10 May 2024 | Africa, News and features, 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.
16 Apr 2024 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
In January this year, when Raqib Hameed Naik received a notice from X (formerly Twitter) that Hindutva Watch was blocked on the platform by order of the country’s ruling Hindu–nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he was not surprised. The government had submitted more than 28 legal requests to X in the past two years, seeking removal of Watch’s posts. As well as the X account being blocked in India, the Hindutva Watch website was, and is, also inaccessible in the country.
“While shocking, it’s not surprising, considering Prime Minister Modi regime’s history of suppressing free press & critical voices,” Naik wrote on X on 16 January in reaction to the ban.
Naik, a journalist reporting on conflict and marginalisation of minorities, founded and runs US-based independent research project Hindutva Watch, which tracks hate crimes by right–wing Hindus against Muslims, Christians and members of the historically oppressed castes in India. The website of India Hate Lab, another initiative by Naik that is exclusively dedicated to tracking hate speech in India, has also been rendered inaccessible in the country.
Various law enforcement agencies have frequently attempted to erase Hindutva Watch and India Hate Lab’s documentation of hate crime and speech towards minorities, primarily on the pretext of violating India’s controversial Information Technology (IT) Act 2000, though the government never clarified which specific laws were violated by the two websites.
The IT Act grants authorities the power to block access to information under the guise of safeguarding India’s “sovereignty, integrity, and security”. In 2022, the country’s Supreme Court invalidated a provision of the Act which empowered the government to prosecute individuals for sharing “offensive” messages online. Various governments, irrespective of political affiliations, had misused the provision to detain ordinary civilians critical of the government.
Hailing from the conflict-ridden India-administered Jammu and Kashmir, Naik started working as a journalist in 2014. He said it was evident for him from the beginning of his career that the government was vindictive against journalists and media outlets who reported critically on them, especially from sensitive areas like Kashmir. The situation, he believes, is worse for journalists from minority communities.
“The assault on the pillars of free press, coupled with the anti–minority policies and generation of an atmosphere grounded in hate and violence towards minority communities, profoundly affected me, as a Kashmiri Muslim journalist,” he told Index.
Naik’s fears were not unfounded. Initially covering political conflict and human rights in Kashmir and later on religious minorities and Hindu nationalism in India, he was among the handful of journalists who was able to report on the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy by the BJP in 2019 amidst a tight curfew and communication blockade, including internet shutdowns for several months in the Himalayan valley.
As Naik’s reporting on Kashmir’s unrest gained international recognition, it also landed him in trouble. He faced questioning from the country’s intelligence officers and frequent inquiries from the police about his whereabouts and work, putting pressure on his family.
“It’s pure harassment but also a debilitating feeling,” said Naik, who is currently in the USA, since fleeing India in 2020 as the death threats and harassment for his reporting ramped up.
“Four years have passed, and I haven’t been home since. The thought of being unable to go home indefinitely just breaks my heart,” he said. “But then, I have to gather strength because there are very few journalists left in the country to tell and humanise stories of the minorities.”
Initially running the two websites and their X accounts anonymously from Massachusetts in the USA, Naik created a unique and robust digital database of human rights abuses, which routinely occur from big cities to remote villages in what is considered the world’s largest democracy. Yet, such cases do not receive adequate mainstream press coverage in India. Interestingly, two news outlets from the country, Hindustan Times and IndiaSpend, made attempts to monitor hate crimes only to stop their operations in 2017 and 2019 respectively.
Modi’s tenure so far has been marred with an increased suppression of dissent, targeting critics such as journalists, activists, academics, lawmakers and minority communities in India. Shortly before Hindutva Watch and India Hate Lab were blocked, Modi presided over the consecration of the new Ram temple, constructed on the ruins of a historic Mughal–era mosque which was demolished by a mob in 1992. The ensuing riots took over 2,000 lives while the site remained a point of contention for over three decades.
According to IndiaSpend’s Citizen’s Religious Hate Crime Watch, a data–driven news platform, around 90% of religiously-motivated hate crimes that have occurred since 2009 did so after the BJP took power on a national level in 2014.
The scale of these hate crimes remains obscured. After 2017, the country’s national crime bureau stopped keeping a separate record on hate crimes or lynching. Naik’s project keeps track of such incidents in absence of any documentation by authorities or media in the country. Run by a small group of 12 volunteers spread across five countries, Naik’s project documents two to four hate events daily using video and picture evidence submitted by a network of Indian activists and citizens.
“Since 2021, we have documented and archived thousands of videos and stories on hate crimes and hate speeches,” Naik said. “Our efforts have led to actionable outcomes in states where law agencies were willing to take a stand against right–wing members involved in such activities.”
“What we have collected serves as the evidence for facilitating judicial intervention, particularly in cases related to hate speech,” he added.
According to the latest report released by India Hate Lab before it was blocked in India, nearly two anti–Muslim hate speech events took place every day in 2023 and around 75% of those occurred in states ruled by the BJP. Collating a total of 668 hate speech events, the report observed that the cases peaked between August and November in 2023 – the period of political campaigning and polling in four major states in the country.
In India, press freedom also took a severe plunge under Modi’s leadership and with people now heading to the polls, Naik worries that blocking of his websites could tighten the government’s grip on the information ecosystem in the country.
Despite the suspension, he remains undeterred in continuing his work. He says: “There is extreme fear. And the climate of fear may continue to stifle reporting. But I know there are journalists who won’t succumb or surrender. I see hope in them.”
Read more about how authorities are silencing their critics across borders in the upcoming issue of Index. For a 50% discounted subscription to our digital edition, visit our page on Exact Editions and use the code Spring24 here
9 Apr 2024 | Afghanistan, Asia and Pacific, News and features
“The situation has not changed, the Taliban didn’t change. They are not allowing journalists, especially women journalists, to work, and any output is censored by the Taliban.” These were the words of Afghan journalist Ali Bezhad, who spoke to Index for our Spring 2023 magazine issue after escaping the country and relocating to Germany. Since then a year has passed, but Bezhad’s words still ring true. Journalists in Afghanistan remain under constant threat of persecution by the Taliban, a situation which has been ongoing since the group regained power in 2021.
This has not gone unnoticed at Index. In February this year, we received an email from another Afghan journalist who feared for their life and safety (and in March, a similar one via Signal). M. Yousufi told Index of her experience of being targeted by the Taliban for her work and having to regularly change location. She said that in recent years, several of her family and friends have been “arrested, tortured or killed”.
“I have continuously been active against the ideas of the Taliban and other extremist groups, and therefore my activities are considered to promote prostitution and blasphemy,” she explained. “My work and activities have been completely censored.”
Yousufi describes her journalism as being focussed on women’s and minority rights, freedom of speech, social justice and the crimes of the Taliban.
“I have dedicated my whole life to freedom of speech to be the voice of the people of society, especially the oppressed women of Afghanistan,” she said.
Having previously been arrested and detained overnight by the Taliban, as well as being subjected to violence and harassment, she said it is no longer possible for her to continue working in the media.
“The increasing restrictions and threats from the Taliban and other extremist groups and Islamic fundamentalists stopped my activity,” she said.
This is not an isolated incident. Over the past year, calls for action have been routinely made to address the situation facing media workers in Afghanistan. In June 2023, an expert panel hosted by Index’s Editor-at-large Martin Bright saw Zahra Joya, an exiled Afghan journalist and founder of Rukhshana Media, and Zehra Zaidi, a lawyer and advocate for Action for Afghanistan, discussing the plight of journalists in the state and urging the UK to do more.
In October 2023, freelance journalist Mortaza Behboudi spoke out for the first time about his experience of spending nine months in an Afghan prison after being charged with spying and assisting border crossings.
“I felt as though I’d been kidnapped,” he told Reporters Without Borders (RSF). “There was no trial, nothing, no future. I was harassed all the time. They used to hit me.”
The Afghanistan Journalists Centre (AFJC) has documented the alarming rise in attacks on journalists since the Taliban took over power. In their 2023 Annual Report on Media Freedom in Afghanistan, the organisation found that over the last year, media workers in Afghanistan have encountered significant obstacles and infringements on their rights, limiting their capacity to function effectively, and recorded 75 incidents of journalists being detained or threatened in this time. Press freedom under the Taliban is clearly heavily restricted across the board, but although all journalists face threats to their safety, women are at much greater risk. In April 2023, we spoke to the editor-in-chief of the Zan Times, Zahra Nader, who explained that the laws preventing women from reporting effectively are not always specific to female journalists, but are a result of the intersection of being both female and a journalist.
This was further demonstrated in February this year with the Taliban’s warning that if women did not adhere to certain guidelines regarding their appearance while working in media then they may issue a complete ban on women working in the industry. RSF responded to this by detailing their alarm at the “worrying increase in the restrictions imposed on journalists, with authoritarian directives on women journalists’ dress, restrictions on women’s access to the audiovisual media and a ban on filming or photographing Taliban officials”.
Cries for help continue to be made. Last month, during the 68th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women – an annual meeting for UN states to discuss gender equality – four Afghan women journalists were interviewed by International Media Support (IMS). One of the interviewees, who remained anonymous for safety reasons, said: “After three difficult and unjust years [under the Taliban], I have become a fighting girl, a photographer trying to showcase the beauty of Afghan girls, and a journalist trying to be the voice of thousands of girls.”
Afghan journalist and women’s rights activist Faranaz Forotan also spoke at the event. “In Afghanistan, being a female journalist is an endless act of bravery,” she told the committee.
“Women journalists have changed the narrative of journalism in Afghanistan and today, with the least resources, they strive to preserve and nurture freedom of expression in Afghanistan.”
These examples all point to a situation which is growing steadily more precarious, as journalists in Afghanistan are targeted and brutally silenced for their work. A year on from Index’s call for action, the only change we’ve seen is for the worse.
4 Apr 2024
Join Index on Censorship at the University of Exeter for an evening discussing the growing – and worrying – trend of transnational repression. Transnational repression takes many forms: from UK residents being poisoned by Russian agents, to a Saudi dissident being murdered in Turkey, to a Polish art gallery being subject to attempted acts of censorship by Chinese diplomats, to UK-based BBC Persian journalists being threatened and harassed by Iranian authorities. Expert panellists John Heathershaw (International Relations at the University of Exeter), Simon Cheng (a Hong Kong exiled pro-democracy activist and a founder of the UK-wide Hong Kong diasporic non-profit organisation, Hongkongers in Britain) and Belarusian poet and activist Hanna Komar will explore about the extent and impact of states silencing their critics abroad and the fundamental right to free expression.
This event celebrates the launch of Index’s latest magazine. Free copies available.
Book your free place here
This event is taking place in person at the University of Exeter. There is also the option of attending online via ZOOM (5-6pm). Click here to register to watch the event online.
Speakers
Hanna Komar is a Belarusian poet, translator, writer. Her poetic work lays bare the experience of being a girl, then a young woman, growing up in a strongly patriarchal authoritarian country. Her latest poems talk about the nationwide political resistance in Belarus of 2020. She’s published five poetry collections, is a member of PEN Belarus and an honorary member of English PEN. Website: hannakomar.com
Simon Cheng is a British Hong Kong exiled pro-democracy activist, and a founder of the UK-wide diaspora group, Hongkongers in Britain. He was detained in China in 2019 and later fled to the UK, where he was granted asylum in 2020. On 30 July last year, the Hong Kong police announced that they had issued arrest warrants to six exiled activists including Cheng for breaching the draconian national security law. Then in December, the Hong Kong government issued an arrest warrant against Cheng and put a bounty of HK$1 million on his capture.
John Heathershaw is a professor at Exeter University whose research addresses conflict, security and development in global politics, especially in post-Soviet Central Asia.
Jemimah Steinfeld is Index on Censorship’s editor-in-chief.
