15 Dec 2021 | Academic Freedom Letters, Afghanistan, Africa, Americas, Asia and Pacific, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Hong Kong, Kenya, Magazine, Magazine Contents, Malaysia, Malta, Middle East and North Africa, Politics and Society, religion & culture, Russia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
The Winter issue of Index magazine highlights the battles fought by theatre of resistance across the world and how they’ve been enduring different forms of censorship.
Writer Jonathan Maitland dives deeply into the history of theatre censorship in the United Kingdom and explains why British playwrights need to lose their fear and be bolder. Kaya Genç and Meltem Arikan provide a good overview of the situation in Turkey in the most recent years, where theatres have been closed down in Istanbul.
Natasha Tripney analyses the impacts of an exaggerated nationalism and how it restrains plays from moving forward.
The theatre of resistance, by Martin Bright: Index has a long history of promoting the work of dissident playwrights.
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.
Women journalists caught in middle of a nightmare, by Zahra Nader: Many Afghan journalists –women in particular – have fled the Taliban or are in hiding from the brutal regime.
Hope in the darkness, by Jemimah Steinfeld: Nathan Law, one of the leaders of Hong Kong’s protest movement, is convinced that the repression will not last forever. We publish an extract from his new book.
Speaking up for the Uyghurs, by Flo Marks: Exeter university students have been successfully challenging the institution’s China policy, but much more needs to be done.
Omission is the same as permission, by Andy Lee Roth and Liam O’Connell: Malaysia’s introduction of emergency powers to deal with “fake news” was broadly ignored by the Western media – and that only emboldened the government.
I can run, but can I hide?, by Clare Rewcastle Brown: Journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown is a wanted woman in Malaysia – and the long reach of Interpol means there are now few places where she can consider herself safe.
Dream of saving sacred land dies in the dust, by Scarlett Evans: Australia’s mining industry is at odds with the traditional beliefs of the Aboriginal population and it is taking its toll on the country’s indigenous heritage.
Bylines, deadlines and the firing line, by Rachael Jolley: It’s not just pens and notebooks that journalists need in the USA, it’s sometimes gas masks and protective vests, too.
Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: “I’ve done my own research.”
Maltese double cross, by Manuel Delia: Four years on from Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, lessons have not been learned and justice for the investigative journalist’s family remains elusive.
“Apple poisoned me physically, mentally and spiritually”, by Martin Bright: A former Apple employee, who was fired by the tech giant after blowing the whistle on toxic waste under her office, says her fight will go on.[
]Keeping the flame alive as theatre goes dark, by Natasha Tripney: Theatre across the world is fighting new waves of repression, intolerance and nationalism, as well as financial cuts, at a time when a raging pandemic has threatened its existence.
Testament to the power of theatre as rebellion, by Kate Maltby: The Belarus Free Theatre, whose 16 members have now gone into exile to escape the Lukashenka regime, are preparing to perform at the Barbican in London.
My dramatic tribute to Samuel Beckett and catastrophe, by Reza Shirmarz: More than three decades after Index published the celebrated playwright’s work dedicated to the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, the censored Iranian writer Reza Shirmarz has responded with his own play, Muzzled.
Why the Taliban wanted my mother dead, by Hamed Amiri: The author of The Boy with Two Hearts on why and how the family fled Afghanistan.
The first steps- Across Europe with Little Amal, by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson: Good Chance Theatre on their symbolic take on the long journey of refugees from Syria to the UK.
Fighting Turkey’s culture war, by Kaya Genç: Theatres have been shuttered in Istanbul but the fightback by directors and playwrights continues.
I wrote a play then lost my home, my husband and my trust, by Meltem Arikan: The exiled Turkish playwright’s Mi Minör was blamed for the Gezi Park protests.
Where silence is the greatest fear, by Issa Sikiti da Silva: How Kenyan theatre has suffered under a succession of corrupt rulers, hot on the heels of colonial repression.
Censorship is still in the script, by Jonathan Maitland: British theatre has lost its backbone and needs to be more courageous.
God waits in the wings…ominously, by Guilherme Osinski and Mark Seacombe: A presidential decree that art must be ‘sacred’ has cast a free-speech shadow over Brazilian theatre.
Elephant that should be in Nobel Room, by John Sweeney: The winners of this year’s Peace Prize deserve their accolade, but there is another who should have taken the award.
We academics must fight the mob – now, by Arif Ahmed: The appalling hounding of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University is a serious threat to freedom of speech on campus.
So who is judging Youtube?, by Keith Kahn-Harris: Accused by the video behemoth of spreading misinformation, the author conducted an experiment in an effort to understand how the social media platform policies its content.
Why is the world applauding the man who assaulted me?, by Caitlin May McNamara: It is time for governments and businesses to decide where their priorities lie when it comes to the Middle East.
Silence is not golden, by Ruth Smeeth: As we enter a new year, Index will continue to act as a voice for those unable to use their own.
The road of no return, by Flo Marks and Aziz Isa Elkun: The Uyghur activist and poet, exiled in the UK, yearns for his family and friends imprisoned in Chinese concentration camps.
Bearing witness through poetry, by Emma Sandvik Ling: Poets are often on the frontlines of protest.
The people’s melody, by Mark Frary: For the first time, English readers can now experience the joys of Ethiopian poetry written in Amharic thanks to the work of Alemu Tebeje and Chris Beckett.
No corruption please, we’re British, by Oliver Bullough: The UK has developed a parallel vocabulary to avoid labelling anyone with the c-word … until now.
9 Nov 2021 | Iran, News and features
As Richard Ratcliffe enters day 16 of a hunger strike to protest against UK government inaction in the case of the continuing detention of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran, he says it is not the lack of food that is his biggest worry.
“It is the cold,” he says from his makeshift tent village outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall, just a short walk from the Houses of Parliament. Last Friday – Guy Fawkes Night – the mercury dipped to below freezing as a candlelit vigil was held to raise awareness of this wife’s plight, who has been detained in Iran for more than five years.
Nazanin, who was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the time of her arrest, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2016 for “plotting to topple the Iranian regime”. As the end of her sentence approached, Nazanin was told she faced new charges of “propaganda activities against the government”. In April 2021, she was sentenced to a further year in prison. I spoke to Richard at the time in our podcast.
It is clear that Nazanin is clearly a pawn in a game of one-upmanship between the British and Iranian governments. There is no guarantee that she will be released even after serving the new sentence.
This is why Ratcliffe is carrying out his protest – to make the British government recognise that its strategy towards Iran has failed.
With his quilted jacket and woolly hat and mittens, Ratcliffe looks like many of the nearby rough sleepers. Yet few of those on nearby Whitehall are surrounded by pebbles painted by young children and carved pumpkins or have their tents festooned with fairy lights. Still fewer have a pile of Amazon deliveries from well-wishers.
Camped out in the heart of British Government, Ratcliffe has been visited by a steady stream of MPs, including the Conservative MP for Ipswich Tom Hunt today.
This in itself is quite unusual.
“I have certainly been visited by more opposition MPS than those in the government,” says Ratcliffe. “I have had a lot of visits from the Labour front bench. Of those in the Government that did visit, very few wanted their picture taken.”
He has not been short of other well-known visitors wishing him well, including the author Kathy Lette, Victoria Coren and TV presenter Claudia Winkelman.
Ratcliffe says that despite promises from former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, little seems to be happening in official channels to secure the release of his wife.
“There have been no negotiations of substance for a while,” he says.
As the light faded and the temperature dropped again tonight, Ratcliffe’s hunger strike continued. Many experts say that the human body can endure around 25 days without eating before permanent damage occurs.
Ratcliffe plans to continue while he can.
“One of the things I have heard from other hunger strikers is that you eventually start closing in on yourself. That hasn’t happened so far,” he says. “You have to listen to your body though.”
Richard’s family and friends are naturally worried for his well-being and many are taking it in turns to keep his spirits up. As I speak to him, his mum – resplendent in a multi-coloured coat that belies the seriousness of the situation – pops over with a hot water bottle to keep the cold at bay.
Despite the cold and the growing concern of the effects of not eating, Ratcliffe will remain outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for now and certainly until later this week when Iran’s vice president Dr Ali Salajegheh leaves the UK after attending COP26 in Glasgow.
When the Government’s focus turns away again from the global ecofest, it needs to think about how it deals with Iran.
He says, “I don’t think the Foreign Office understands Iran properly. The Government also needs to look long and hard at its hostage policy and its ineffectiveness.”
Ratcliffe is clear on one thing that would help secure Nazanin’s release – the British Government could pay the £450 million that Ratcliffe and many others believe say it owes to the Iranian government. The money was paid to the UK in the 1970s by the then Shah of Iran to buy Chieftain tanks and armoured vehicles. When the Shah was deposed, Britain sold the vehicles instead to Iraq but kept the money.
Sign the petition to Free Nazanin here and, if you are in the UK, write to your MP.
4 Jun 2021 | Belarus, China, Hong Kong, News and features
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As you scroll through your Telegram feed, one image jumps out.
It shows crowds of young Hong Kongers, all dressed in black, at a protest, holding their smartphones aloft like virtual cigarette lighters from a Telegram channel called HKerschedule.
The image is an invitation for young activists to congregate and march to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on 4 June. Wearing black has been a form of protest for many years, which has led to suggestions that the authorities may arrest anyone doing so.
Calls to action like this have migrated from fly posters and other highly visible methods of communication online.
Secure messaging has become vital to organising protests against an oppressive state.
Many protest groups have used the encrypted service Telegram to schedule and plan demonstrations and marches. Countries across the world have attempted to ban it, with limited levels of success. Vladimir Putin’s Russia tried and failed, the regimes of China and Iran have come closest to eradicating its influence in their respective states.
Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services.
It also means that news sites who have had their websites blocked, such as in the case of news website Tut.by in Belarus, or broadcaster Mizzima in Myanmar, have a safe and secure platform to broadcast from, should they so choose.
Belarusian freelance journalist Yauhen Merkis, who wrote for the most recent edition of the magazine, said such services were vital for both journalists and regular civilians.
“The importance of Telegram has grown in Belarus especially due to the blocking of the main news websites and problems accessing other social media platforms such as VK, OK and Facebook after August 2020,” he said.
“Telegram is easy to use, allows you to read the main news even in times of internet access restrictions, it’s a good platform to quickly share photos and videos and for regular users too: via Telegram-bots you could send a file to the editors of a particular Telegram channel in a second directly from a protest action, for example.”
The appeal, then, revolves around the safety of its usage, as well as access to well-sourced information from journalists.
In 2020, the Mobilise project set out to “analyse the micro-foundations of out-migration and mass protest”. In Belarus, it found that Telegram was the most trusted news source among the protesters taking part in the early stages of the demonstrations in the country that arose in August 2020, when President Alexander Lukashenko won a fifth term in office amidst an election result that was widely disputed.
But there are questions over its safety. Cooper Quintin, senior security researcher of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit that aims to protect privacy online, said Telegram’s encryption “falls short”.
“End-to-end encryption is extremely important for everyone in the world, not just activists and journalists but regular people as well. Unfortunately, Telegram’s end-to-end encryption falls short in a couple of key areas. Firstly, end-to-end encryption isn’t enabled by default meaning that your conversations could be intercepted or recovered by a state-level actor if you don’t enable this, which most users are not aware of. Secondly, group conversations in Telegram are never encrypted [using end-to-end encryption], lacking even the option to do so, unlike other encrypted chat apps such as Signal, Wire, and Keybase.”
A Telegram spokesperson said: “Everything sent over Telegram is encrypted including messages sent in groups and posted to channels.”
This is true; however, messages sent using anything other than Secret Chats use so-called client-server/server-client encryption and are stored encrypted in Telegram’s cloud, allowing access to the messages if you lose your device, for example.
The platform says this means that messages can be securely backed up.
“We opted for a third approach by offering two distinct types of chats. Telegram disables default system backups and provides all users with an integrated security-focused backup solution in the form of Cloud Chats. Meanwhile, the separate entity of Secret Chats gives you full control over the data you do not want to be stored. This allows Telegram to be widely adopted in broad circles, not just by activists and dissidents, so that the simple fact of using Telegram does not mark users as targets for heightened surveillance in certain countries,” the company says in its FAQs.
The spokesperson said, “Telegram’s unique mix of end-to-end encryption and secure client-server encryption allows for the huge groups and channels that have made decentralized protests possible. Telegram’s end-to-end encrypted Secret Chats allow for an extra layer of security for those who are willing to accept the drawbacks of end-to-end encryption.”
If the app’s level of safety is up for debate, its impact and reach is less so.
Authorities are aware of the reach the app has and the level of influence its users can have. Roman Protasevich, the journalist currently detained in his home state after his flight from Greece to Lithuania was forcibly diverted to Minsk after entering Belarusian airspace, was working for Telegram channel Belamova. He previously co-founded and ran the Telegram channel Nexta Live, pictured.
Nexta’s Telegram page
Social media channels other than Telegram are easier to ban; Telegram access does not require a VPN, meaning even if governments choose to shut down internet providers, as the regimes in Myanmar and Belarus have done, access can be granted via mobile data. Mobile data is also targeted, but perhaps a problem easier to get around with alternative SIM cards from neighbouring countries.
People in Myanmar, for instance, have been known to use Thai SIM cards.
The site isn’t without controversy, however. Its very nature means it is a natural home for illicit activity such as revenge porn and use by extremists and terror groups. It is this that governments point to when trying to limit its reach.
China’s National Security Law attempts to censor information on the basis of criminalising any act of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with external forces, the threshold for which is extremely low. It has a particular impact on protesters in Hong Kong. Telegram was therefore an easy target.
In July 2020, Telegram refused to comply with Chinese authorities attempting to gain access to user data. As they told the Hong Kong Free Press at the time: “Telegram does not intend to process any data requests related to its Hong Kong users until an international consensus is reached in relation to the ongoing political changes in the city.”
Telegram continues to resist calls to share information (which other companies have done): it even took the step of removing mobile numbers from its service, for fear of its users being identified.
Anyone who values freedom of expression and the right to protest should resist calls for messaging platforms like Telegram to pull back on encryption or to install back doors for governments. When authoritarian regimes are cracking down on independent media more than ever, platforms like these are often the only way for protests to be heard
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28 Apr 2021 | Magazine, Magazine Editions, Volume 50.01 Spring 2021
Volume 50.01 Spring 2021
