message to express.
It is also why Nick is wrong to suggest that free expression groups resist alliances. He cites only one significant partnership between free speech advocates, the IFEX Tunisia Monitoring Group (TMG), of which Index on Censorship is a member. The TMG links free speech NGOs from around the western world and Africa in partnership with official and unofficial Tunisian rights groups.
Yet there have been many more programmes around the world like it in the last 12 month alone. In Colombia, a partnership between a coalition of six local organisations and seven global and regional IFEX members – including RSF – identified key obstacles and set priorities for a strategy to support press freedom and free expression last September.
No fewer than 14 press freedom groups joined forces to support free speech advocates in Sri Lanka in March. There have been a score of similar joint missions to countries from Pakistan to Mexico in the last 12 months. Each one is based around cooperation, partnership and shared resources.
The absolute start point for all free expression work today is with the local partner groups – the human rights campaigners, women’s NGOs, independent media and civil society already active on the ground.
Nick is wrong to suggest that this is unusual, especially by harking back to days when under funded groups were thrown into competition by donors whose priorities were the best deal for their nations’ taxpayers or their minister’s political objectives, not necessarily global free speech rights.
He has a rosy-tinted view of the motives of the funding ‘community’. For some time the funders’ fashion was to press for mergers – not partnerships – between free expression groups, to reduce donor administration (and their staff) and reduce the funds given overall. There are some 40 key donors who are de facto clients in a small, competitive and unregulated market and a shrinking pool of funds.
Many donors exploit this relationship. Up to 40% of the costs of a project can be withheld until after the projects are completed, forcing small groups to cannibalise scarce resources to complete them – effectively funding the funders – before the balance is paid. Some expect lead partners to impose management standards on partners working in war zones and cash dollar only ‘economies’ they would not dare try to apply directly themselves. Many donors have thinly disguised political objectives that reflect their government’s own – especially in the Middle East and Latin America.
The donors – and Nick – also fail to credit the view that just as plurality is a good thing for independent media, it is a good thing for independent media rights groups too. Each of the free expression groups – north and south – that Nick is so keen to rope together in the name of ‘efficiency’, already work together to that end in flexible and mutually beneficial relationships.
Depending on their respective specialities, strengths, agendas and mandates, even their country base, they are free to build large or small coalitions to suit the needs of the people they are trying to reach, not the needs of the donors.
They all have specific methodologies developed over years. Most would be reluctant to subsume their skills into a single melting pot of consensus activities, mixed at best to cut western taxpayers’ burdens, at worst to suit a political agenda that is either confused, ill-defined or politically suspect.
This is why this organisational diversity should be preserved. The many groups on the ground – all of whom work together in the same way as their northern partners – need just the same freedom to pick and choose between different partners north and south.
Links are made through a dozen international conferences convened each year, specifically to facilitate cooperation and if all else fails there’s the catch-up meeting between colleagues of different organisations over coffee.
Index on Censorship alone is in contact with 27 different international and local groups, publications and universities as it puts together its own relatively small portfolio of free expression support projects from Iraq and Iran to Colombia via Albania in 2008.
There will always be the need for more cooperation and all the northern free expression groups need to work harder to reinforce the technical capacity and build the resources of the groups on the ground they work with.
But there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem. Naturally evolving partnerships are the fairest and most practical way to find the right one.
And possibly the most efficient too, judging by the sheer number of joint campaigns and shared alerts logged daily by IFEX’s website. If all that work is being done for $15 million a year by some 100 groups worldwide, as Nick claims, at an average UK £75,000 per group the free expression world is really getting its money’s worth.
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3 May 2007 | Comment, News
BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped in March, and suddenly press freedom, in the most literal sense, has become a talking point.
Websites and blogs all over the world carry badges calling for his release. Last week, BBC colleagues held a vigil, while an image of Johnston was projected on to the wall of Television Centre.
Johnston’s may be the big story this year, but it’s by no means the only one: indeed, surveys of freedom of the press have discovered a depressing trend as more and more people are now living under regimes where journalistic freedom is either unprotected, or actively attacked, by government.
In Russia, investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered, apparently for digging too deep in to the government’s dirty war in Chechnya.
In the Philippines, six journalists were killed last year, and police have done little to stop the wave of threats and harassment media workers face. Environmental journalist Joey Estriber was kidnapped in March, like Alan Johnston. To date, the police have failed even to mount a search for him.
In Zimbabwe, cameraman Edward Chikomba was abducted and murdered, apparently because he had filmed the violent conduct of the security forces during anti-government protests.
In Turkey, the resurgence of the nationalist, statist right has created an atmosphere where journalists and authors fear to voice their opinions. Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk has left the country: Agos editor Hrant Dink decided to stay, and was assassinated on 19 January.
The list goes on. And it’s getting longer.
Meanwhile, the hope for freedom offered by the World Wide Web seems to be lost.
Only a few years ago, we convinced ourselves that the web was the wild frontier, an ungoverned new world where everyone with access to a computer could write their own news, challenge official lines, and generally push ever harder at the barriers of censorship.
So what happened?
It seems increasingly obvious that that breach in the fence was only temporary. Throughout the world, the enforcers have caught up with the bloggers. We imagined the Internet to be beyond the reach of the censors. We were wrong. As George Orwell wrote in 1943, “The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.”
We now realise that this is just as true of the Internet user in 2007 as it was of the dissident diarist in 1943. In Egypt, blogger Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman was jailed for criticizing his country and Islam on his blog. Other Egyptian bloggers have quit, after harassment from security forces. Meanwhile, Iran and China both exercise extensive and ever-widening Internet censorship, with the help of companies such as Google. The Iranian government’s paranoia about the World Wide Web has now stretched to the point where mms messages may be screened, lest they be used for blogging. The Internet once offered the promise of a new ‘citizen journalism’ unburdened by commercial or institutional pressure. But now it increasingly finds itself under the insidious hand of the state censor.
Sadly, as the 21st century progresses, journalists all over the world find themselves struggling to carry out the very basics of their jobs without fear.
The prognosis is grim. Commenting on Freedom House’s Global Press Freedom Report, Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said: “The fact that press freedom is in retreat is a deeply troubling sign that democracy itself will come under further assault.” This is why, on World Press Freedom Day, we must shout ever louder for those who have been silenced.
25 Apr 2007 | Comment
Last week, Germany, in its capacity as president of the EU, attempted to outlaw Holocaust denial in the EU. In the end, the resolution that emerged was the classic result of hard-fought compromise – that is to say, nobody got what they wanted. States that already had a Holocaust-denial law, such as Germany, Austria and France, did not manage to foist one on countries such as the UK and Ireland, who claimed to be worried about freedom of speech and inquiry. Meanwhile, those countries that did not have laws concerning the Holocaust now find themselves having to pay lip service, as members of the Union, to the watered down proposal – criminalising “trivialisation” of the Holocaust.
Even if the majority of nations in the EU do not sign up to this (and they have every right not to), damage has been done to the EU’s self-image as protector of human rights and free speech, and it is unsurprising who was among the first to point this out.
Step forward the man in the beige anorak.
Speaking to Spanish TV earlier this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran did not hesitate to pick up on the EU’s stance. Of course, Mr Ahmadinejad has form on this: he is the man who responded to the Mohammed cartoons controversy by sanctioning an exhibition of viciously anti-semitic Holocaust denial cartoons, with the expressed attempt at exposing the west’s “hypocrisy” on the portrayal of taboos.
We can agree or disagree on whether he had a point at the time. Personally, I don’t think he did: In terms of taste and offence there’s a difference, not least of historical distance, between mocking a centuries-dead religious leader and an abysmal event from which many still literally bear the scars.
But when one looks at events in Luxembourg over the past week, and Mr Ahmadinejad’s response, one cannot help but see he has a certain logic on his side when he asks: “Does [the] EU consider questions as a crime? Today, anywhere in the world, one can raise questions about God, prophets, existence and any other issue. Why historical events should not be clarified [sic]?”
We all, of course, can imagine where these questions lead (if you can’t, ask David Irving). But how many of us can bring ourselves to disagree with Mr Ahmadinejad’s words above, however much we may be suspicious of the sentiment? If the EU can allow people to raise questions about one thing, then why not another?
We may write off the resolution as a gesture (though, again, David Irving might have something to tell us about that), but even in the gesture, the damage is done. The EU is seen to be the superpower that protects the sensitivities of Jews, but not those of Muslims.
And Ahmadinejad has been quick to take advantage. At a time when already too many in the Middle East see the EU as in the pocket of Israel, this at best pointless resolution will only serve to drive yet more into the arms of the Iranians, who, after the propaganda victories of the second Lebanon war and the hostage crisis, are more and more managing to portray themselves as the champions of the Middle East’s Muslims.
Originally posted on Comment is Free
17 Apr 2007 | Comment
When Ariel Sharon declared his intention to withdraw Israeli settlers from Gaza in 2004, the Palestinian leadership was quick to declare its readiness to manage security and political affairs in the Gaza Strip.
After Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, a new front opened between the Palestinians and Israel, with Palestinian militants launching attacks on Israeli towns close to Gaza. The Gaza Strip itself descended into political and social chaos, with killing, destruction and kidnapping dominating the headlines of the daily Palestinian newspapers.
Since the withdrawal, the number of Palestinians killed by Palestinians has reached 240, and there have been 85 reported cases of kidnapping. The press coverage of Gaza has reported the situation as either the ‘tragedy’ (according to the Arabic press) or the ‘internal war’ (according to the foreign press). So where do we stand now? And how can a nation live in such a situation?
At the beginning of the second intifada, when Israel killed a Palestinian or foreigner, Israeli propaganda tried to play down such incidents. But when armed Palestinians abduct a foreigner, Israeli propaganda attempts to cast the incident as if it’s the end of the world, which motivates Palestinian leaders to appear on TV demanding both the release of the hostage and the capture of the kidnappers.
Since the kidnapping of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston on 12 March, numerous declarations have been made by Palestinian politicians, starting with President Mahmoud Abbas and ending with the Legislative Council Member Hassan Kreisheh, who stated recently that the new Palestinian Minister for the Interior Hani Qawasmi failed in his position by not securing the release of the British reporter.
But Kreisheh did not criticise the minister for the interior for the ‘internal war’ which has resulted in so many deaths. Gaza has become a theatre for the political chaos and the contradictory declarations of its politicians. It is my view that failure has infected all levels of Palestinian society, and not only the new government.
The one hopeful aspect of Johnston’s kidnapping is the high level of outcry for his release from normal Palestinians. Civil society organisations too have initiated many petitions for his release. This response shows the level of Palestinian despair at the current moment.
Since the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on 25 June 2006, Israel has killed more than 500 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and it still holds more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Even if Israel released 1,000 Palestinians prisoners today, we’ve still already lost 500 Palestinians. If the capture of other Israeli soldiers is followed by the killing of another 500, then we have lost. Palestinians are unable, and even unqualified, for kidnap and exchange deals: we are not Hezbollah, nor Al-Qaeda.
Lately, the term ‘Palestinian national interest’ has been deleted from the resistance dictionary. Personal interest takes precedence. Kidnapping in Gaza is carried out for monetary gain, not out of any sense of resistance to occupation.
There is an armed element that refers to itself as ‘resistance’ but most Palestinians see it as nothing more than a group of thugs who are out for personal gain, and do not care how much they tarnish the reputation of Palestinians, or the amount of harm that may arise from their actions.
The Palestinian Authority has not improved security and safety for Gaza’s citizens, nor even for foreigners, in spite of the Arabic norms and traditions of hospitality that encourage respect, help and protection for guests.
The day after Iran’s President Ahmadinejad released the 15 British servicemen he had alleged were found in Iranian waters, the British consul went to Gaza to meet the Palestinian Prime Minister Ismaill Haniyah in an attempt to secure the release of Alan Johnston. So far, nothing seems to have come of this meeting.
In my opinion, Britain must increase its efforts to obtain the release of the British reporter and to eliminate the kidnapping phenomenon in the Gaza Strip. The British government has been considered one of the greatest supporters of the Palestinian Authority since the Oslo accords of 1993, and also supports Palestinian civil society organisations.
It is not right that we, Palestinians, kidnapped one of its citizens. If the Palestinians and our government continue sliding into the political and security chaos, then this is a sign for a dark future. The Gaza Strip is in much need of international organisations these days, particularly humanitarian aid and press coverage. The Palestinian Authority must provide protection to those who offer help to the Palestinians.
Johnston’s kidnapping was the second such incident this year. In a very disturbing development, the Foreign Press Association has advised its members to ‘re-evaluate the necessity of travel to Gaza’ after the BBC provided evidence that Palestinian militants may be planning to kidnap foreigners.
The current chaos in Gaza directly affects journalists, and inevitably the information the international community receives. The Palestinian Authority has shown that it cannot manage the conflict in Gaza and therefore the chaos continues.
Of course the international community wants to help, and there are always engaged journalists willing to risk their lives to gather real information and show it to the world. However, there are limits and the Palestinian Authority should consider that Gaza is getting out of control. If something is not done, there will be fewer and fewer journalists willing to engage with the situation of the Palestinians, as the danger makes it too difficult to report.
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