01 Apr 22 | Hungary, News and features, Uncategorized
LGBTQI rights. Gender equality. Media freedom. The fate of liberties in Hungary hang in the balance as the nation heads to the polls on Sunday. With a falling currency, a mismanaged response to the pandemic still fresh to mind and a stronger opposition under United For Hungary – a coalition of six parties spanning the political spectrum – the election campaign has been the closest in years. But the war in Ukraine, right on Hungary’s border, has changed its course in unexpected ways. Below we’ve picked the most important things to consider when it comes to the April 2022 elections.
Basic rights could worsen
Since his election in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has whittled away fundamental rights in the country to the extent that Hungarian activist Dora Papp told Index in 2019 free expression had no more space “to worsen”.
Orban’s main targets have been people who identify as LGBTQI. Last year, amid global outcry, he passed a law that bans the dissemination of content in schools deemed to promote homosexuality and gender change. Seeking approval for this legislation, Hungary is holding a referendum on sexual orientation workshops in schools this Sunday alongside the parliamentary elections.
Orban also takes aim at the nation’s Roma and immigrants, and has revived old anti-Semitic tropes in his attacks on George Soros, a Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist who Orban claims is plotting to flood the country with migrants (an accusation Soros firmly denies).
As for half of the population, Orban’s macho-style leadership manifests in rhetoric on women that is dismissive, insulting and focuses on traditional roles. Asked in 2015 why there were no women in his cabinet, he replied that few women could deal with the stress of politics. That’s just one example. The list goes on.
His populist politics have seeped into every democratic institution and effectively dismantled them. The constitution, the judiciary and municipal councils have all been reorganised to serve the interests of Orban. Education, both higher and lower, has seen huge levels of interference. Progressive teachers and classes have been removed. Even the Billy Elliot musical was cancelled after Orban called the show a propaganda tool for homosexuality.
But the media can’t freely report much of this
In response to claims of media-freedom erosion, the Hungarian government likes to point out that there are no journalists in jail in Hungary, nor have any been murdered on Orban’s watch. But as we know only too well there are many ways to cook an egg. Through gaining control of public media, concentrating private media in the hands of Orban allies and creating a hostile environment for the remaining independent media (think misinformation laws and constant insults), the attacks come from every other angle. Orban has even been accused of using Pegasus, the invasive spyware behind the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi, to target investigative journalists.
It’s little wonder then that in 2021 Reporters Without Borders labelled Orban a “press freedom predator”, the only one to make the list from the EU.
As election day approaches the attacks continue. In February, for example, pro-government daily Magyar Nemzet said it had obtained recordings showing that NGOs linked to Soros were “manipulating” international press coverage of Hungary, a claim instantly rejected by civil society groups.
Ukraine War has shifted the narrative, for better and worse
Given Orban’s track-record on rights, it comes as no surprise that he’s the closest EU ally of Vladimir Putin. This wasn’t a great look before 24 February and it’s even less so today, as the opposition are keen to highlight. They are pushing Orban hard on his neutral stance, which has seen him simultaneously open Hungary’s borders to Ukrainian refugees and oppose sanctions and the sending of weapons.
But Orban is playing his hand well. Fears of becoming embroiled in the war appear to be stronger in Hungary than anger at Putin’s aggression, many analysts says. Orban is claiming a vote for him is a vote for stability and neutrality, while a vote for the opposition is a vote for war. He’s even tried to cast his February visit to Moscow as a “peace mission”.
And though he has condemned the invasion, he has yet to say anything bad about Putin himself. Worse still, Hungarian media is blasting out Russian propaganda. Pundits, TV stations and print outlets are pushing out lines like the war was caused by NATO’s aggressive acts toward Russia, Russian troops have occupied Ukraine’s nuclear plants to protect them and the Ukrainian government is full of Nazis.
Anything else?
Yes. Orban met with a coalition of Europe’s far-right in Spain at the start of the year. They discussed the possibility of a Europe-wide alliance. What that looks like now in a post-Ukraine world is hard to tell. We’d rather not see.
Then there’s the fact that Serbia also goes to the polls Sunday. Like Orban, the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), led by president Aleksandar Vučić, has been unnerved by growing opposition. Also like Orban, they’re close to Putin and using the Ukraine war to their advantage – reminding people of the 1999 Kosovo war when NATO launched a three-month air strike. Orban and Vučić have developed close ties and will no doubt be buoyed up by each other’s victories should that happen on Sunday.
So will the Hungary elections be free and fair?
If the 2018 elections are anything to go by, they will be “free but not fair”, the conclusion of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), who partially monitored the 2018 election process. That’s the optimistic take. Others are fearful they will be neither free nor fair, so much so that a grassroots civic initiative called 20K22 has recruited more than 20,000 ballot counters – two for each of Hungary’s voting precincts – to be stationed at polling centres on election day with the aim of stopping any voting irregularities.
News from yesterday isn’t confidence-boosting either. Hungarian election officials reported a suspected case of voter fraud to the police. Bags full of completed ballots were found at a rubbish dump in north-western Romania, home to a large Hungarian minority who have the right to vote in Hungary’s elections. Images and videos shared by the opposition featured partially burnt ballots marked to support them. As of writing, no details have been provided of the actual perpetrators and their motives, and Orban has been quick to accuse the opposition of being behind the incident. Either way, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
01 Apr 22 | 50 years of Index, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine
Sir Trevor Phillips and Jonathan Dimbleby. Photo: Mark Frary
First I need to apologise, I should have written this blog last month but events in Ukraine have dominated all of our thoughts. But honestly the Russian invasion has caused the team at Index to not just react to the ongoing war but also think a great deal about our heritage and the similarities between events today and those that led to our founding.
For avid followers of our work it shouldn’t surprise you that the Index family have been delving into our history in recent months. Although we were launched as a British charity in 1971, the first edition of our award winning magazine wasn’t published until 1972. So on Tuesday March 15th we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Index on Censorship magazine. And launched our souvenir edition of the magazine – reflecting on the last 50 years as well as looking forward to the new challenges we face.
Given the collective horrors of Covid-19 and Ukraine it was actually a joy to be able to come together. There was birthday cake, the odd glass of fizz and genuinely wonderful conversations with the people who collectively built our organisation. Conversations about our history and Index’s contribution to media, academic and artist freedom around the world during our half century dominated the chat. The extended Index family has made so many contributions to the society we cherish, protecting the core human right of free expression. From campaigning against libel tourism and SLAPPs to publishing the work of some of the most important dissidents of the last five decades.
The highlight of our birthday party was listening to our current Chair, Sir Trevor Phillips, discuss the historic and current challenges to freedom of expression around the world with our former Chair, Jonathan Dimbleby. Their collective contribution to media and academic freedoms are numerous and have been vital to protect these most basic of freedoms both in the UK and further afield.
In the midst of a war on European soil and the likely beginnings of a new Cold War, being able to reflect on our beginnings was both timely and heartbreaking. In the months ahead the professional staff at Index will again be refocusing our work on the areas that led to our founding from Ukraine to Belarus, Russia to China. We never stopped providing a platform for the persecuted in each of these countries but our work will need a renewed focus as we strive to make sure that those being persecuted by increasingly repressive regimes have a voice.
If you are interested in our history, you will want to read the 50th anniversary of our magazine.
01 Apr 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Oleksandra Matviichuk is head of the Centre for Civil Liberties in Kyiv. She recorded this video for Index on Censorship to appeal to the international community to act over Russian abuses of free expression in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russian troops since 24 February. She is particularly concerned with beatings and abductions of protesters and journalists in cities in the southeast of the country and names Khakova, Mariupol, Kherson and Berdyansk in her powerful testimony.
Index has been working closely with members of the Ukrainian media and civil society since the outbreak of the conflict. It is our intention to build a network of journalists, writers and artists in Ukraine itself and in the diaspora to help keep the outside world informed.
Index was inspired by dissidents in Russia and Czechoslovakia who protested against the Soviet invasion of 1968. We are proud to stand by those who continue to fight for freedom of expression in Ukraine today.
29 Mar 22 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
Celebrated Ukrainian author Andrei Kurkov. Photo: Juerg Vollmer
After five days of silence, my friend, a writer, journalist, and historian in occupied Melitopol, finally sent me a message. I’d been afraid something had happened to her, that I would never hear from her again. But, thank God, it turned out that she’d simply had no internet access or telephone reception. I asked her to keep a diary of life under occupation, to take photos on her smartphone, and to send all that to me. I would keep it safe. The original diary could then be destroyed.
She’s been living under occupation for more than two weeks and doesn’t set foot outside, for fear of being captured. The director of the Melitopol History Museum, Leyla Ibragimova, a Crimean Tatar, has already been kidnapped. They terrorised her, interrogated her, confiscated her and her family’s phones and computers — then released her. The next morning they picked her up for another interrogation. Activists and journalists are disappearing in the occupied territories. FSB agents walk the streets with lists of names and addresses in hand. These lists were prepared before the start of the war.
Oleg Baturin, a journalist from Kakhovka, was abducted by the Russian military. Eventually, he was released — after eight days of beatings and torture, of demands to go over to the Russian side, of hunger and thirst, of humiliation. Those who beat him hid their faces and forbade him to raise his head and look at them. Is this today’s Russia? Yes. But it is also the Soviet Union of the 1930s. These are the practices of the Gulag. The Ukrainian author Stanislav Aseyev wrote an entire book about the torture camp in Donetsk. After two years of captivity in this camp and in the prison run by separatists, he had plenty of material. He studied closely those who beat and abused Ukrainian prisoners of war and others who had been seized on the streets and brought to this already infamous concentration camp, called “Isolation.” Years ago, the place had been a factory for the manufacture of insulation for electrical wires. Later, under the same name, it became a contemporary art centre. When the separatists, aided by the Russian military, captured Donetsk, they converted it into a concentration camp, with a set of chambers in which all their detainees were tortured. Stanislav Aseyev’s book has already appeared in several languages, including English. I highly recommend it to anyone who seeks to better understand what went on and continues to go on in the separatist “republics” since 2014. And now the same things are happening in the territories occupied by the Russian army.
We’re well into 2022. Books about what is happening now in Ukraine are already being written, but are not yet published.
The unsuccessful attempt to annex or, to put it plainly, occupy all of Ukraine has angered Putin and now, judging by the military actions of the Russian army, Russian generals have been ordered to destroy cities and villages, to kill civilians, and simply to make sure that Ukraine ceases to exist.
This is not the first attempt to destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. In the late 1920s, Ukrainian peasants refused to join collective farms, and for this the Soviet government deported 250,000 families to Siberia. In 1932-1933, as punishment for the same individualism and unwillingness to become part of Soviet collective agriculture, all reserves of wheat and, indeed, all sources of nourishment were confiscated from Ukrainian peasants, leaving them with no food for the winter. Some seven million Ukrainians perished during this artificial famine organised by Moscow.
In those same years, the Soviet government decided to destroy Ukrainian culture. Nearly all the country’s leading writers, poets, and playwrights were arrested, sent to Solovki in the north of Russia, and shot. In Ukrainian literary history, the authors of this period are referred to as the “Executed Renaissance.” These people had tried to revive Ukrainian culture after decades of official prohibitions on the use of the Ukrainian language and on anything distinctly Ukrainian in tsarist Russia. Soviet communists had decided that the revival of Ukrainian culture posed a danger to the Soviet Union. And alongside the writers, poets, and playwrights they executed, the NKVD also shot many artists and theatre directors. The works of Mykhaylo Semenko (1892-1937), Maik Yohansen (1895-1937), Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), and dozens of other Ukrainian writers killed in that purge could only be published again after the collapse of the USSR.
Today’s Ukrainian intellectuals face the same danger. That goes for writers and journalists and historians. Anyone who believes that Ukraine should remain independent and become part of Europe is already an enemy of Russia. Culture is what cements a nation. Ukrainian culture has only just begun to revive after 70 years of Soviet rule, 70 years of censorship and persecution.
But today that culture and its representatives are the targets of Russian bombers. The attacks on Kyiv have killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famed actress Oksana Shvets. Near Kyiv, in the village of Bucha — home to a number of writers and composers— Oleksandr Kislyuk, a well-known translator from Ancient Greek and other languages, a teacher at the Theological Academy, and a professor at the Drahomanov Pedagogical University, was shot by Russian soldiers on the threshold of his house. It is thanks to him that Ukrainians can read the works of Aristotle, Tacitus, Thomas Aquinas, and other classic authors in their own language.
Now Oleksandr Kislyuk has been murdered and one wonders who will finish the translations he was working on in his final days.
Among those killed in this war are at least three painters. There are also photographers and scientists, musicians and architects, schoolteachers and university professors.
For almost a month, now, Russian bombers have been aiming directly at schools and universities, theatres and libraries.
Near Kyiv, in the village of Ivankiv, a bomb hit a historical museum that housed the works of famous Ukrainian primitive artist Maria Prymachenko (1909-1997). While the museum burned, locals carried her paintings out of the fire. Now those canvases are kept in the homes of people who live next to the ruined museum.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture has sent an order to all museums to prepare their exhibits for evacuation to Western Ukraine. Some museums managed to pack up their collections, others simply lowered them into basements and underground rooms. But none have so far been evacuated. The most important thing is to evacuate people from cities under constant bombardment and artillery fire.
For two weeks, Ukrainian writers tried to extract their colleague, the Russophone prose writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko, from the village of Klavdiyevo, which was practically destroyed by the Russian army. He is a refugee twice over. First, in 2014, he had to leave his apartment in Donetsk. Since then, he and his wife had been living in Klavdiyevo, at the dacha of the Ukrainophone writer and translator Andriy Bondar. Klavdiyevo has been all but flattened by Russian artillery and is surrounded by their tanks. Volodymyr and his wife spent more than a week in the basement of a half-collapsed house. At long last, they managed to break out of encirclement and volunteers took them to Kyiv.
Kyiv is also being hit by rockets, but not so intensively. The chances of survival are greater in Kyiv. There, in his apartment near the railway station, the publisher Mykola Kravchenko* sits at his table and works. He’s editing a novel by a young woman from Lutsk, titled Porcelain Doll. The novel concerns domestic violence. He knows that he won’t be able to publish it anytime soon, but he continues to work in order to preserve his psychological balance, in order to think less about the war.
Yet the war, including the violent attack on Ukrainian cultural heritage, continues. The number of bombed-out churches is already in the tens.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Culture is still at work and every day its employees collect new information about the historical sites and cultural institutions destroyed by the Russian army.
The list of Russia’s crimes against Ukrainian culture is constantly being updated.
* Editor’s note: Not the Ukrainian political figure of the same name who died in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
