Contents – Land of the Free? Trump’s war on speech at home and abroad

Contents

Has the USA, the so-called Land of the Free, become a dangerous country for those who question its government?

Such a notion is, of course, in opposition to the country’s founding principles. Enshrined in the 1791 First Amendment to the US Constitution are citizens’ fundamental freedoms – including freedom of religion, speech, the press, protest and petition. Conveniently glossing over its dark history of colonisation and slavery (whi=ch would continue for nearly a century after the First Amendment was ratified), it signified the USA as a global bastion of democracy, equality and civilised values. Now, Trump appears to be metaphorically setting fire to the paper these principles are written on.

This is having profound impacts within the USA and around the world. Trump was inaugurated for his second term only six months ago, but already he has sought to deport people for their views on Israel and Palestine; threatened universities with eye-watering financial sanctions if they do not adhere to his ideological viewpoints; slashed the budgets of state-funded broadcasters; deployed the National Guard to police protests, a tactic used by military dictatorships; and dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID), stopping the work of human rights groups globally.

In this edition, we explore these attacks on free speech at home and abroad.

Up Front

The American Nightmare: Sarah Dawood
Fundamental freedoms are being rapidly dismantled in the “land of liberty”

The Index: Mark Stimpson
A close look at upcoming elections, El Salvador and the attitudes of US border agents

Features

The forgotten Caucasus conflict: JP O’Malley
With journalism restricted, it’s not easy to get to the truth about Azerbaijan and Armenia

Attacked on all fronts in the West Bank: Sarah Dawood
A human rights lawyer who has seen Israeli prisons from the inside

Is this how it is in Somalia?: Abdalle Ahmed Mumin
Journalists criticising the government take their lives in their hands

“People are terrified to speak their minds”: Ruth Green
From a questionable offer of a Georgian literature award comes the perfect opportunity to speak out

The plight of Boualem Sansal: Clemence Manyukwe
Algeria’s answer to Orwell has found himself in a dystopian situation

Reporters branded as traitors: Margaux Blanchard
Telling the truth has become a dangerous act in Guatemala

Climate protest feels the chill: Sally Gimson
Just Stop Oil go on one final outing before hanging up their orange t-shirts

The forgotten Syrians: Mawada Bahah
Assad might have fallen, but hundreds of his critics are still locked up in Lebanon

Going underground in beijing: Murong Xuecun
Singing on the subway can quickly become an act of dissent

From protest to social post: Tiléwa Kazeem
Nigerians are taking to TikTok to voice their frustrations

Special Report: Land of the Free? - Trump's war on speech at home and abroad

American dissident: Martin Bright
Lessons in resistance from those who have been here before

Trump’s first days under scrutiny: Mark Stimpson
A whirlwind of executive orders, and the real impact for free expression

Radio silence: Rebecca L Root
Left without funding, Radio Free Asia is fighting to stay on the airwaves

Borrowing from Erdoğan’s playbook: Kaya Genç
Culture wars in the USA meet culture wars in Turkey

The war on truth: Maksym Filipenko
A new comic from a Ukrainian artist gets to the heart of US interests

Silence is survival in Haiti: Gabriella Jóźwiak
The withdrawal of USAID has left press freedom in tatters

Good news for tyrants: Danson Kahyana
Is the suspension of USAID empowering African dictators?

Land of the litigious bullies: Nik Williams
A road trip across the home of strategic lawsuits that stifle dissent

The rise of the newsfluencer: Liam Scott
Falsehoods, conspiracies and a place in the press pool

Why the UK needs to step up on international aid: Emily Couch
Freedom and human rights are being deprioritised

Befriending the Kremlin: Alexandra Domenech
When Trump and Putin cosy up, there are consequences for the world

An un-American story: Katie Dancey-Downs
Control the books, control the narrative

No power to the people: Mackenzie Argent
US universities have become battlegrounds for free speech

Comment

What we all lose when we lose LGBTQ+ rights: Matthew Beard
Hungary’s Pride event went ahead despite a ban but other spaces for freedom are shrinking

Votes for men?: Raina Lipsitz
It might be time to get the Suffragette banners out of storage

Democratic backsliding: Jemimah Steinfeld
The UK’s free speech record is shaky – but US right-wingers are looking in the wrong place

Lost in translation: Clive Priddle
The era of a less diverse USA, where international literature is turned away

Culture

Goodness Gracious Me in the age of Trump: Salil Tripathi
A new (and unofficial) scene from the hit comedy sketch show pits India against the USA

Documenting Ukraine’s war has a deadly cost: Victoria Amelina, Mark Stimpson
An exclusive extract from the war diary of a writer killed by Russia

The trouble with love: Keletso Thobega
A new anthology paints a picture of queer activism in Africa

A silent life under the Taliban: Sarah Dawood, Barin
When Afghan women are forbidden from speaking, one author writes regardless

Hamilton star on freedom’s fragility: Giles Terera
Taking centre stage to have the last word

Contents – The forgotten patients: Lost voices in the global healthcare system

Contents

Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. Before Edward Jenner’s development of the smallpox vaccination in 1796, infectious diseases and viruses killed millions. The introduction of anaesthetic gases during surgical procedures in 1846 eliminated the excruciating pain of surgery. And before Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928, people died unnecessarily from cuts and grazes.

But the benefits of modern medicine are not felt equally around the world. In this issue, we explore the forgotten patients in global healthcare settings – the marginalised groups who fall through the cracks or are actively shut out of healthcare provision, then ignored or silenced when they raise concerns.

Just like free speech, healthcare is an indisputable human right. But for many around the globe, both these rights are being removed in conjunction with each other. Through telling their stories, this edition aims to shine a light on these injustices and – we hope – empower more people to speak up for the right to health for themselves and others.

Up Front

A bitter pill to swallow: Sarah Dawood
Not all healthcare is made equal, and pointing this out can have serious consequences

The Index: Mark Stimpson
From elections in Romania to breaking encryption in the UK: a tour of the world’s most pressing free expression issues

Features

Rape, reputation and little recourse: Samridhi Kapoor, Hanan Zaffar
Indian universities have a sexual violence problem that no one is talking about

Georgian nightmare: Ruth Green
Russian-style laws are shutting down more conversations in Georgia, with academia feeling the heat

Botswana’s new era: Clemence Manyukwe
From brave lawyer to president – could the country’s new leader put human rights front and centre?

Venezuela’s prison problem: Catherine Ellis
The disputed new president has a way of dealing with critics – locking them up

Forbidden words: Salil Tripathi
The Satanic Verses is back in India’s bookshops. Or is it?

The art of resistance: Alessandra Bajec
A film, a graffiti archive and a stage play: three works changing the narrative in Tunisia

A tragic renaissance: Emily Couch
The pen is getting mightier and mightier in Ukraine

In the red zone: Alexandra Domenech
Conscription is just one of the fears of an LGBTQ+ visual artist in Russia

Demokratia dismantled: Georgios Samaras
The legacy of the Predator spyware scandal has left a dark stain on Greece

Elon musk’s year on X: Mark Stimpson
The biggest mystery about Musk: when does he sleep?

Keyboard warriors: Laura O’Connor
A band of women are fighting oppression in Myanmar through digital activism

Behind the bars of Saydnaya prison: Laura Silvia Battaglia
Unspeakable horrors unfolded at Syria’s most notorious prison, and now its survivors tell their stories

Painting a truer picture: Natalie Skowlund
Street art in one Colombian city has been sanitised beyond recognition

The reporting black hole: Fasil Aregay
Ethiopian journalists are allowed to report on new street lights, and little else

Special Report: The forgotten patients - Lost voices in the global healthcare system

Whistleblowing in an empty room: Martin Bright
Failures in England’s maternity services are shrouded in secrecy

An epidemic of corruption: Danson Kahyana
The Ugandan healthcare system is on its knees, but what does that matter to the rich and powerful?

Left speechless: Sarah Dawood
The horrors of war are leaving children in Gaza unable to speak

Speaking up to end the cut: Hinda Abdi Mohamoud
In Somalia, fighting against female genital mutilation comes at a high price

Doctors under attack: Kaya Genç
Turkey’s president is politicising healthcare, and medics are in the crosshairs

Denial of healthcare is censoring political prisoners – often permanently: Rishabh Jain, Alexandra Domenech, Danson Kahyana
Another page in the authoritarian playbook: deny medical treatment to jailed dissidents

The silent killer: Mackenzie Argent
A hurdle for many people using the UK’s National Health Service: institutional racism

Czechoslovakia’s haunting legacy: Katie Dancey-Downs
Roma women went into hospitals to give birth, and came out infertile

An inconvenient truth: Ella Pawlik
While Covid vaccines saved millions of lives, those with adverse reactions have been ignored

Punished for raising standards: Esther Adepetun
From misuse of money to misdirecting medicines, Nigerian healthcare is rife with corruption

Nowhere to turn: Zahra Joya
Life as they know it has been destroyed for women in Afghanistan, and healthcare provision is no different

Emergency in the children’s ward: Shaylim Castro Valderrama
The last thing parents of sick children expect is threats from militia

Comment

We need to talk about Sudan: Yassmin Abdel-Magied
Would “a battle of narratives” give the war more attention?

RFK Jr could be a disaster for American healthcare: Mark Honigsbaum
An anti-vaxxer has got US lives in his hands

The diamond age of death threats: Jemimah Steinfeld
When violent behaviour becomes business as usual

Free speech v the right to a fair trial: Gill Phillips
Are contempt of court laws fit for the digital age?

Culture

An unjust trial: Ariel Dorfman
A new short story imagines a kangaroo court of nightmares, where victims become defendants

Remember the past to save the future: Sarah Dawood, Diane Fahey
Published exclusively, the issues of antisemitism and colonialism are recorded through poetry

Where it’s more dangerous to carry a camera than a gun: Antonia Langford
A singer meets filmmakers in Yemen, and both take risks to tell her story

The fight for change isn’t straightforward: Shani Dhanda
The Last Word, on exclusion and intersectional discrimination

Telling fact from fiction

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This well-known philosophical question most likely stems from the work of 18th century philosopher George Berkeley, who questioned the possibility of “unperceived existence”. In other words – did something really happen if no one is around to witness or perceive it?

This might seem a lofty and pretentious way to start this week’s Index newsletter. But the first-hand observance and subsequent documentation of events is the fundamental basis of rigorous journalism, and enables injustices to be accurately reported around the world. It provides us with the ability to understand truth from falsehood. And it is being increasingly undermined.

Journalistic “black holes” are appearing in conflicts globally, stopping the world from being able to witness what is happening on the ground, and therefore causing us to question reality.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, triggered by Hamas's incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has banned foreign media access in Gaza. Only very limited international news crews are allowed in under strict conditions. This has left the world reliant on press statements, the words of government officials, and individual Palestinian journalists, who have risked their lives to showcase the brutality of the war on social media.

And many have lost their lives in the process. According to investigations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), as of 4 October 2024, at least 127 journalists and media workers are among the more than 42,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis killed since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since the organisation started gathering data in 1992. The CPJ has determined that at least five of these journalists were directly targeted.

Major broadcasters have also been targeted. Last month, Al Jazeera’s office in the West Bank was raided and shut down for 45 days by Israeli soldiers, following the closure of the channel’s East Jerusalem office in May, on claims that they are a threat to Israel’s national security. But as Al Jazeera English’s Gaza correspondent Youmna El Sayed writes for Index this week, such shutdowns of legitimate news providers prevent global audiences from being able to see the pain and suffering that is being endured by both Palestinians and Israelis, encouraging misinformation to propagate.

As hostilities escalate across the Middle East, news channels continue to be curtailed. This week, an air strike destroyed the headquarters of the religious al-Sirat TV station in Beirut, Lebanon, on grounds that it was being used to store Hezbollah weapons, a claim which Hezbollah denies. Foreign correspondents are, however, still allowed in Lebanon - but in Iran all broadcasting is controlled by the state, with foreign journalists barred, meaning access to objective reporting is essentially impossible.

Outside of the region, other countries’ severe reporting restrictions and intimidation of journalists have made it difficult for global audiences to comprehend what is happening in conflicts. This includes Kashmir, the disputed mountainous region between India and Pakistan, and Sudan, where it is estimated that 90% of the country’s media infrastructure has been wiped out by the civil war.

What is the impact of this? The worrying rise in press suppression not only creates huge risks for journalists, but severely curtails people’s ability to understand geopolitics, conflict, and in future, historical events. It stops us from being able to weigh things up and form opinions based on what we have perceived.

Ultimately, it is impossible for any news producer, whether they be an individual correspondent or a major broadcaster, to be truly “objective”. People are driven by motives, both emotional and financial, and their own lived experiences. A news organisation, backed by a particular country or group, will appear truthful to some and severely biased to others.

But the only way to ensure some level of objectivity is to retain access to a broad range of sources, from the BBC to Al Jazeera, helping us form a more rounded world view. To go back to Berkeley’s philosophical analysis, the only way to verify the truth is to have the privilege of witnessing the evidence. Without this, it becomes virtually impossible to be able to tell fact from fiction.

New magazine Atar fills information void in Sudan

Atar, a digital magazine distributed via email and WhatsApp, first came to my attention late last October. I was in a dimly lit New York cafe, warmed by the company of a group of Sudanese diaspora; artists, activists, journalists, nursing hot teas and wounded souls. As it often does, the question of obtaining high quality Sudani news bubbled up. “Have you heard about Atar yet?’ someone asked. I hadn’t, yet. But this interaction was instructive. With their formal website still under construction, word-of-mouth was one of the main ways this weekly Arabic (bi-monthly English) magazine was being found.

An initiative of the non-for-profit Sudan Facts Center for Journalism Services - founded by veteran journalist Arif Elsaui - Atar began publishing on 12 October 2023, six months into the war against civilians in Sudan. Co-managing director Amar Jamal told Index it was a project borne of necessity.

“We had been talking about theory for a long time,” Jamal said. “But with the current situation, we realised there won’t be any more media outlets in Sudan left.”

Sudan Facts Center had been running fellowships for young professional journalists, but the crisis spurred them into pushing forward with their greater ambitions. “If we were going to wait until the perfect conditions, we would be waiting a long time. Let us start, and improve as we go along,” Jamal noted.

Since October, the Atar team has produced 28 Arabic editions and four in English. Inspired by The Continent, another popular African digital news magazine, Atar - with the tagline “Sudan in Perspective” - is currently distributed through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal and email.

“There hasn’t been a day when our distribution list hasn’t grown,” Jamal said.

Stories range from investigations into “Sudan’s labyrinth of torture centres” to the stories of those fleeing the war north through Egypt. Early editions reported on the daily experiences of Sudanese people during the conflict, how they “eat, drink and sleep” and their “daily heroism”, while more recent releases focus on the mutual aid infrastructure keeping people alive.

Not only was the content of the story important to get right, Jamal said, but the voice and tone of the publication was given thorough consideration.

“We stay away from tragic language. While we are writing about death, we write about it with heroism.” Not necessarily out of a desire to give readers hope, “but to give people an encouraging word”.

Atar began with three editors in Nairobi - Arif Elsaui, Amar Jamal and Mohammed Alsadiq - and four correspondents. The first releases were focused on the written word, delivering vital information via dense blocks of text, not unlike the traditional Sudanese newspaper. But this model changed after the team took stock 10 weeks into the project. Over the new year period, “we took a break to review the structure and design, expand our pool of reporters, institutionalise the project so it wouldn’t fail,” Amar said.

Today, Atar is delivered by 24 reporters and seven editors. The growth is palpable, not only in the range of stories, but in their design. The structure and voice of Atar is unique, deliberately so. “This is not a newspaper, delivering daily stories,” Amar makes clear. Atar is focused on analysis, curation, about showing the verification and the context for your average reader to make sense of unfolding events.

“The need for a newspaper has changed in the age of social media,” said Jamal, noting that in an age of camera phones, the recording of events has been democratised.

“What is needed now is the verification and context. That is our ambition. Respecting the intellect of the Sudanese reader, and presenting material that yes, might be difficult, but it has value. The value it has is in its truth.”

Atar is providing a home for fact-based news in a prohibitive information landscape. There are few players in Sudan today, fewer still after the state suspended operations of three satellite channels this April, Saudi state-owned broadcasters Al Arabiya and Al Hadath and UAE-owned Sky News Arabia.

“All of the correspondents that we began with have had to leave the country,” Amar admitted. “It’s very difficult to write from the inside.” But difficult is not impossible, and Atar consistently manages to publish original stories from the ground.

“Sometimes, stories are written under the Atar byline to protect the journalist,” Jamal said, describing how their local correspondents find ways to contact sources and file stories even in the most challenging circumstances. “Even when the internet was cut off,” he said. “You just adjust your investigative style.”

Atar’s popularity now means that they are regularly approached by writers, reporters and potential sources as an outlet for news, with some sending in fully written pieces for publication. Atar pride themselves on having an open-door policy, allowing anyone to submit material via phone or email, but only work that goes through their fact-checking system will be included in the magazine. The volume of engagement and interest is a “scream from the people,” Jamal said. Even a 14-year-old girl sent a piece with some news. These are people’s voices who are not heard and Atar wants to be a home for them.

Such grounded local reporting cultivates intense loyalty and support, such as in the case of the small island of Dagarti. “It has maybe only 300, 400 inhabitants,” Jamal said. “Nobody had written about these people before. But when our journalist went to do a follow-up story, she said the whole island waits for Thursday so they can read Atar.”

What next for Atar? The team has big ambitions. Their English-language edition was always part of the plan, because “it isn’t just the Sudanese reader that cares about Sudan.” They have recently moved into a new, larger office in Nairobi, with talk of a live studio arm, events and more. Their approach is experimental, and with enough funding in the bank for the moment, Jamal is excited about the future.

Jamal is not the only one. If this is what the Sudanese people can do in the most inhospitable of circumstances, imagine the possibilities once the war is over.

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