21 Aug 20 | News and features, Opinion
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114590″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]August is meant to be a quiet month for news. But this month has been anything but quiet.
Every day the world has been exposed to a new and sustained attack on our basic human rights. In every corner of the world, our collective rights to free expression and our freedom of association seem to be under siege. And for too many, the most basic of our human rights – our right to life, to live in peace – is, too often, not considered a right at all by those who will use any tool at their disposal to retain their power and the status quo.
It seems that at any given time, there is always at least one government, one repressive regime or a non-state actor using their power to remove the rights of citizens.
The results are heart-breaking to watch and devastating for the families that are torn apart and left scared and isolated.
This week alone, we have seen images of a teenager from Sudan who drowned as he tried to get to the UK to plead asylum – a 16-year-old who was fleeing war and a military regime.
In Russia, the leader of the opposition, Alexei Navalny, is in a coma after reportedly being poisoned as he travelled back to Moscow. His wife is being refused access to his hospital bed.
The first-hand account from a Uighur teacher who had been exposed to the Xinjiang concentration camps was published this week. It is a harrowing personal testimony of a genocide.
In Hong Kong, the impact of the national security law continues to be felt far and wide with arrests and intimidation now being deployed to silence dissenters. And its reach is now being felt outside of China. On university campuses around the world, professors and academics are starting to consider the impact their teaching will have on Chinese students. Knowledge has become a vulnerability for too many Chinese students as they return to Hong Kong. Seats of academic enlightenment and learning are having to change what they teach and how they teach it in order to protect their students – this is not acceptable.
And of course, we have followed in horror what is happening in Belarus, on European soil, as Lukashenko refuses to leave office and hold free and fair elections. Journalists arrested, protestors tortured and artists and musicians sacked for standing up to the regime.
These are the stories which have held the news cycle and grabbed our attention. However, for each example I cite there are a further dozen cases of tyranny that need to be exposed and challenged, in every corner of the earth. And yet, woven through each of these affronts to our basic rights is a single thread of brave men and women who refuse to be silenced. A cadre of freedom fighters determined to protect their rights and ours. They do not know each other and they likely never will meet but they are fighting the same fight. They are holding back the tide of tyranny and they are risking everything to do so.
The question for all of us is what can we do to help? How can we support people on the other side of the world as they stand up to tyrants? How can we make sure they know that we stand with them?
At Index, it is our role but also our responsibility to stand with them. To tell their stories, to publish their work, to make sure that the world knows what is happening to them. But to do that we need your help. We need your support, emotional and of course financial. Behind each of these headlines is a person, a family, a life. Their lives are as valuable as ours but their journeys are at the moment just too hard. To support them we need your help – please donate to Index, just a five pounds a month will enable us to tell someone else’s story.[/vc_column_text][vc_btn title=”Donate to Index” color=”danger” size=”lg” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fregular-donation-form%2F%3Famt%3D%25C2%25A35|||”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You might also like to read” category_id=”13527″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
11 Aug 20 | Covid 19 and freedom of expression, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114537″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Cartoonists are “the canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to media freedom. That, at least, is the view of multiple award-nominated Belgian cartoonist Steven Degryse, better known to his readers as Lectrr.
If so there is certainly something wrong in the mine. According to the Cartoonists Rights Network International, there have been more than twice the number of attacks against cartoonists between the months of March and May this year than there normally are, and the reason? It is a dangerous combination of restrictive legislation enacted because of the Covid pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism, frayed tempers, and offended individuals with powerful platforms.
Early on in the crisis, Lectrr’s cartoon of a Chinese flag with biohazard symbols instead of stars drew sharp criticism.
“I started to receive a lot of hate mail on my social media, most of it in Chinese, and a lot by fake accounts and manufactured texts. After a while I also received a death threat by one of the accounts,” said Lectrr.
While he did not feel pressured by the negative reactions, not all cartoonists share this sentiment. Australian cartoonist Badiucao received a death threat from a Twitter user following the publication of his Wuhan Diary; likewise, Mahmoud Abbas and his family’s location was shared on social media following the publication of his oil crisis cartoon that sparked a smear campaign against him as well as death threats.
Terry Anderson, executive director of Cartoonists Rights Network International, says that in countries where democracy is weak or entirely absent, legislation that is said to be in the name of monitoring false information about coronavirus is “actually being used to detain critics who…aren’t pleased with how the situation is being handled in their country”. Anderson said, “Authoritarianism, isolationism, and exceptionalism are pretexts by those who have an inclination to curtail freedoms…under the auspices of protecting public health, protecting from misinformation and disinformation, from fake news, and so on.”
Lectrr said there has been a rise in both violence and legislation that prohibits criticism of the government, or that the government deems seditious in countries “where we see the rise of autocratic leaders…[like] Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, and Francken who constantly bash or criminalize journalists and cartoonists with their followers”.
This is something that the Index on Censorship has been acutely aware of. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been more than 200 violations of media freedom which we have reported on an interactive map, in conjunction with our partners at Justice for Journalists Foundation.
For example, Brazilian president Bolsonaro suspended the deadline for when his government must respond to a request for access to information in an attempt to prevent the public from accessing government records; a study in Hungary found that public information on the coronavirus pandemic has been centralised and restricted in an attempt to control the pandemic’s narrative; and in the United States, the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health has ordered faculty doctors not to speak with reporters about Covid-19 without express approval from the Office of Communications and Marketing under threat of termination. These legislative and regulatory attacks on media freedom have affected journalists and cartoonists by preventing their access to pertinent information, and therefore curtailing criticism of respective governments. However, government regulation of media is not the only type of violence that cartoonists have had to endure.
With billions of people around the world in lockdown, media content has been at the forefront of everyone’s mind. People are constantly on the news—newspapers, social media, televised reports—and right along with the daily news is a critical cartoon.
Anderson said, “Because so many things in their common life are gone, people are consuming information in a much higher quantity, so when a news story breaks, everyone is paying attention. If there’s a cartoon that pisses people off, it’s going to piss off far more people far more quickly.”
Lectrr’s cartoon was one of many that upset powerful people.
In the early months of 2020, “there was a rash of diplomats specifying cartoons that they took umbrage with…when a diplomat, somebody with an enormous platform and prestige singles out an individual practitioner, it’s an open invitation to harassment,” said Anderson. “The majority are state actors: governments, police forces, and military.”
When cartoonists, who are often freelance artists, are targeted by someone as powerful as a diplomat, they become the eye of public dissent, and as a result, become victims of smear campaigns, death threats, and, in some cases, violent, physical attacks.
Usually, a cartoonist or journalist can be silenced in the EU with the “brutal intimidation…of lawyers. Cartoonists and journalists often don’t have the means to go into lengthy trials, so even when they are right…they often don’t stand a chance against powerful enemies,” according to Lectrr.
These kinds of defamation cases run “dry the resources of cartoonists,” he continued, but in the age of the coronavirus, the most effective way to silence a cartoonist seems to be by putting them in the centre of a storm of loyal, angry, low-patience supporters, bypassing the need to spend money on a trial, and instead using a sea of threats to intimidate and silence cartoonists.
This Covid-inspired attack on cartoonists has led some media outlets to conclude that cartoons and cartoonists are a problem, Anderson stated.
“It’s a strange thing, just five years after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, to see so many places saying, ‘yeah, we’ll just do without—we won’t have cartoons.’”
Although a world without cartoons feels more imminent now during the clash of authoritarian leaders and a deadly virus, Lectrr warns that “where cartoonism [sic] is in decline, so is freedom of speech, or even democracy.”
What happens to a society when freedom of speech is regulated, or worse, eradicated, by governments? And how close are we to that edge?
Read more about Index on Censorship’s mapping media freedom during Covid-19 project. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You might also enjoy reading” category_id=”40456″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
06 Aug 20 | News and features
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A screenshot of Merdan Ghappar from the video he filmed on his phone from a Chinese prison
In a video clip that went viral yesterday, Uighur model Merdan Ghappar doesn’t speak. But he doesn’t need to – the footage says enough. Shot by Ghappar himself from inside a prison cell, he moves the camera with one hand and reveals his other to be handcuffed to a bed. Ghappar is confined to a tiny room with mesh and bars on a window. His clothes are dirty as are the walls, and his face carries an expression of anguish and exhaustion.
Ghappar is incarcerated in one of China’s notorious prisons for Uighurs, the Muslim population who live in the far western province of Xinjiang. The Uighurs, with their Islamic faith, Turkic language and ties to the cultures of central Asia, have long been viewed by the Chinese state with suspicion and have faced discrimination. Following two brutal attacks against pedestrians and commuters in Beijing in 2013 and in Kunming in 2014, which were blamed on Uighur separatists, this suspicion has morphed into systematic oppression.
Estimates suggest more than one million Uighurs are now incarcerated in a network of prisons across the region. China initially denied the existence of the prisons, then acknowledged them but said they were re-education camps established to counter extremism in the province. The state denies Uighurs are being used as forced labour and denies rumours of torture and other abuses. The camps are also winding down, the state has recently said.
It can be hard to probe the official Chinese party line: foreign media is pretty much banned from Xinjiang. Reporters who have been there have found their visas revoked, such as Buzzfeed’s China bureau chief Megha Rajagopalan, who was forced to leave China in 2018. Rajagopalan had reported extensively on the crackdown in Xinjiang. When media is allowed in, as the BBC has been, the visits are highly controlled and staged.
But with each passing week and month evidence that directly contradicts the party line finds its way into the outside world; shipments of human hair products from Xinjiang reach New York; drone footage of rows of people queuing, shackled and blindfolded, for trains appears; testimonies of sterilisation of Uighur women emerge. And now Merdan Ghappar’s video. It might be the most significant piece of evidence yet.
Sure it does not come close to showing the real horror of the camps, but it does something else. It personalises the Uighurs’ plight. We see his face; we look into his eyes. And through his video and the reports that have emerged around it we learn his own, unique story.
We know that Ghappar studied dance at Xinjiang Arts University and worked as a dancer before he became a successful model. We know that in 2009, he moved away from Xinjiang in search of other opportunities in China’s wealthier eastern cities. We know, from his relatives, that he was told to downplay his Uighur identity and refer to his facial features as “half-European” if he wanted to get ahead in his career. And we know that he was also apparently unable to register the apartment he bought with his own money in his own name, instead having to use the name of a Han Chinese friend. We know that throughout this period Ghappar was in regular touch with his uncle, Abdulhakim Ghappar, who fled China after his activism in Xinjiang made him a target (in 2009, for example, he handed out flyers ahead of a large-scale protest in the city of Urumqi), and that while his uncle says Ghappar is not political, his ties to his uncle might explain why he became a target.
We know that in August 2018 he was arrested and sentenced to 16 months in prison for selling cannabis, a charge many believe is false. We know he was released in November 2019, but that soon after police told him he needed to return to Xinjiang to complete a routine registration procedure and that there “he may need to do a few days of education at his local community”.
We know that on 15 January, his friends and family brought clothes and his phone to the airport where he boarded a flight and was escorted by two officers back to his home city of Kucha. And most significantly, we know that he somehow managed to not only keep, but use his phone and from this reveal some details of his own incarceration (initially in a squalid, unsanitary prison jail where he was surrounded by the sounds of other inmates screaming; later in the facility shown in the new video he says his “whole body is covered in lice”).
But we don’t know where he is today. Ghappar’s messages have stopped. No one has heard from him and authorities have not provided notification of his whereabouts.
There is an increasingly loud chorus of calls for what is happening in Xinjiang to be labelled a genocide – and this could definitely change how the international community responds to the situation. But as history has proved even if it is officially termed a genocide will it force us, on an individual level at least, to act differently?
Comparisons to the Holocaust come easily and one line of defence there, which has come up again and again, is that people didn’t act because people “didn’t know”. But that’s historically contested given how ubiquitous the camps were. There was a reason people on arrival at Auschwitz tried to rouge their cheeks to appear healthy – they knew.
What some historians have argued, though, which could partly explain the inaction of many, is that while people might have known, they didn’t understand. The truth was simply too abhorrent to fathom. And without understanding they didn’t truly know.
And that’s why Ghappar’s video and story is so important. As was the case with Anne Frank, and indeed recently with George Floyd, sometimes you need a face, a singular experience, to relate to the suffering of the whole. Stories that are granular touch people in ways that the bigger picture cannot always. News of the ill treatment of Uighurs is not new and yet within hours of Ghappar’s video circulating, crowds began protesting outside the Chinese Embassy in London.
Ghappar has made the Uighur suffering feel much more real and more personal. He could be our brother, our son, our neighbour, our friend. He’s not just a number or a news headline; he’s a face and a name. Let’s learn that name and tell his story. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
