30 Jan 2013 | Egypt
Thousands of protesters took to the streets in three Suez Canal cities on Monday night, defying a night-time curfew and a month-long state of emergency declared by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi a day earlier.
“Down with Mohamed Morsi! No to the emergency law,”they chanted.
In a televised address to the nation on Sunday, the Islamist President announced the imposition of martial law in the restive cities of Port Said, Suez and Ismailia in a bid “to end the bloodshed and protect citizens.” The move came in response to four days of street violence that left more than 50 people dead and hundreds of others injured.
Egyptian police fire tear gas in Alexandria
The latest wave of unrest was sparked by nationwide anti-government protests on the eve of the second anniversary of the mass uprising that toppled former president Hosni Mubarak, that began on 25 Jan 2011. Opposition activists on Friday reiterated the now-familiar revolutionary slogans of “bread, freedom and social justice” and “the people want the downfall of the regime”.
They demanded quicker reforms and called for amendments to the Islamist-tinged constitution passed in a popular referendum in December. The situation deteriorated further after 21 defendants charged with involvement in last February’s violence at Port Said football stadium — the worst football-related violence in the country’s history — were sentenced to death on Sunday. The verdict triggered angry riots and attacks on police stations in Port Said.
The army has been deployed in Port Said and Suez in a bid “to restore stability and protect vital installations,” a military spokesman said on Egyptian TV. “Those who defy the curfew or damage public property will be dealt with harshly,” he warned.
In Alexandria, Egypt’s second city, demonstrators meanwhile staged rallies to protest the return of the much-detested emergency law, which was used for decades by Mubarak to round up opponents, silence voices of dissent and stifle freedom of expression. The protesters accused President Morsi of using the same repressive tactics as his predecessor.
“Morsi is Mubarak,” they shouted, “Down with the rule of the (Muslim Brotherhood) Supreme Guide.”
In recent weeks, a government crackdown on journalists critical of President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood has fuelled concerns of restrictions on press freedoms gained after the January 2011 uprising. Several journalists have faced criminal investigations after being accused by Morsi’s Islamist supporters of “insulting the president”.
In December, a lawsuit was filed against Egypt’s answer to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show — satirist Bassem Youssef — for poking fun at the president on his weekly television programme Al Bernameg (The Programme) on Egyptian independent satellite channel CBC. Youssef appeared on the show hugging a pillow with the president’s picture on it — a gesture mocking Morsi’s repeated calls on Egyptians to “unify ranks and love one another”. While the court dismissed the charge, the case served as a reminder to journalists that the country’s controversial new constitution includes provisions forbidding insults.
Meanwhile the online editor-in-chief for state-sponsored newspaper Al Ahram, Hani Shukrallah, was forced into early retirement this month. Highly respected for his objectivity in covering the news, Shukrallah would not reveal the details surrounding his removal from the post, but some have suggested via Twitter that his dismissal was for not being pro-Muslim Brotherhood.
In December, Islamist protesters staged a sit-in outside the Media Production City calling for “the purging of the media” and accusing independent journalists and talk show hosts of vilifying the Islamist President.
In Cairo, security forces continued battling rock-throwing youths around Kasr-el-Nil, not far from Tahrir Square for a fifth consecutive day on Monday, disrupting traffic in the downtown area. The protesters hurled molotov cocktails at the police and set fire to a police armoured personnel carrier, in scenes reminiscent of “The Friday of Rage” on 28 January 2011.
Members of the 6 April youth movement that called for the mass uprising two years ago condemned the government’s slow response to the violence and warned that the state of emergency would further provoke Morsi’s opponents. They called for a political solution to address the root cause of the problem.
Emerging from talks with the president on Monday night, Ayman Nour, Head of the liberal Ghad Al Thawra Party said that the president had rejected the call for a national unity government but had agreed to amendments to the constitution including articles that opposition political parties say undermine women’s rights.
Rights groups denounced Morsi’s declaration of a state of emergency as “a backward step” that would allow police to resort to the heavy-handed tactics practiced under the ousted regime.
Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch in Cairo lamented Morsi’s decision to re-impose martial law describing it as “a classic knee-jerk reaction that would pave the way for more abuse by the Ministry of Interior, causing more anger.”
Analysts have expressed fears meanwhile, that the newly-declared state of emergency will plunge the country — battered by weeks of street violence — into deeper political and economic turmoil, and further polarising the already divided country. The emergence of the mysterious “Black Bloc”, a group that has vowed “to protect the goals of the revolution and rid the country of the fascist regime” has raised alarm. Islamists have so far exercised restraint and have stayed away from the protests, in order to avoid the kind of bloody confrontation witnessed in December outside of the presidential palace. They have warned warned however, that their patience is wearing thin, and that they are preparing for combat should the need arise. Such warnings have led some to even express fears of a collapse in Egyptian society. A scenario that would present Egypt’s powerful military with a fresh opportunity to return to power.
22 Jan 2013 | Uncategorized
In recent weeks, Kazakh authorities closed down almost all independent media, and gave prosecutors new, wider legal powers against free speech. Protests against these latest attacks must go hand-in-hand with the defence of prisoners of conscience such as the poet and writer Aron Atabek, say his family and friends.
They warn that Atabek’s latest sentence — two years of solitary confinement for “insubordination” to prison authorities, on top of the 18 years he is serving for “orchestrating mass disorder” — puts his life in danger.
In mid-December, as Atabek was transferred back to the Arkalyk prison in Kostanai region to serve the two years, his son Askar Aidarkhan wrote to international campaign groups urging them to protest against his ill treatment.
Since being jailed in 2007, Atabek has frequently been deprived of proper food and water, access to fresh air and sunlight, as well as access to sports facilities and writing materials. He has also had manuscripts confiscated.
Atabek became a dissident writer and political activist in Soviet times, and has been a vocal critic of Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev since then. In December 1986 he participated in the Zheltoksan demonstration, the first open protest against Soviet dictatorship to be held in Kazakhstan, and afterwards campaigned for the truth about those killed when the security services broke it up.
In 1992, shortly after Kazakhstan became independent, Atabek was given political asylum in Azerbaijan after publishing opposition newspapers. He returned to Kazakhstan in 1996 and since then published novels, plays and poems as well as political articles critical of the government.
Atabek’s 18-year jail sentence was imposed in 2007 after he took up the case of shanty-town dwellers at Shanyrak outside Almaty whose homes were destroyed in a violent, illegal police operation. Twenty-three other activists and shanty-town dwellers were jailed for between one and 14 years on a variety of charges.
Atabek’s family sees a pattern of protest and reaction. In 2007, the shanty-town dwellers resisted the Almaty authorities’ attempts to destroy their community — and Atabek was punished for supporting them. In 2011, oil workers in western Kazakhstan staged nine months of strikes and protests, culminating in the massacre of 16 of them by police at Zhanaozen — and retribution has been visited on politicians and media who highlighted the strikers’ plight.
Askar Aidarkhan, Atabek’s son, has said that “what is happening in Kazakhstan now [in the aftermath of the Zhanaozen massacre] follows on from what happened at Shanyrak”.
Shanyrak became a sanctuary for homeless families during the rapid expansion of Almaty in the early 2000s. It is estimated that when it was destroyed it comprised more than 2000 dwellings with up to 10,000 residents.
The notorious clearance of Shanyrak took shortly after the promulgation on 5 July 2006 of the law “On Amnesty and Legalisation of Property”. The city authorities, citing shanty-town dwellers’ failure to register their properties correctly, ordered them to leave. Atabek and other oppositionists argued that the real reason was that the authorities wanted to make the land available to property developers.
Atabek lobbied parliamentarians, wrote articles, organised petitions and reminded the shanty-town dwellers of constitutional rights that protected them. But pleas by Atabek and other activists went unheeded. The police tried to clear the shanty-town forcibly, and a violent clash ensued in which an officer died. A round-up of activists followed.
Atabek was tried and convicted in October 2007 of “orchestrating mass disorder” — despite there being no evidence that he was nearby when the clashes occurred. He was offered a pardon in exchange for admitting guilt, but he vehemently refused.
The poet has continued to write in prison, detailing illegal and inhumane prison conditions on his website, which was set up by friends and family to whom he sent his writings. He has faced constant restrictions on visitors and had manuscripts confiscated. Before his current two-year sentence solitary, Atabek served a previous two-year period in a punishment cell (February 2010 to February 2012), for refusing to wear a prison uniform and other offences against prison rules.
Atabek’s son said in an email message to friends and supporters that his father’s health is suffering, and that he feared for his father’s life after the recent on-line publication of a book by him criticising Kazakh Nursultan Nazarbayev and other powerful figures in Kazakhstan.
17 Jan 2013 | Russia
A Russian court yesterday dismissed the appeal of Maria Alekhina, one of the three members of feminist punk group Pussy Riot. Alekhina, 24, appealed to the local court asking to defer the remaining 13 months of her two year sentence until her six-year-old son, Filipp, turns 14.
Judge Galina Yefremova said that the initial ruling had taken Alekhina’s young son into account, and added that her “felony” is the reason for her son’s suffering, rather than separation from his mother. Alekhina is currently serving her sentence labouring as a seamstress in a prison colony in the Ural mountain city of Berezniki.
Alekhina has six penalties against her in the colony, but she has rejected them, as two of the offences against her were for failing to wake up at 5:30 AM. Alekhina said that she did not hear the call of the reveille, signaling the start of a day working in the colony. Staff from the prison camp testified against Alekhina during yesterday’s hearing. She was also penalised after she attempted to provide her lawyer with documents for the European Court of Human Rights in person rather than by post.
The activist was sentenced to two years in prison along with two other members Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolonnikova and Ekaterina Samutsevich on charges of hooliganism in August 2012
The trio performed a “punk prayer” against Vladimir Putin on 21 February, and charges were brought against them only days after, along with a call from the Russian Orthodox Church for more stringent punishment for blasphemy.
While Samutsevich was released on bail on 10 October, Tolokonnikova and Alekhina were sent to serve their two year sentences in prison colonies. Tolokonnikova is also a mother to a young child and has also appealed for deferment. However, a date has not yet been set for a hearing.
The charges brought against the trio drew criticism and outrage across the globe, with leading human rights organisations condemning the case for being politically motivated.
Alekhina plans to appeal the court’s ruling, but Russian courts rarely change verdicts in politically motivated cases. While unwavering in appealing her case, Alekhina refuses to plead guilty, and said yesterday “no one will ever force me into admitting guilt — not for the sake of deferment or conditional early discharge.”
16 Jan 2013 | China
After a week of protests and walkouts over a censored Near Year editorial, and rigorous calls for press freedom, journalists at China’s Southern Weekly have gone back to work. A normal edition of the paper was published last Thursday.
Outrage over the actions of Guangdong’s propaganda chief, Tuo Zhen, seemed to reach another climax when The Beijing News, an offshoot newspaper of Southern Weekly, refused to print an editorial taken from the nationalistic Global Times blaming the protests on “activists outside the media industry” instead of on the censorship apparatus.
Dai Zigeng, the editor-in-chief, was said to have nearly resigned over the editorial. However, the BBC reported this:
When the BBC visited The Beijing News offices, the chief editor’s office manager and several of the paper’s journalists issued assurances that Mr Dai was still at work. Reports that protesters were camping outside The Beijing News offices also appeared to be untrue.
The newspaper printed the directive as a news item the next day.
Maria Repnikova, an academic who writes on state-media relations at Oxford University, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that so far the Southern Weekly affair has not helped to make any waves in press freedoms here because
These journalists [at Southern Weekly] did not confront the Central Publicity Department or the Party-state in Beijing. After a few days of protest, when they quietly settled the dispute with local authorities, some netizens were outraged that they didn’t explain their decision to their supporters.
An editorial entitled Dim Hopes for a Free Press in China published on Monday in the New York Times and written by Xiao Shu, a commentator for Southern Weekly for six years, notes that ever since Tuo Zhen started overseeing the Guangdong party propaganda last May, he has “micromanaged every aspect of media operations.”
Xiao Shu went on to say that under Tuo “Guangdong retreated into its darkest period since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening up’ policies in the late 1970s.” Xiao was told to quit in March 2011, as authorities grew nervous of Arab-Spring inspired dissent.
It would seem that some of the most daring journalists in China have settled for a deal which, as Xiao Shu described, was “ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.” I asked Antony Tao, founder and blogger at Beijing Cream, a well-regarded China news blog, how credible these assertions were.
“It sounds good on paper, but I wouldn’t put much stock in ‘tacit’ agreements,” he said. “We should also keep in mind that in most Chinese newsrooms, to the best of my knowledge, editors and censors work in symbiosis to keep themselves out of trouble. No one wants to draw the ire of higher-ranking censors.”
According to Tao, a settlement was best for editors and journalists involved. As for what it means for media freedoms in China, Tao said:
“I don’t think the key players in this drama were ever as concerned about advocating for expanded media rights across China as China watchers perhaps wanted them to be.”
