27 Jun 2007 | Comment, News
Salman Rushdie is back in the limelight in the Islamic world – this time as Sir Salman. His inclusion in the Queen’s birthday honours list this year has rekindled memories of 1988-89, when the publication of his controversial book The Satanic Verses provoked orthodox Muslims. The book was declared blasphemous and Iran had placed a price on the author’s head.
It is not just Rushdie who is under fire. The British government is also viewed as being in the wrong and has criticism heaped on it. But the fact remains that very few in the Muslim world have read The Satanic Verses which is banned here. Those who have read it would not publicly admit it for fear of being branded as blasphemers themselves. It will be difficult to find a Rushdie fan in Pakistan. And no one would ever defend Rushdie along the lines of ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
Yet many find the vociferous reaction intriguing. With so many grave problems of governance, economic development and social adjustment posing a challenge for the Third World, the enlightened section of opinion here feels that ‘Sir Salman’ is hardly worth the fuss.
Hence the field has been left open to the anti-Rushdie critics who have traditionally used religion to promote their own political ends. The knee jerk response from different quarters reflects their zeal in competing with one another in their display of anger and disapproval to establish their love and reverence for the Prophet of Islam. If in the process they can score a few political points too, they stand to gain.
The reactions have varied in their intensity and nature. The mildest, if one may call it so, was the resolution adopted by parliament condemning the British government for knighting Salman Rushdie and demanding that the title be withdrawn ‘to avoid offending Muslims’. The resolution was passed unanimously in a rare show of unity between the government and the opposition.
Beyond that the protests took different forms. The Pakistan Foreign Office summoned the British envoy in Islamabad to convey its ‘deep disappointment and resentment’, describing the move as betraying an ‘utter lack of sensitivity’ on the part of the British government. Coming at a time when the Musharraf government is under attack for its role as a ‘faithful ally’ of the US and Britain in their war on terror, this stance was designed to demonstrate the government’s independence.
For others, the knighthood issue was seen as an occasion to establish their Islamic credentials. The clerics used the mosques to denounce the author of The Satanic Verses and the British government in one breath, while the religious parties rushed to mobilise their followers and hold rallies where the Union flag was burnt. The Pakistan Ulema Council retaliated by creating the title of Saifullah (the sword of God) and conferring it on Osama bin Laden. Some traders offered head money for killing Rushdie. There was also a call for Pakistan to leave the Commonwealth.
There was more political than religious passion in these reactions. Small wonder the government and the opposition used this as an opportunity to embarrass each other. The Minister for Religious Affairs, Ejaz ul Haq, who happens to be the son of the former military strongman Zia ul Haq, was embroiled in vitriolic exchanges with the Pakistan Peoples Party chairperson, Benazir Bhutto, whose father had been executed by General Zia. The minister had said that the knighthood would ‘encourage extremists to legitimise suicide bombing’. Ms Bhutto demanded his dismissal. Promptly came the rejoinder – she was pleading Rushdie’s case.
Benazir was confronted with the demand made by another rival, the Sindh chief minister. Publicly renouncing the honours bestowed on his ancestors by the British, Mr Arbab Rahim challenged Ms Bhutto to do the same. We do not know what happened to the medals Mr Rahim was photographed with. But no one responded to Ayesha Siddiqa, the author of the controversial book Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. In a newspaper column she suggested leaders in Pakistan should demonstrate their ‘honour’ by returning to the government the massive estates that their ancestors were awarded by the British.
Ironically it needed a conservative cleric to (almost) hit the nail on the head. In a TV interview, Dr Israr Ahmad said that honouring a writer like Salman Rushdie was a provocation like the Danish cartoons were last year, but did Muslims have to overreact and fall into the ‘Western trap’?
19 Jun 2007 | Comment
Lord knows, I’ve had my differences with Ken Livingstone, especially when it comes to the politics of the Middle East – but there’s one issue he’s got absolutely right. Last week, to the enormous surprise of much of London’s Jewish community, the mayor agreed with them – and came out against an academic boycott of Israel.
Unfortunately, his intervention came too late. The very next day, Britain’s University and College Union voted to promote the call for a boycott. Now, I was raised to be respectful of teachers and positively reverential towards academics. Which is why it pains me to say that this decision is almost laughably stupid. But it is. If a student had come up with it, he would find it daubed with a thick red line, from top to bottom.
First, it lacks all logical consistency. Let’s say you accept, as I do, that Israel is wrong to be occupying the territories it won in the Six Day war, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this week. Let’s say that that is your reason for boycotting Israel. Then why no boycott of China for its occupation of Tibet? Or of Russia for its brutal war against the Chechens? Or of Sudan, for its killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, a murderous persecution described by the US as genocide?
If it’s the ill-treatment of Palestinians in particular that concerns you, then why no boycott of Lebanon, whose army continues to pound the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, killing civilians daily? True, the Lebanese government is not a military occupier. But if occupation is the crime that warrants international ostracism, then why no boycott of American universities? After all, the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is Britain. Why do the good men and women of UCU not speak out, by boycotting, say, Oxford, Cambridge and London universities? Why do they not boycott themselves?
Maybe academic freedom is their chief concern. That would make sense, given that they’re academics. But if that was the issue, there would surely be boycotts of Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few places where intellectual freedom remains a fond dream. (The awkward truth is that the freest place in the Middle East for an Arab scholar is Israel.) Yet the UCU sees no “moral implications,” to use the language of last week’s resolution, in institutional ties with Damascus, Cairo or Tehran. Only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
For some reason, the activists pushing for this move believe Israelis should be placed in a unique category of untouchability. Never mind the 655,000 the US and Britain have, on one estimate, killed in Iraq. Never mind the two million displaced in Darfur. Never mind the closed, repressive societies of the Middle East. The Israelis are a people apart, one that must be shunned.
But let’s be charitable and forgive the boycotters their inconsistency. Surely any tactic, even an inconsistent one, is forgivable if it does some good. This, though, is where the combined geniuses of the UCU have really blundered. For a boycott will be hugely counter-productive.
For one thing, Israeli academics are disproportionately represented in Israel’s “peace camp.” The UCU will be boycotting the very people who have done most to draw the Israeli public’s attention to the folly of the occupation, to the very people working to bring an end to this desperate conflict. By their actions, the UCU will embolden the Israeli right who will be able to say, ‘Look, the world hates and isolates us: this is exactly why we have to be militarily strong.’
The second error is more subtle. One of the few things that might make Israel change course would be a shift in diaspora Jewish opinion: those campaigning for Palestinian rights and an end to the occupation need to win over Jewish allies. Yet no tactic is more likely to alienate Jews than a boycott. That’s because the very word has deep and painful resonances for Jews: a boycott of Jewish business was one of the Nazis’ opening moves. No one is equating the current plan with that. But of all the tactics to have chosen, a boycott is the very dumbest one.
Advocates say there’s nothing to worry about, this will be a boycott of institutions, not individuals – a necessary move because no Israeli institution has ever taken a stand against the occupation. This, too, is numb-skulled. When do academic institutions ever take a collective stand against anything? Did Imperial College declare itself against the Iraq war? What was the British Museum’s view of UK policy in Northern Ireland? Of course there was no such thing. Institutions of learning don’t take a stand; individuals do.
Which is why it will be individuals who are ostracised by this action. When you boycott the Hebrew University, you’re not boycotting bricks and mortar but the men and women who teach there. The “institutional” talk is just a ruse designed to make this boycott more palatable. It will still end in the shunning of individuals.
And why? Simply because they are citizens of the wrong country, born with the wrong nationality. In 2003 the Linguistic Society of America declared itself against blacklisting scholars simply because of the actions of their governments. “Such boycotts violate the principle of free scientific interaction and cooperation, and they constitute arbitrary and selective applications of collective punishment.” They also amount to a pretty crass form or discrimination: you can’t come to this conference, because you’ve got the wrong colour passport.
Oh, but none of these arguments stopped the boycott of South Africa, say the pro-blacklisters. Except these situations are completely different. In South Africa, the majority of the people were denied a vote in the state in which they lived. Israelis and Palestinians are, by contrast, two peoples locked in a national conflict which will be resolved only when each has its own, secure state.
Ken Livingstone is right: to launch a boycott of Israel now would hurt, not help the search for the peace that might end this Middle East tragedy. And that, when all the posturing is put to one side, is all that should matter.
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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.
