23 Mar 2022 | News and features, United Kingdom
When I was at drama school in the early 1970s, there was a middle-aged Iranian on the directors’ course called Rokneddin. He’d been ejected from the Shah’s Iran for staging subversive productions. Rokneddin was no political firebrand: he had simply tried to put on Shakespeare’s history plays, which, like all plays in which a king died, were banned in Iran under the Pahlavi dynasty. The plays reminded people all too vividly that the divine right of kings had severe limits.
After the revolution Rokneddin went back, and tried to ply his trade again: this time he disappeared into prison, never to be seen again. At the time the Shah’s proscription was seen as the act of an exotic tyrant. That is not to say the English monarchy has always celebrated Shakespeare’s entire canon. During the period of George III’s madness in 18th-century Britain, King Lear was banished from the stage because the parallels were too obvious.
Shakespeare has had this unique symbolic significance for a long time. From the end of the 17th century, initially in England, and then increasingly in translation across Europe, his stock began its inexorable rise, until he was acclaimed across the whole of the Western world, to a degree never before or since equalled by any other writer. His work was a mirror in which people of widely diverse cultures could see themselves – in Scandinavia, in the Middle East, in Spain and the Americas.
He was fervently admired in France, despite his barbaric non-conformism to the laws of classical drama. In Germany and Russia, he was clasped to those nations’ bosoms, claimed by them as, respectively, German and Russian. Shakespeare’s perceived universality – which expanded in the 19th and 20th centuries to include Africa, India, China and Japan – inevitably meant that his work would be recruited to embody the positions of various political and philosophical groupings. And with this came, equally inevitably, censorship and suppression.
Not that Shakespeare was a stranger to censorship in his own time, living and working as he did in, first, the Elizabethan, then the Jacobean, police state where people’s actions and their very thoughts were under constant surveillance. The theatre in which he worked was heavily patrolled by the Master of the Revels, who was charged not only with providing entertainment for the monarch, but with averting controversy, particularly in the sphere of foreign relations. Sometimes this meant deleting matters offensive to allies, sometimes it meant suppressing criticism – or perceived criticism – of the crown, sometimes, more rarely, it meant eliminating morally or sexually offensive material. The theatre was a minefield of significance for dramatists and their companies. Even a simple dig at German and Spanish dress had to be cut from Much Ado About Nothing because of contemporary diplomatic sensitivities. But the reach of the censor went well beyond the explicit. The characters and narratives in Shakespeare’s plays were perceived symbolically, as commentaries on current events.
In 1601 Shakespeare and his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, ran into danger on this account: the Earl of Essex and his supporter, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and possibly his lover, were planning a rebellion against the ageing Queen. They decided that it would help to rally support if Shakespeare’s old play about a wayward despot, King Richard II, were to be revived. Comparisons between Richard and Elizabeth were common – even the Queen knew about them.
“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she said to the keeper of records. “This tragedy,” she continued, raging against the players’ apparent impunity, “was played 40 times in open streets and houses.” For the 1601 revival, the company really went out on a limb, adding the famous scene, possibly specially commissioned for the occasion, in which the king abdicates and is deposed. For their pains, the actors, including Shakespeare, found themselves arraigned by the Privy Council. Any one of them, including Shakespeare, could have been imprisoned for life, like Southampton, or, like Essex, beheaded. In the end they got off on the shaky plea that they were just doing their job. The rebellion, of course, had failed abjectly. Had the rebellion succeeded, it might have been a different matter.
After Shakespeare’s death, his plays were subjected to a different, internal, sort of censorship: on moral grounds, or those of taste. Happy endings were imposed, filth extirpated, difficult characters, like the fool in Lear, excised. But by the end of the 19th century, theatrical reformers had begun to establish the wildly controversial idea that Shakespeare might have known what he was doing. Almost immediately after this revelation directors began to use the plays to make points about the modern world. Especially in the wake of World War I, the martial dimension of the plays was subjected to intense scrutiny, and Shakespeare’s patriotism was rarely taken at face value, until World War II, when, in Olivier’s famous film, Henry V again became a rallying cry. But post-war productions have once again used the plays as a retort in which to examine our present preoccupations: Peter Brook’s bleak absurdist King Lear, for example; Peter Hall’s grimly realistic The Wars of the Roses; Jonathan Miller’s Alzheimer’s-stricken King Lear. Devastating truths have been confronted, but subversion has rarely been attempted.
Elsewhere, however, the plays have been keenly probed for political endorsement, or denounced for its absence. In 1941, Joseph Stalin banned Hamlet. The historian Arthur Mendel wrote: “The very idea of showing on the stage a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith, who intently scrutinized the life around him in an effort to discover for himself, without outside ‘prompting,’ the reasons for its defects, separating truth from falsehood, the very idea seemed almost ‘criminal’.” Having Hamlet suppressed must have been a nasty shock for Russians: at least since the times of novelist and short story writer Ivan Turgenev, the Danish Prince had been identified with the Russian soul. Ten years earlier, Adolf Hitler, had claimed the play as quintessentially Aryan, and described Nazi Germany as resembling Elizabethan England, in its youthfulness and vitality (unlike the allegedly decadent and moribund British Empire). In his Germany, Hamlet was reimagined as a proto-German warrior. Only weeks after Hitler took power in 1933 an official party publication appeared titled Shakespeare – A Germanic Writer.
17 Mar 2022 | 50 years of Index, Afghanistan, Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Bosnia, Brazil, China, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Magazine, Magazine Contents, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 51.01 Spring 2022 Extras
The spring issue of Index magazine is special. We are celebrating 50 years of history and to such a milestone we’ve decided to look back at the thorny path that brought us here.
Editors from our five decades of life have accepted our invitation to think over their time at Index, while we’ve chosen pieces from important moments that truly tell our diverse and abundant trajectory.
Susan McKay has revisited an article about the contentious role of the BBC in Northern Ireland published in our first issue, and compares it to today’s reality.
Martin Bright does a brilliant job and reveals fascinating details on Index origin story, which you shouldn’t miss.
Index at 50, by Jemimah Steinfeld: How Index has lived up to Stephen Spender’s founding manifesto over five decades of the magazine.
The Index: Free expression around the world today: the inspiring voices, the people who have been imprisoned and the trends, legislation and technology which are causing concern.
“Special report: Index on Censorship at 50”][vc_column_text]Dissidents, spies and the lies that came in from the cold, by Martin Bright: The story of Index’s origins is caught up in the Cold War – and as exciting
Sound and fury at BBC ‘bias’, by Susan McKay: The way Northern Ireland is reported continues to divide, 50 years on.
How do you find 50 years of censorship, by Htein Lin: The distinguished artist from Myanmar paints a canvas exclusively for our anniversary.
Humpty Dumpty has maybe had the last word, by Sir Tom Stoppard: Identity politics has thrown up a new phenonemon, an intolerance between individuals.
The article that tore Turkey apart, by Kaya Genç: Elif Shafak and Ece Temulkuran reflect on an Index article that the nation.
Of course it’s not appropriate – it’s satire, by Natasha Joseph: The Dame Edna of South Africa on beating apartheid’s censors.
The staged suicided that haunts Brazil, by Guilherme Osinski: Vladimir Herzog was murdered in 1975. Years on his family await answers – and an apology.
Greece haunted by spectre of the past, by Tony Rigopoulos: Decades after the colonels, Greece’s media is under attack.
Ugandans still wait for life to turn sweet, by Issa Sikiti da Silva: Hopes were high after Idi Amin. Then came Museveni …People in Kampala talk about their
problems with the regime.
How much distance from Mao? By Rana Mitter: The Cultural Revolution ended; censorship did not.
Climate science is still being silenced, by Margaret Atwood: The acclaimed writer on the fiercest free speech battle of the day.
God’s gift to who? By Charlie Smith: A 2006 prediction that the internet would change China for the better has come to pass.
50 tech milestones of the past 50 years, by Mark Frary: Expert voices and a long-view of the innovations that changed the free speech landscape.
Censoring the net is not the answer, but… By Vint Cerf: One of the godfathers of the internet reflects on what went right and what went wrong.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Five decades in review”][vc_column_text]An arresting start, by Michael Scammell: The first editor of Index recounts being detained in Moscow.
The clockwork show: Under the Greek colonels, being out of jail didn’t mean being free.
Two letters, by Kurt Vonnegut: His books were banned and burned.
Winning friends, making enemies, influencing people, by Philip Spender: Index found its stride in the 1980s. Governments took note.
The nurse and the poet, by Karel Kyncl: An English nurse and the first Czech ‘non-person’.
Tuning in to revolution, by Jane McIntosh: In revolutionary Latin America, radio set the rules.
‘Animal can’t dash me human rights’, by Fela Kuti: Why the king of Afrobeat scared Nigeria’s regime.
Why should music be censorable, by Yehudi Menuhin: The violinist laid down his own rules – about muzak.
The snake sheds its skin, by Judith Vidal-Hall: A post-USSR world order didn’t bring desired freedoms.
Close-up of death, by Slavenka Drakulic: We said ‘never again’ but didn’t live up to it in Bosnia. Instead we just filmed it.
Bosnia on my mind, by Salman Rushdie: Did the world look away because it was Muslims?
Laughing in Rwanda, by François Vinsot: After the genocide, laughter was the tonic.
The fatwa made publishers lose their nerve, by Jo Glanville: Long after the Rushdie aff air, Index’s editor felt the pinch.
Standing alone, by Anna Politkovskaya: Chechnya by the fearless journalist later murdered.
Fortress America, by Rubén Martínez: A report from the Mexican border in a post 9/11 USA.
Stripsearch, by Martin Rowson: The thing about the Human Rights Act …
Conspiracy of silence, by Al Weiwei: Saying the devastation of the Sichuan earthquake was partly manmade was not welcome.
To better days, by Rachael Jolley: The hope that kept the light burning during her editorship.
Plays, protests and the censor’s pencil, by Simon Callow: How Shakespeare fell foul of dictators and monarchs. Plus: Katherine E McClusky.
The enemies of those people, by Nina Khrushcheva: Khrushchev’s greatgranddaughter on growing up in the Soviet Union and her fears for the US press.
We’re not scared of these things, by Miriam Grace A Go: Trouble for Philippine
journalists.
Windows on the world, by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee: Poems from Iran by two political prisoners.
Beijing’s fearless foe with God on his side, by Jimmy Lai: Letters from prison by the Hong Kong publisher and activist.
We should not be put up for sale, by Aishwarya Jagani: Two Muslim women in India on being ‘auctioned’ online.
Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: Liberty for who?
Amin’s awful story is much more than popcorn for the eyes, by Jemimah Steinfeld: Interview with the director of Flee, a film about an Afghan refugee’s flight and exile.
Women defy gunmen in fight for justice, by Témoris Grecko: Relatives of murdered Mexican journalist in brave campaign.
Chaos censorship, by John Sweeney: Putin’s war on truth, from the Ukraine frontline.
In defence of the unreasonable, by Ziyad Marar: The reasons behind the need
to be unreasonable.
We walk a very thin line when we report ‘us and them’, by Emily Couch: Reverting to stereotypes when reporting on non-Western countries merely aids dictators.
It’s time to put down the detached watchdog, by Fréderike Geerdink: Western newsrooms are failing to hold power to account.
A light in the dark, by Trevor Philips: Index’s Chair reflects on some of the magazine’s achievements.
Our work here is far from done, by Ruth Smeeth: Our CEO says Index will carry on fighting for the next 50 years.
In vodka veritas, by Nick Harkaway and Jemimah Steinfeld: The author talks about Anya’s Bible, his new story inspired by early Index and Moscow bars.
A ghost-written tale of love, by Ariel Dorfman and Jemimah Steinfeld: The novelist tells the editor of Index about his new short story, Mumtaz, which we publish.
‘Threats will not silence me’, by Bilal Ahmad Pandow and Madhosh Balhami: A Kashmiri poet talks about his 30 years of resistance.
A classic case of cancel culture, by Marc Nash: Remember Socrates’ downfall.
27 Dec 2021 | Artistic Freedom, Magazine, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
In June 2015, a national newspaper in Britain started a campaign to have a play banned. This surprised me for two reasons. One: clearly no one had told the Daily Mirror about the Theatre Act 1968, which abolished the state’s censorship of the stage and did away with the quaintly repressive (if that’s not an oxymoron) notion of the Lord Chamberlain’s red pen. Two: the play in question was mine.
I wrote An Audience With Jimmy Savile to show how the late entertainer managed to get away with a lifetime of sexual offending. But despite the play’s very public service intentions, the Mirror started a petition to stop it. And so, for a moment, I found myself in some exalted, unwarranted company: Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw had plays banned (Ghosts and Mrs Warren’s Profession, respectively). Inevitably, however, the Mirror’s cack-handed attempt at censorship failed and the play went ahead.
The episode was instructive, however. Because while it’s true that “we” – that is, the British state – don’t ban plays any more, a powerful and unhealthy censorious reflex still exists and there are clear signs that the urge to stifle and to repress has been growing stronger over the last few years. That repression takes many forms: a social media backlash here, a not-very-subtle government threat there – but it’s real, it’s unhealthy and it’s profoundly worrying.
Censorship in the West is real
We are not, of course, in the same league as China – where a play bemoaning their treatment of Uyghur Muslims, for example, would never be officially sanctioned – but as playwright David Hare told me in an email exchange for this article, censorship in the West is real. It just isn’t called that anymore.
“Is there censorship in the sense that there is censorship in Iran, Russia or China? Of course not. Nobody’s physical survival is threatened,” he said.
But he does seem to say that the BBC has, in effect, become a censorious government’s useful idiot. (My phrase, not his.)
“The BBC has a current policy of deliberately not alienating the government,” he said. “They have chosen the path of ingratiation rather than asserting their independence. The result is, effectively, a range of subjects [which is] hopelessly narrowed. Hence the ubiquity of cop shows. Even medical dramas are forbidden if they stray into questions of ministerial health policy.”
Some might accuse Hare of pique, given that a TV adaptation of his most recent play, Beat the Devil, starring Ralph Fiennes, was turned down by the BBC. He says it was rejected because of the subject matter: Covid-19. (Hare became gravely ill with the virus and the play depicts him on his sickbed, despairing of the government’s response to the pandemic as they “stutter and stumble” on the airwaves.)
Indeed, when Hare went public with his attack on the corporation for turning him down, it refused to comment and the inference was that this was an editorial judgment and not a political one. But, says Hare, they would say that wouldn’t they?
“Censorship in the West,” he said, occurs “in the impossible grey area between editorial judgment and active prohibition.”
He’s right. The most egregious recent example of censorship-in-all-but-name occurred in 2015 when the National Youth Theatre (NYT) cancelled a production of the play Homegrown, about the radicalisation of young Muslims, two weeks before it was due to open. The executive who made the decision cited “editorial judgment” as a factor.
But, thanks to Freedom of Information requests from Index on Censorship, a fuller explanation emerged soon afterwards. An email from the NYT executive responsible for cancelling the production contained the following line: “At the end of the day we are simply ‘pulling a show’ … at a point that still saves us a lot of emotional, financial and critical fallout.”
In other words: “Yes, we might be censoring an important piece of work featuring the two most underrepresented groups on stage – Muslims and young people – because we are worried about defending ourselves from a backlash which hasn’t happened yet, but we don’t really fancy defending free speech and trying to ride out the storm because it’s too much hassle. So, let’s just cancel it and put it down to editorial judgment. Oh yeah – and safeguarding. Even though putting on work like this should be our raison d’etre.”
The director of the piece, Nadia Latif, was understandably shellshocked. A few weeks after the cancellation she said the creative team were “genuinely still reeling. The gesture of someone silencing you is a really profound one. You give your heart and soul to something, and someone comes and shuts it down. It’s like they’re saying my thoughts and feelings are no longer valid.”
And to refer the audience to my earlier point, it’s happening more and more. Albeit behind the scenes, and sometimes in ways you don’t get to hear about. There are two reasons for this: the pandemic and the nature of the current government.
Covid and censorship
The pandemic first. Although Hare’s Covid-19 polemic made it to the stage, that was the exception not the rule. I can’t find any other examples of plays critical of the current government being either staged or commissioned.
That would seem to be directly related to the fact that, during lockdown, every theatre in the country was desperate for financial assistance from the Treasury. So regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, few gave the go-ahead to works which bit, or even nibbled, the only hand that could feed them.
This isn’t speculation. When the producers of my play The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson – an unashamed takedown of the prime minister – tried to book it into theatres for a national tour post-pandemic, more than one theatre said, in effect: “We are worried we will lose our Covid grants if we put on a play like that.”
Which brings us on to the current Conservative government and its attempt to take a long march through our cultural, creative and editorial institutions.
When the Tories couldn’t get the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre installed as the new boss of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom, they simply scrapped the selection process and ordered that it start again, putting Dacre’s name forward once more – even though, first time round, the selection panel described him as “not appointable”. Dacre has now voluntarily withdrawn and gone back to the Mail.
Someone who was appointable and acceptable, however – to the government, that is – was Nadine Dorries, the new secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport. Putting Dorries in charge at DCMS was a bit like getting Herod to run the local nursery. Within days of taking over she reportedly started issuing threats against our premier creative organisation – the BBC – which, in her view, was guilty of not sufficiently toeing the line.
After the BBC radio presenter Nick Robinson hectored Johnson in an interview – “Stop talking, prime minister” – it’s said that Dorries told her advisers that Robinson had “cost the BBC a lot of money”.
A bit like the take on Aids policy from the satricial show Brass Eye – is it Good Aids or Bad Aids? – there is Good Censorship and Bad Censorship. The decision to ban Homegrown falls into the latter category.
The social media backlash
But the act of self-editing – in effect, self-censorship – has more going for it. As Hare puts it: “There is all sorts of subject matter I wouldn’t tackle – but entirely because I’m not good enough. I have always refused anything which represents life in Nazi concentration camps, since I don’t trust myself to do it well enough to do justice to what happened. If I don’t think I can do justice to the real suffering of real people, then I avoid, [although] I take my hat off to great writers who are able to expand subject matter at a level where it vindicates the idea of writing about absolutely everything. More power to them.”
But it’s complicated, of course. The worry is that more and more writers, terrified of a vicious social media backlash, are self-editing to an extent that is unhealthy. There are few, for example, who would now dare to pen a play that took a critical, coolly objective look at both sides of the argument over transgender rights – even though tackling difficult subjects and representing “problematic” points of view is, arguably, one of theatre’s prime functions. What could be more relevant, and on point, than a play like that?
One playwright who did sail into these waters was Jo Clifford. Her play, The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, casts Jesus as a trans woman. During its 2018 run at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, an online petition demanding the play be banned garnered a healthy – or rather unhealthy – 24,674 signatures. Soon after that she spoke of how artists and writers were “on the front line of a culture war that will only deepen and strengthen as the ecological and financial crisis worsens and the right feel more fearfully that they are losing their grip on power”.
So, at a time when writers and playwrights need to be bolder, the signs are that they’re becoming more and more cowed; hence Sebastian Faulks’s bizarre announcement that he will no longer physically describe female characters in his novels. Fortunately, most of his peers seem to disagree with him. A recent open letter signed by more than 150 eminent writers, artists and thinkers including JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem warned of “a fear spreading through arts and media”.
“We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement,” it said.
Then again, not everyone agreed with the letter. Author Kaitlyn Greenidge said she was asked to sign it but refused, saying: “I do not subscribe to [its] concerns and do not believe this threat is real. Or at least I do not believe that being asked to consider the history of anti-blackness and white terrorism when writing a piece, after centuries of suppression of any other view in academia, is the equivalent of loss of institutional authority.”
Like I said, it’s complicated.
Promotional material for An Audience With Jimmy Savile. Photo: Boom Ents
The big question for writers, then, is this – if, like me, you believe that anything goes on stage, provided it’s not proscribed by law, how far should you go? Where do the (self-imposed) limits of free expression lie?
Those limits are different for each writer, of course. I would draw the line at, for example, depicting sexual assault on stage. My Jimmy Savile play showed the effects of it, clearly, on the main character – a young woman who’d been abused by him at Stoke Mandeville Hospital – but left the rest to the audience’s imagination. Sometimes it’s more powerful that way.
I would, however, defend the right of other playwrights to go further and include vivid scenes of sexual assault, provided it was for the “right” reasons. There would need to be a coherent dramatic justification for it and the creative team would be advised to have plenty of flak jackets ready. Anyone who tests the boundaries in this way will inevitably face accusations of prurience, unjustified provocation or worse.
The actor’s “thumb”
In 1980, when Howard Brenton showed a scene of homosexual rape in The Romans in Britain, the production found itself being prosecuted for gross indecency by Mary Whitehouse as part of her attempt to “clean up” Britain. (The prosecution failed when a key witness admitted that, from the back of stalls, what he thought was a penis might have been an actor’s thumb.)
A similar court case today would be unlikely. But then again there is always the Court of Public Opinion, powered by the rotten fuel of social media, which is arguably more scary and intimidating than the real thing.
I wouldn’t draw the line at giving free expression on stage to anti-Semitism, either. Sometimes the best way to destroy an argument is to bring it into the light. With one crucial proviso, which I will come to in a moment.
As a Jew who lost relatives in the Holocaust I am fascinated by the subject. I would love to see a play which explained where anti-Semitism came from. Or whether the definitions of it are justified. Are there internal contradictions there? (We fought the war to preserve our freedoms, but isn’t using the label “anti-Semitic” a destruction of one of our most cherished freedoms? As in, the freedom of speech?)
Any play which seeks to answer these questions would need characters espousing anti-Semitism – the more articulately the better, in my view – if they are to work properly.
My proviso would be that the anti-Semitism would need to be both contextualised and rigorously challenged. This could be done within the play – two characters arguing – or in the form of a post-show debate.
I would, for example, even have defended the right of writer Jim Allen and director Ken Loach to stage Perdition, their controversial 1987 play for the Royal Court, despite its disgusting anti-Semitic tropes.
The play accused Jews of “collaborating” with the Nazis during the Holocaust (is there a more loaded, insulting, inappropriate word in this context than “collaborated”?) and was based on the story of Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to let more than 1,600 Jews flee Hungary for the safety of Switzerland.
Kastner, it is argued, should have done more to warn more Jews (not just the 1,600 that he rescued) of what was happening. Hence Allen’s line: “To save your hides, you [a Jew] practically led them to the gas chambers.” Disgusting, misjudged and morally wrong.
In the resulting furore, the Royal Court cancelled the play. But the decision to ban it, paradoxically, only increased support for it, and the poison it contained. I would have let it go ahead but tried to persuade Allen to make editorial changes. And if that didn’t work (and I doubt it would have done, although some controversial lines were excised during rehearsals) then I would have staged a debate, forming part of the show, which allowed the Jewish community to explain why the play was so offensive and misjudged. Education beats defenestration, every time.
The stage would be the perfect place to explore the arguments on both sides, but in particular to highlight the muddy thinking of the anti-Israel lobby, as personified by Sally Rooney, who recently decided to punish the Jews by forbidding a Hebrew translation of her latest novel. (Although making them read it might have been a more effective punishment.)
British theatre is not in a good place today. Where are the revolutionaries? The new, angry young men and women, the new John Osbornes? We don’t need to Look Back In Anger: it’s all in front of us, now.
Would a film like 2009’s Four Lions, a deeply moral but, to some, hugely offensive Jihadi satire, get made today? I very much doubt it.
We – all of us: writers, commissioners and directors – need to be braver.
17 Dec 2021 | News and features, Norway
A fatwa was issued against all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses. Photo: Adam Butler/PA Archive/PA Images
Norwegian freedom of speech foundation Fritt Ord has called for a state commission to investigate police handling of the attempted murder of a publisher three decades ago.
In 1993 William Nygaard – a former head of NRK and long-time director of the Aschehoug publishing house – was shot outside of his home in the Oslo suburb of Slemdal. Nygaard was left for dead on the street after being hit three times from behind as he opened his car door.
The call to look at the case again comes after one of the prime suspects in the case was tracked down by a team of journalists working for Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
Although nobody claimed responsibility for the attack at the time, the shooting was widely believed to be linked to Nygaard’s support for Salman Rushdie and Aschehoug’s publication in Norwegian of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses. At the time Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini for heresy. Aschehoug is Norway’s second largest publisher and has a track record of publishing controversial titles.
Fritt Ord director Knut Olav Åmås has suggested that an independent investigation into the handling of the case is warranted due to the longstanding failure of the Oslo police to make progress despite ample evidence. Åmås has singled out what he sees as strange police behaviour and a failure to follow up on key leads.
“[The handling of the case] should be investigated by an independent commission due to the considerable and surprising number of strange things that have happened, not least in the Oslo Metropolitan Police ever since the murder attempt took place in 1993,” Åmås told Index on Censorship. Åmås has specifically been critical of the Oslo’ police’s failure to focus on the fatwa in the crucial period following the shooting, and the decision to let local police investigate a case of national and international significance.
Witnesses to the shooting used photofits to produce an image of the attacker at the time, but until recently nobody was ever publicly identified or charged for the crime. Last month however the name of one of the suspects was revealed by the NRK team after he was tracked down in Beirut. Lebanese national Khaled Moussawi, who was resident in Norway when the attack happened, has been accused, though he denies all claims. As part of the accusations, he is alleged to have been assisted by a still-unnamed employee of the Iranian embassy in Oslo.
“It is a very important case, both as an integrated part of the whole Rushdie affair, and also as an important precursor to the [Danish] cartoon controversy, where Islamic regimes´ pressure on freedom of expression became a dramatic global event.” says Åmås, who is a former culture editor at Norway’s leading broadsheet Aftenposten.
Moussawi lived in Norway until 1996 and regularly attended events at the Iranian embassy. Despite having a son born in Oslo his family were never granted citizenship and he was eventually deported from the country and returned to Lebanon, inadvertently complicating the investigation into the Nygaard shooting.
In 2008 the Norwegian Prosecuting Authority determined that the case should be reopened and responsibility was shifted from the Oslo Metropolitan Police to Kripos, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service .
Åmås says that the latest revelations mean it may finally be possible to bring Nygaard’s attackers to justice.
“It shows that Norwegian police has evidence that they should act upon, by issuing a so-called Red notice through Interpol for example – and also working with Lebanese authorities to make it possible to bring him [Moussawi] to Norway for interrogation. The same should happen to the Iranian who has been charged.” Åmås believes.
If the unnamed Iranian embassy staff member is convicted and a link is proven between Iran’s embassy and the shooting, it would also retrospectively establish the crime as an act of state-sponsored terrorism rather than attempted murder.
The Iranian Embassy in Oslo has denied the claims. “This type of allegation…is completely without basis, and we strongly reject this allegation,” it told NRK.
Moussawi also gave an extensive interview to NRK in Beirut when his identity was revealed, claiming to have been unaware of his status as one of the prime suspects. He also repeatedly denied any involvement with Hezbollah, the Lebanese religious and political movement with close ties to Iran that endorsed the fatwa against Rushdie.
“I have never been active in Hezbollah, either politically, religiously or socially,” Moussawi told NRK. “There was no political activity in the embassy. We drank tea, ate and read from the Koran,” he said.
