01 Aug 07
REPORTING THE MIDDLE EAST
NEWS ANALYSIS
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Chris Ames: There are still questions to answer on the notorious Iraq dossier
CYCLE OF FEAR
Beatrice Mtetwa: The campaign of harassment in Zimbabwe is at its height
ART WARS
Ruben Andersson: Indian nationalists are no fans of the modern art scene
REPORTING THE MIDDLE EAST
THE AUTHORISED VERSION
Amira Hass: The realities of occupation don’t make the Isreali headlines
FALSE HOPES
Mouwaffaq Al Rifa’i: The Iraqi press faces intimidation and violence
MR MOHAMMADI’S SMILE
Maziar Bahari: An invitation to tea with Iranian intelligence
LOST IN PROCESS
Amr Gharbeia: Egyptian bloggers are under attack
Martin Rowsom – Stripsearch
BACK TO BASICS
Malu Halasa: The future is in lingerie
WALKING THE TIGHTROPE
Safwat Al Kahlout: Journalists in Gaza have to dodge more than crossfire
NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Hengameh Golestan: The life of photojournalist Kaveh Golestan
WITNESS TO REVOLUTION
Kaveh Golestan: Reflections on censorship in Iran
FORTY YEARS ON
Raja Shehadeh: Ariel Sharon’s map has reshaped the landscape
ROAD TO NOWHERE
WRONG PLACE WRONG TIME
Any Worthington: The release of documents has lifted Guantanamo’s veil of secrecy
DATA DENIED: THE POLITICS OF SCIENCE
WHO OWNS KNOWLEDGE?
Kenan Malik: The battle between scientific research and cultural identity
DEADLY SILENCE
Helen Epstein: A programme of misguided Aids policy could have been prevented
SCIENCE FICTION
Ashish Ranpura & Daniel Glaser: Scientists speak more than one language
EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT FREE SPEECH
CENSORING THE WORD
Julian Petley: A brief history of censorship
FIRST PERSON
DANCING LESSONS FROM GOD
Dawn Starin: Notes on the press, politics and monkeys in the Gambia
Click here for stockists and subscription details
26 Jul 07 | Statements
Jailed Tunisian dissident, writer and lawyer Mohamed Abbou was released from prison in Le Kef, where he had been held since his arrest in March 2005. He was sentenced to prison for three-and-a-half years for exposing torture in Tunisian prisons on the Internet. His release and that of more than 20 other political prisoners came on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic of Tunisia, marked on 25 July.
It led to speculation that the release of the country’s highest profile domestic critic was timed simply to prevent the case from spoiling the international response to the independence celebrations.
Index on Censorship and other members of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX) Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG) have long campaigned for his release – including trying to visit him in prison in March.
Index chief executive Henderson Mullin urged the Tunisian authorities to cease the kind of aggressive and intimidating surveillance that Abbou’s wife Samia has endured since he was jailed in 2005.
‘Policemen have been climbing over the Abbou family balconies in the middle of the night, repeatedly, purely to terrorise them,’ said Mullin. ‘Police officers often harassed Mrs Abbou and the friends who accompany her for weekly visits with her husband at Kef prison, and they only let up when representatives of Index and other TMG members were watching in person.
‘It would be a disgrace if this kind of aggressive harassment is allowed to continue now Mr Abbou is free. He must be allowed to express his opinions freely.’
TMG Chair Carl Morten Iversen of Norwegian PEN assured Abbou that the TMG and other human rights groups will keep a close eye on the way Tunisian authorities will treat him and his family in the future. Tunisia’s repression of free expression is seen by many as the sole stain on the country’s otherwise tolerant and peaceful system. Increasingly its poor free speech record has become an issue that obstructs Tunisia’s routine relations with the EU and France.
Significantly, new French president Nicolas Sarkozy had raised Abbou’s case in meetings with Tunisian head of state Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali the week before.
Abbou told al Jazeera TV on the day of his release: ‘As a former prisoner of conscience, I would like to thank all those in Tunisia and the rest of the world who stood by my side during the ordeal I have been through. My release is the result of actions of resistance to oppression undertaken by Tunisians capable of saying no to a regime in violation of basic human rights. The Tunisian Constitution and international human rights law guarantee the right to criticise the government, as long as there are human rights abuses and corruption.’
But he added: ‘The lack of freedom led some young people to use violence which I strongly denounce.’
Abbou was jailed for three-and-a-half-years for posting an article on the Tunisnews website in August 2004 comparing the torture of political prisoners in Tunisia to that perpetrated by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But observers at his trial suspected the sentence was imposed in response to a different article he had posted online a few days before his arrest, in which he criticised an invitation to Israeli leader Ariel Sharon to attend a UN summit in Tunis.
The IFEX-TMG continues to call on the Tunisian authorities to allow writers, journalists, web loggers and publishers to express themselves freely without fear of persecution or imprisonment in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Tunisia is a signatory.
(more…)
19 Jun 07 | Comment
Lord knows, I’ve had my differences with Ken Livingstone, especially when it comes to the politics of the Middle East – but there’s one issue he’s got absolutely right. Last week, to the enormous surprise of much of London’s Jewish community, the mayor agreed with them – and came out against an academic boycott of Israel.
Unfortunately, his intervention came too late. The very next day, Britain’s University and College Union voted to promote the call for a boycott. Now, I was raised to be respectful of teachers and positively reverential towards academics. Which is why it pains me to say that this decision is almost laughably stupid. But it is. If a student had come up with it, he would find it daubed with a thick red line, from top to bottom.
First, it lacks all logical consistency. Let’s say you accept, as I do, that Israel is wrong to be occupying the territories it won in the Six Day war, whose 40th anniversary is being marked this week. Let’s say that that is your reason for boycotting Israel. Then why no boycott of China for its occupation of Tibet? Or of Russia for its brutal war against the Chechens? Or of Sudan, for its killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur, a murderous persecution described by the US as genocide?
If it’s the ill-treatment of Palestinians in particular that concerns you, then why no boycott of Lebanon, whose army continues to pound the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, killing civilians daily? True, the Lebanese government is not a military occupier. But if occupation is the crime that warrants international ostracism, then why no boycott of American universities? After all, the US is occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is Britain. Why do the good men and women of UCU not speak out, by boycotting, say, Oxford, Cambridge and London universities? Why do they not boycott themselves?
Maybe academic freedom is their chief concern. That would make sense, given that they’re academics. But if that was the issue, there would surely be boycotts of Syria, Egypt, Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few places where intellectual freedom remains a fond dream. (The awkward truth is that the freest place in the Middle East for an Arab scholar is Israel.) Yet the UCU sees no “moral implications,” to use the language of last week’s resolution, in institutional ties with Damascus, Cairo or Tehran. Only Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
For some reason, the activists pushing for this move believe Israelis should be placed in a unique category of untouchability. Never mind the 655,000 the US and Britain have, on one estimate, killed in Iraq. Never mind the two million displaced in Darfur. Never mind the closed, repressive societies of the Middle East. The Israelis are a people apart, one that must be shunned.
But let’s be charitable and forgive the boycotters their inconsistency. Surely any tactic, even an inconsistent one, is forgivable if it does some good. This, though, is where the combined geniuses of the UCU have really blundered. For a boycott will be hugely counter-productive.
For one thing, Israeli academics are disproportionately represented in Israel’s “peace camp.” The UCU will be boycotting the very people who have done most to draw the Israeli public’s attention to the folly of the occupation, to the very people working to bring an end to this desperate conflict. By their actions, the UCU will embolden the Israeli right who will be able to say, ‘Look, the world hates and isolates us: this is exactly why we have to be militarily strong.’
The second error is more subtle. One of the few things that might make Israel change course would be a shift in diaspora Jewish opinion: those campaigning for Palestinian rights and an end to the occupation need to win over Jewish allies. Yet no tactic is more likely to alienate Jews than a boycott. That’s because the very word has deep and painful resonances for Jews: a boycott of Jewish business was one of the Nazis’ opening moves. No one is equating the current plan with that. But of all the tactics to have chosen, a boycott is the very dumbest one.
Advocates say there’s nothing to worry about, this will be a boycott of institutions, not individuals – a necessary move because no Israeli institution has ever taken a stand against the occupation. This, too, is numb-skulled. When do academic institutions ever take a collective stand against anything? Did Imperial College declare itself against the Iraq war? What was the British Museum’s view of UK policy in Northern Ireland? Of course there was no such thing. Institutions of learning don’t take a stand; individuals do.
Which is why it will be individuals who are ostracised by this action. When you boycott the Hebrew University, you’re not boycotting bricks and mortar but the men and women who teach there. The “institutional” talk is just a ruse designed to make this boycott more palatable. It will still end in the shunning of individuals.
And why? Simply because they are citizens of the wrong country, born with the wrong nationality. In 2003 the Linguistic Society of America declared itself against blacklisting scholars simply because of the actions of their governments. “Such boycotts violate the principle of free scientific interaction and cooperation, and they constitute arbitrary and selective applications of collective punishment.” They also amount to a pretty crass form or discrimination: you can’t come to this conference, because you’ve got the wrong colour passport.
Oh, but none of these arguments stopped the boycott of South Africa, say the pro-blacklisters. Except these situations are completely different. In South Africa, the majority of the people were denied a vote in the state in which they lived. Israelis and Palestinians are, by contrast, two peoples locked in a national conflict which will be resolved only when each has its own, secure state.
Ken Livingstone is right: to launch a boycott of Israel now would hurt, not help the search for the peace that might end this Middle East tragedy. And that, when all the posturing is put to one side, is all that should matter.
(more…)
21 May 07 | Uncategorized
For four months at the end of 2005, I was given access to an extraordinary series of Foreign Office documents concerning the government’s strategy to tackle the threat of radical Islam at home and abroad. Literally dozens of emails, position papers and policy discussions came my way. It became clear that someone within Whitehall was deeply disturbed about the direction of British foreign policy, especially the strategy of engagement with groups and individuals on the Islamist extreme right. At one point I was receiving so many documents that I barely had time to read their contents, let alone judge whether there was a story in them.
But stories there were. The documents showed that senior figures in the Foreign Office believed that Britain’s policy in Iraq had led to an increase in radicalism among young Muslims, something the prime minister was denying at the time. I published the story in the Observer, where I was working as home affairs editor. But that was just the beginning.
The leaks provided me with a further news story for the Observer about plans to infiltrate extremist groups, and with features for the New Statesman on CIA rendition flights, diplomatic engagement with Egypt’s banned opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the panic that had engulfed the Foreign Office as a result of the disclosures. The documents also formed the basis of a Channel 4 documentary on the government’s troubled relationship with radical Islam and an accompanying pamphlet, When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries, for the think tank Policy Exchange. The leaks were a journalistic goldmine. The revelations about the compact between the Foreign Office and radical Islam also went some way towards changing government policy towards the self-appointed representatives of Britain’s Muslim community, such as the Muslim Council of Britain.
It is difficult to imagine a series of documents that could have been more in the public interest to disclose. Decisions being made in the Foreign Office, with a direct effect on the British people, were taking place with little or no consultation. In particular, the Foreign Office had embarked on a detailed strategy of engagement with Islamists at home and abroad without reference to Parliament or even, it seemed, the prime minister himself.
owever, at the end of January 2006 my source was arrested under suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act. I have not heard from him since. The latest news is that he has been bailed until June, while investigations continue. By then, his life will have been held in suspension for 18 months: this at a time when Labour politicians complain that the ‘loans for peerages’ investigation has dragged on for a mere 12 months with no charges being brought.
If, and when, the case comes to trial it will provide a fascinating test of the secrecy laws. The documents, many of which have been collected in the Policy
Exchange pamphlet, are also available online. They provide a unique insight into government thinking on Islam between 2001 and 2006, a period that encompasses the suicide attacks on New York and the bombing of London. Reading through them again, it is difficult to imagine how national security can have been seriously compromised by the disclosures, which contributed considerably to the national debate on one of the most important issues of our time. Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly is known to have been influenced by the disclosures in making her decision to seek new grassroots Muslim partners in the battle for hearts and minds. The Policy Exchange pamphlet has also helped inform the Conservative policy group on national and international security headed by Pauline Neville-Jones, a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee who also served as political director in the Foreign Office. It would be a delicious spectacle to see Kelly and Neville-Jones called as witnesses for the defence in any
trial that results from the Foreign Office leaks.
However, it is not difficult to see what motivated the arrest. The leaks were proving intensely embarrassing and coincided with a crackdown across Whitehall against unauthorised disclosures. This had been sparked by a separate leak of a memo said to outline plans by President George W Bush to bomb the Arabic television station Al Jazeera in April 2004. Following the publication of the claims in the Mirror, Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh and parliamentary researcher Leo O’Connor were charged under the Official Secrets Act.
In opposition, the Labour Party had fought the introduction of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, arguing that a ‘public interest’ defence should be inserted
into the legislation to give protection to genuine whistleblowers. During the parliamentary debate, Shadow Home Affairs spokesman Roy Hattersley said that the definition of harm to national security ‘is so wide and so weak that it is difficult to imagine any revelation which is followed by a prosecution not
resulting in a conviction’. Frank Dobson, who went on to serve in Tony Blair’s first cabinet, added: ‘Surely we as a Parliament have not sunk so low
that we want to introduce new laws to protect official wrongdoing.’
Once in power, the Labour Party had no such qualms. The Blair government has wielded the big stick of the Official Secrets Act with alarming regularity since it came to power. In August 1997, just months after winning an election on a promise of new openness and transparency in government, the new government faced a serious predicament in the person of David Shayler, an MI5 officer whose revelations about the intelligence service were published in the Mail on Sunday.
These included details of files kept on senior Labour politicians such as Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman. More seriously, Shayler later claimed that officers from Britain’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, had participated in a plot to assassinate Colonel Qaddafi of Libya.
Despite the fact that Shayler’s claims referred to a period before Labour came to power, the new government pursued him relentlessly, requesting his
extradition from France, where he had set up home after leaving the security service. This pursuit extended to journalists who wrote about Shayler, and in
2000 I found myself in court after publishing an article in the Observer about the Libya plot, in which I said the newspaper had been given the names of the spies allegedly involved in the plot, but had been prevented from publishing them for legal reasons. (The officers’ names, David Watson and Richard Bartlett, have since entered the public domain, but they have never been prosecuted for their
alleged crimes.)
The Observer successfully fought an order to hand over all documents relating to my dealings with David Shayler and established an important precedent in media law that has made it more difficult to seize journalistic material. But it did not help David Shayler, who returned to Britain in 2000 to face trial. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in November 2002 for breaching the
Official Secrets Act, after more than five years of fighting for his claims to be investigated by the government.
David Shayler did not succeed in his own case, but his lawyers did establish an important precedent for future whistleblowers. In 2002, the House of Lords had decided that Shayler’s lawyers could not use a public interest defence. It also decided that the 1989 OSA was compatible with human rights legislation.
However, it did establish that in certain cases a ‘defence of necessity’ could be used if a whistleblower had acted because there was an imminent threat
to human life.
Less than six months later an opportunity arose to test the legislation. In March
2003 as the military preparations for war in Iraq gathered pace, a young woman in her late 20s walked into her boss’s office at GCHQ, the government’s secret eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, and admitted to leaking a document of the highest possible classification of secrecy. Katharine Gun, a junior Mandarin Chinese translator, knew her career was at an end and that she could face a long prison sentence. But she believed the contents of an email she had received in the course of her work could stop the war. She believed her action could save lives.
The email, dated 31 January 2003, was from Frank Koza, head of regional targets at the National Security Agency in the United States, and asked for British help in spying on the United Nations, which was immersed in an intense debate about whether to authorise an attack on Iraq. Britain was arguing for a second UN resolution to specifically sanction the invasion, without which many thought the war would be illegal.
Key to any vote were the so called ‘swing’ nations, Chile, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Guinea and Angola, temporary members of the Security Council,
whose votes were essential in gaining legal cover for the war. Koza was demanding a ‘surge’ in spying activities to give the US an ‘edge’ in the negotiations.
He was desperate to know the voting intentions of the ‘swing six’, but also hinted that private information about individual diplomats should be amassed in case blackmail was necessary.
I ran the story about the leaked email in the Observer on 4 March 2003, three weeks before the outbreak of war. It had taken nearly a month from leaking the document to its appearance in the press and Gun was in a state of almost unbearable tension. She immediately owned up to being the source of the leak and was arrested by the police for a suspected breach of the Official Secrets Act. Gun believed that when the UN discovered what was going on, they
would never allow the war to go ahead. What she didn’t realise at the time Katharine Gun after charges against her were dropped, London February 2004
was that George W Bush had already decided on regime change in Baghdad, with or without the United Nations.
However, when the case finally came to trial in February 2004, the prosecution failed to present any evidence and the case was dropped before it had begun. At the time, speculation suggested that the government had decided to drop the case because it would have led to the publication of the attorney general’s legal advice on the legality of the war, which was initially equivocal. But the Crown Prosecution Service always said that the reason was far more banal: that it had become clear that it would be impossible to fight Gun’s defence that she had acted
to save lives.
Although it is impossible to know precisely why the government dropped the Gun case, it is probably fair to say that the ‘defence of necessity’, established by David Shayler, helped save Katharine Gun from prison. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the government has indicated its intention to close down the defence in future cases. Last July, The Times reported the intention of the new Home Secretary, John Reid, to remove the necessity defence and suggested that he would present the necessary legislation in last autumn’s Queen’s Speech. This did not materialise, due to a lack of parliamentary time. But the Home Office has confirmed that it is keeping the OSA under review and will revisit the defence of
necessity as soon as it can.
Campaigners still believe an amendment to the 1989 Act is imminent. Julie-Ann Davies, who was arrested in connection with the Shayler case in 2000, has
spent the past seven years researching Britain’s secrecy laws and is currently studying for a PhD at Glasgow University. She said: ‘I have no doubt the government intends to act. Whenever a window of public interest opens up, they close it.’ Former senior BBC journalist Nick Jones is now chair of Reform the Official Secrets Act (Rosa), which campaigns for a public interest defence for whistleblowers in national security cases. He said the Al Jazeera trial marked an intensification in the drive for government secrecy: ‘There does seem to be a new push, triggered by the war on terror, to restrain journalists who want to write in this area. Meanwhile, all talk of protecting whistleblowers has disappeared in a puff of
smoke.’
The paradox is that in the present circumstances the more serious the disclosure, the more chance of running a successful defence. My source, for example, who could only be accused of leaking ‘confidential’ rather than ‘secret’ documents, would not have recourse to the necessity defence. He would have to fall back on a defence that said he had acted in the public interest, something of which Labour seems to have lost sight after ten long years in government.
Martin Bright is political editor of the New Statesman
Subscribe to Index on Censorship here
