16 Dec 08
The Index on Censorship Hugo Young Journalism Award
Kareem Amer is the pseudonym for the Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Suleiman Amer. His blog writings about secularism and women rights led to his arrest and detention in October 2005, his expulsion form Al-Azhar University in early 2006, and a second arrest in November 2006 that has left him in solitary confinement ever since. On 22 February 2007 he was sentenced to four year’s imprisonment for insulting Islam and President Mubarak and for inciting sedition.
http://www.freekareem.org/
http://karam903.blogspot.com/
The Index on Censorship Whistleblowing Award
Chen Guangcheng is a self-taught lawyer in the Shandong province of China who has been regaled as representative of an emerging group of liberal Chinese intellectuals. He gained international attention for publishing reports on forced abortions and sterilisations. In August 2006 he was sentenced to four years in prison. His appeal was rejected on 12 January 2007.
The Index on Censorship Film Award
Five Days by Yoav Shamir is a documentary about the Israel Defence Forces as they evacuate 8000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip in August 2005, to make way for 250,000 Palestinians. The director builds a composite impression of the withdrawal that does justice to the complexity of the issues at stake and the conflicting aims and worldviews of those taking part.
The T.R. Fyvel Book Award
Being Arab by Samir Kassir is a searing analysis of the predicament facing the Arab world considering what he calls the Arab ‘malaise’ – a condition which he believes springs form a crippling sense of impotence. Samir Kassir was a journalist and historian, who was assassinated in Beirut in June 2005.
The Bindmans’ Law and Campaigning Award
When Siphiwe Hlophe from Swaziland discovered she was HIV positive in 1999, she was abandoned by her husband and lost an agricultural economics scholarship. She reacted by co-founding an organisation called Swazis for Positive Living (Swapol) in 2001, which aims to fight gender discrimination related to HIV/Aids and to help other HIV/Aids victims.
http://www.swapol.net/
12 Dec 08 | Uncategorized
This article was first published on Comment is Free
On 13 December, 1948, Frederic Warburg typed up his comments on the manuscript of George Orwell’s recently completed Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘Orwell has no hope, or at least he allows his reader no hope, no tiny flickering candlelight of hope. Here is a study in pessimism unrelieved, except perhaps by the thought that, if a man can conceive
‘1984’, he can also will to avoid it.
[…]
‘For what is ‘1984’ but a picture of man unmanned, of humanity without a heart, of a people without tolerance and civilisation, of a government whose sole object is the maintenance of power, by every
contrivance of cruelty.’
At the same time Orwell was working on his ‘study in pessimism unrelieved’, others were fomenting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an unparalleled statement of optimism and faith in humanity.
Article 19 of the UDHR states: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and
ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.’
A great deal is, rightly, made of the first clause of this statement. But equally important is the assertion that we have the right to seek information. Orwell’s Winston Smith, you will recall, was employed by the Ministry of Truth to destroy information, to deny people the right to seek out historical fact and truth, to bring to an end the very concept of fact and truth.
The rewriting of history is central to the project of state censorship. Only last week, we saw a brazen attempt by the Russian authorities to destroy the records of the Memorial project, which seeks to document the atrocities of the Gulag. The pessimist would say that very little has changed since 1948.
But of course that is untrue.
When Orwell was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, and even when Index on Censorship began publishing 25 years later, there seemed almost an easy clarity about opposing censorship. Censorship, by and large, was a political project carried out, by and large, by Soviet bloc governments against pro-democracy writers, thinkers and activists. The enemy was in plain sight, and his motivation unambiguous.
Flash forward, and we are confronted with a very different landscape. Of course, most calls for censorship are still, at core, political, but they can as easily be well-meaning as malicious. What has seeped into our consciousness is censorship masquerading as a protective, rather than oppressive force. Most pernicious is the notion that ideas, like people, should be afforded protection. We forget that the UDHR was borne out of the horror of a war in which millions had died precisely because ideology took precedence over the integrity of the individual.
We also forget the ‘universal’ part of the UDHR. So, on Comment is Free, in discussions on Free Speech and the Internet, we find Digby Anderson lauding social censorship, without considering what social censorship might mean in a society less liberal than our own.
We also find Jonathan Rée, alluding to Internet debate, wondering ‘if “freedom of speech and belief” can really be such a big deal any more, in a world where thought itself has become no more than a game.’
I’m glad it’s now just a game: I hope someone’s told the Egyptian police who lock up bloggers, or the Burmese censors who launch cyber attacks on refugee news sites, to stop taking it all so seriously.
This kind of narrowness, of glibness, serves only to diminish the principle of Article 19 of the UDHR. We must not allow it to be diminished so far that we lose sight of it: and we must not allow the
principle of universal free expression to be lost down the memory hole.
02 Dec 08 | Uncategorized
Al Dostour editor Ibrahim Eissa has won the Gerbran Tueni award, a prize given by the World Association of Newspapers that honours an editor or publisher in the Arab region.
Eissa spent much of the last year locked in legal battles after he was given a custodial sentence when his newspaper reported on rumours of Egyptian president Mubarak’s ill health. He was pardoned in October.
20 Nov 08 | Uncategorized
Yesterday I had the privilege of taking part in a discussion at the Foreign Press Association with Egyptian writer Ali Salem. He was in London to accept the Civil Courage Prize, an award set up by US businessman (and co-founder of the Paris Review) John Train to honour ‘steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk’.
Salem is best known for his book Journey to Israel (you can read extracts here). After the Oslo Peace Accords, Salem decided he wanted to find out about Israel, and set off in his car for a three-week trip round Egypt’s neighbour. He wrote a book about the experience, and, while the book sold well in Egypt, he found himself criticised and ostracised for ‘normalisation of the Zionist entity’.
Ali Salem is a passionate believer in the exchange of ideas and culture, an outspoken critic of the narrow thinking that has blighted his country (and all countries). ‘Thinking is a risky business,’ he told me yesterday. ‘And sometimes it is easier to shoot someone than to debate.’
But Salem insists we must debate if we are to progress. As he puts it: ‘Let ideas do combat with each other, theory against theory, for the benefit of the nation.’
