09 Feb 15
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
The next morning, taking a taxi to the Cau Giay district on the west side of town, I pass several of the lakes that dot downtown Hanoi to arrive at a tree-line boulevard where Nha Nam, my publisher, fills an old building with louvered windows that open onto iron-fronted balconies. Already by ten in the morning a gray blanket of heat and humidity has draped itself over the city. Nha Nam’s ground-floor bookshop is filled with translations of Proust, Kundera, and Nabokov, and I am pleased to find a stack of my own books displayed next to Lolita. I introduce myself to the receptionist and am led upstairs to meet Nguyen Nhat Anh, chairman of the company, and Vu Hoang Giang, his vice-director and partner. I had actually met Giang the night before. Without my knowing that he would be there, he had attended a lecture I gave at the Hanoi Cinematheque and introduced himself afterwards. As the chairman of Nha Nam presents me with a bouquet of purple lotus blossoms, I fear that my remarks the previous evening may have been too candid.
Nguyen Nhat Anh, a slender man in a black tee shirt, jeans, and sandals, looks more like a coffee shop habitué than the editor of a major publishing company. Known for his literary nose, he works at a desk covered with books and manuscripts piled ten deep. His partner, Giang, wearing an open-necked polo shirt, is a tall, handsome fellow with a ready smile and a small tattoo decorating his right wrist. I imagine they have divided the corporate turf between them, with Anh responsible for scholarship and Giang for sales. Later I learn that a lot of the manuscripts piled on Anh’s desk are actually publishing contracts, while Giang has his own literary interests, and, in fact, he was the person who finally arranged to got my book published.
Thu Yen, the editor with whom I have been sparring for the last few years, has not been invited to this meeting. She remains at her desk in the contracts department, while another translator has been hired for the occasion—a young Vietnamese woman, a former office manager at an American law firm. As the scholarly Anh and smiling Giang discuss the nuances of Vietnamese publishing, the young woman’s translations get shorter and shorter, until finally she seems on the verge of giving up completely. Fortunately, I have brought my own translator, and we will spend several hours later that afternoon reconstructing the conversation.
I take a seat on the couch in Anh’s office. Outside the louvered windows, the cicadas in the trees are making a fearsome racket. Giang has already warned me an in email about the “tight and rather heavy-handed censorship system of state-owned publishers in Vietnam. This you may not fully imagine.” I am offered a cup of green tea and then we launch into a discussion of censorship, how it is handled generally in Vietnam and particularly in my case.
Anh takes the lead, giving lengthy, formal answers to my questions, until Giang takes over when the boss heads to the espresso machine next to his desk and brews himself a cup of coffee. I am tempted to ask for one myself but decide to be polite and stick with tea. Anh describes how the censors dictate even the smallest details. He gives as an example the fact that political figures must have honorifics. One is not allowed to refer to the founder of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as Ho Chi Minh. He has to be Bac Ho—Uncle Ho—which inscribes him simultaneously into Vietnamese family structure and history.
“Censorship is a very tough question,” says Anh. “We don’t really have a system or set of rules for how it’s handled. All we know is that lots of publishers didn’t dare to publish your book.”
The jalousie doors and windows in Anh’s office open onto a porch overlooking the street, but they remain closed against the heat. Other than his desk, groaning under its layer of books, and a coffee table, piled with yet more books, the room holds nothing more than the couch on which I am sitting and bare green walls.
“Because another book had been published on the same subject, we thought this improved our chances,” he says. “We were sure we could get your book in print.”
I ask Anh why he chose a northerner to translate my book, someone who missed the nuances and even the jokes told by its southern hero.
“The differences are like music,” he says. “Singers sing the same songs but give them different interpretations. When we translated Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we tried to keep it honest to the southern dialect. But in your case, we thought we were dealing with a political book, a work of non-fiction. The people who read these books are northerners, and you have to make the text understandable for them.”
I ask Anh and Giang to talk in more detail about censoring my book. They describe the by now well-known process, which begins with the translation, commissioned from someone who knows how the game is played. Then the book goes to the editor, who removes all the “sensitive” material.
“How does he know what to remove?”
Nha Nam Vice Director Vu Hoang Giang and Chairman Nguyen Nhat Anh (Photo: Thomas Bass)
“The process is dangerous, dangerous to the author, but also dangerous to the publisher,” says Anh. By this point in the conversation, he has kicked off his sandals and is cooling his bare feet on the tile floor. Overhead, a fan swirls tepid air around the room. Temperatures in Hanoi this spring are spiking over a hundred.
Anh tells me the story of a book of poems the company published in 2006 by an author named Tran Dan. Dan’s work has been banned in Vietnam since the 1950s, when he was involved in the nhan van giai pham affair. This was Vietnam’s version of Mao’s cultural revolution, a purging of writers, artists, and musicians who were blacklisted, imprisoned, and banned for fifty years. One of these artists was Van Cao, who, in 1945, had composed Vietnam’s national anthem. From 1957 until 1986, Vietnamese found themselves in the peculiar position of being allowed to play but not sing Van Cao’s anthem. Only when the words were changed was the song once again performed. Van Cao himself had long ago stopped composing, thereby joining the ranks of Vietnamese artists—hundreds of them, from the 1950s to the present—who have been driven into silence or exile.
With Mao long dead and his cultural revolution discredited, Nha Nam thought it was safe to bring the poet Tran Dan back into print. They had obtained a publishing license from a state-owned company in Danang and printed some of his poems when all hell broke loose. “The police came to the book fair and seized all our books,” says Anh. “Then they raided our offices and destroyed more books. This was terrifying for us. We thought we were going to be closed down and put out of business.”
“What went wrong?” I ask.
Anh lowers his voice and mentions the name of an agency named A25.
“Now it’s A87,” Giang says, correcting him.
Governmental departments that begin with the letter “A,” which stands for “an ninh,” meaning “security,” are legion, and A25—now known as A87—is the one that deals with publishers.
“In any case, it’s Cultural Security, cuc an ninh van hoa,” says Anh.
“What’s their address?” I ask.
“They don’t have an address,” he says, implying they are everywhere. The two men discuss among themselves in terse sentences what went wrong. None of their interchange is translated.
“There is no single organization in charge of censorship,” says Anh. “There are a lot of people involved.” Again, he mentions the Ministry of Public Security.
Giang mentions the Ministry of Information and Communication. “This is the office in charge of publishing,” he says.
Anh adds to this list the national police and other organizations. “It’s like a cloud,” he says. “They are everywhere.”
“Usually they don’t arrest editors,” he says. “This can happen to writers, but editors generally know in advance when they’re going to run into trouble.”
I ask them to speak in more detail about the censorship involved in publishing my book. This is when I hear for the first time about Nguyen The Vinh. Vinh is the man who produced the final list of cuts to my book and secured its publishing license. From their description of him, I get the idea that Vinh is a heavy-weight in the publishing world. The former director of various companies, he now works as an editor at Hong Duc, the state-owned publisher attached to the Ministry of Information and Communication. This company not only gave my book its publishing license, it also put its logo on the title page. Actually, the book has two logos on the title page: Nha Nam’s trudging water buffalo, with a book-reading buffalo boy (or girl) on its back, and Hong Duc’s white H inscribed inside a black D.
I learn another interesting fact about Vinh. He was the editor who secured the publishing license for Professor Berman’s Perfect Spy. The Vietnamese translation of this book was supposed to grease the skids for mine, and who better to perform this feat than the man who had already done it before.
As Anh busies himself making his cup of espresso, Giang takes over the narrative. “Your book was rejected by five or six publishers,” he says. “Other publishers who looked at it wanted to interfere a lot, changing the content. They kept asking to cut more and more. We resisted these changes, until finally Nguyen The Vinh agreed to publish it.”
“And what changes did he demand?” I ask.
Anh is pacing behind his desk. A frown darkens Giang’s face. “When you talk to him, you shouldn’t be too hard in your questions,” he says. “It could affect Vinh and the chances for your book to remain on sale.”
“Who asked Vinh to get involved?” I ask.
“Giang approached him,” says Anh. I can see that these men are nervous about talking to me in such detail. By now, both of them are sitting with their arms crossed over their chests.
“The publishers at Hong Duc wanted to write a forward to your book,” says Anh. “We rejected this idea.”
I can imagine how Hong Duc’s introduction would have reworked the standard tropes about Pham Xuan An as a “perfect” spy, an impeccable Communist cadre, who, nonetheless, garnered fulsome praise from his Western admirers. I am grateful to my editors for saving me this embarrassment.
“It was Vinh who took personal responsibility for publishing your book,” says Anh.
“You mean it can still be censored?”
Your book could be seized tomorrow,” he says. “No one knows where the trouble could come from. We have yet to see any negative signs, but someone can always find ‘sensitive’ items in a book.”
“What subjects would you like me to avoid talking about while I am in Vietnam?” I ask.
“Please remember that Vinh has his reputation and career on the line,” says Anh.
By now everyone knows my opinion of censorship—the cowardly business by which the powerful lie to the weak in order to protect their self-interest. I have no need to repeat myself.
“You shouldn’t be too direct with Vinh,” says Anh. “He was acting on directions from the publisher.”
“You should also know that your book is a living thing,” says Giang. “It can be published again, with material that was cut in the first edition added back in later editions.”
I assure Anh and Giang that I will do my best not to offend anyone. They know that an uncensored Vietnamese version of my book will be released later on the web.
“Right now we have no standards in Vietnam,” says Giang. “We don’t know our rights, and we don’t know from what direction the censorship is coming. But our system is changing. We hope you understand that we can improve. We can do better. We are learning how to function in the world of international publishing.”
“If your book is republished, we want to put back in the details that were cut,” he says. “You have a positive perception of Vietnam. People know this. So we’re asking for you to be patient. Give us some time to work things out. People appreciate you as an expert on Vietnam, a critic, sometimes a tough critic, but a fair one. Vietnamology—maybe that’s the right word for what you do.”
“How many ‘hard’ books do you publish each year?” I ask.
“In our career we are always working with difficult books,” says Anh. “This comes with the territory. But your book was a special case. It was the most difficult. I wanted to give up. I thought it was hopeless. I’m hot headed, and this was just too hard. I threw up my hands. ‘This book is never going to be published!’ I said. But my colleagues are more patient than I am. ‘Wait,’ they told me. ‘There is still a chance.’ It was thanks to Giang and Thu Yen that your book saw the light of day. They were patient. They persisted.”
“I felt like a hostage between two warring armies,” says Anh. “I was being fired on from two directions. The author was resisting cuts. The censors were demanding cuts. There are authors who know how this system works, Milan Kundera for example. He has lived under censorship. When we published his books, he understood our problems and agreed to let us do what we had to do. It would have been helpful if you had been more reassuring.”
“On behalf of the publisher, we want to tell you that we’re happy your book has been published,” says Giang. I suspect he’s feeling sorry about my having been compared unfavorably to Milan Kundera. Actually, I’m amused that a refugee from communist Czechoslovakia would prove tractable to being censored in communist Vietnam.
“This is not the first time that Vietnam and the United States have engaged in difficult negotiations,” I say. Anh and Giang appreciate the joke. “I’m glad we arrived at a happy conclusion.” We shake hands, and then I am asked to sit at Anh’s desk to sign copies of my book for members of Nha Nam’s staff. Apparently, everyone in the company wants a copy—perhaps before the book disappears from the shelves. All throughout lunch hour people keep drifting into Anh’s office with yet more copies for me to sign.
Part 7: Perfect spy?
This sixth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 9, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
22 May 14 | Czech Republic
Peter Demetz (Photo: Prague Book Fair)
Emeritus Yale University professor and author Peter Demetz was awarded the Jiri (George) Theiner prize at the Prague Literary Festival this year.
George’s son Pavel, the prize organiser, said Demetz received the award because “all his life he has remained intellectually honest in his demystification of views which sometimes became popular such as the notion of magical Prague, rather stressing the reality of Czech history, as well as his life-long commitment to Czech literature in American and German environments and as translator of Frantisek Halas´ and Jiri Orten´s poetry”.
Theiner set up the prize in memory of his father’s work, as a former editor of Index on Censorship magazine he brought attention to Czech writing and writers during the communist era. He said: “Almost five years ago I discussed with the director of World of Books (Prague Book Fair), Dana Kalinova, the possibility of making this prize an important permanent fixture at the annual book fair. Looking back I realised that George Theiner´s reputation here was as solid as it was in other countries, despite the fact that he left in 1968.
The jury this year was chaired by Lenka Jungmannova (professor at the Institute of Czech Literature, Academy of Sciences), Martin Putna (literary historian, professor at Prague´s Charles University and critic), Jiri Gruntorad (guardian of the largest samizdat collection in central and eastern Europe, dissident persecuted in the 1970´s and 1980´s) and Ivan Biel (documentary film-maker and lecturer in Film Studies). Next year’s jury was also announced and will include Karel Schwarzenberg (a former Czech foreign minister, one of Havel´s closest aides and supporter of dissidents before 1989 whilst living in Austria), Michal Priban (academic at the Institute of Czech Literature, Academy of Sciences), Vladimír Pistorius (samizdat publisher who successfully made the transition into becoming a ´straight´ book publisher) and Jan Bednar (radio journalist and commentator, signatory of Charter 77, between 1985 and 1992 and who worked for the BBC in London).
Theiner said that they received between 35 and 60 nominations each year from all over the world. The criteria stated that the recipient (or organisation) had made a major long-term contribution to the promotion of Czech literature overseas, with an expectation that they have also made a contribution to freedom of speech and human rights in general. Other prize winners include Andrzej Jagodzinski, translator of Havel, Hrabal, Kundera, journalist as well as a leading member of the democratic opposition on Poland); Ruth Bondy (an Israeli of Czech origin, survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen who worked as a journalist on the Hebrew daily Davar; and Paul Wilson (a Canadian who lived in Czechoslovakia as a young man before being thrown out in 1977 for collaborating with dissidents and, above all, the band Plastic Pepople of the Universe, translator of Skvorecky, Klima, Havel, Hrabal, radio producer, editor and writer).
Theiner said: “One of the most positive aspects that has come out of the activity surrounding the prize has been the link made between old and new Index on Censorship. It was a real joy to welcome to Prague at the first prize-giving the founding editor Michael Scammell along with some of his old colleagues such as Philip Spender, Haifaa Khalafallah and others. Four years later the present editor Rachael Jolley joined us and moderated a discussion following the award-giving ceremony on freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a reflection on the democratisation of society and freedom of expression in literature and journalism. It´s great to see that the bridge-building that George Theiner was so adept at is still going strong.”
This article was published on May 22, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
02 Jan 14 | European Union, News and features, Politics and Society
The law of libel, privacy and national “insult” laws vary across the European Union. In a number of member states, criminal sanctions are still in place and public interest defences are inadequate, curtailing freedom of expression.
The European Union has limited competencies in this area, except in the field of data protection, where it is devising new regulations. Due to the impact on freedom of expression and the functioning of the internal market, the European Commisssion High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism recommended that libel laws be harmonised across the European Union. It remains the case that the European Court of Human Rights is instrumental in defending freedom of expression where the laws of member states fail to do so. Far too often, archaic national laws have been left unreformed and therefore contain provisions that have the potential to chill freedom of expression.
Nearly all EU member states still have not repealed criminal sanctions for defamation – with only Croatia,[1] Cyprus, Ireland, Romania and the UK[2] having done so. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe called on states to repeal criminal sanctions for libel in 2007, as did both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and UN special rapporteurs on freedom of expression.[3] Criminal defamation laws chill free speech by making it possible for journalists to face jail or a criminal record (which will have a direct impact on their future careers), in connection with their work. Many EU member states have tougher sanctions for criminal libel against politicians than ordinary citizens, even though the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Lingens v. Austria (1986) that:
“The limits of acceptable criticism are accordingly wider as regards a politician as such than as regards a private individual.”
Of particular concern is the fact that insult laws remain in place in many EU member states and are enforced – particularly in Poland, Spain, and Greece – even though convictions are regularly overturned by the European Court of Human Rights. Insult to national symbols is also criminalised in Austria, Germany and Poland. Austria has the EU’s strictest laws in this regard, with the penal code criminalising the disparagement of the state and its symbols[4] if malicious insult is perceived by a broad section of the republic. This section of the code also covers the flag and the federal anthem of the state. In November 2013, Spain’s parliament passed draft legislation permitting fines of up to €30,000 for “insulting” the country’s flag. The Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muiznieks, criticised the proposals stating they were of “serious concern”.
There is a wide variance in the application of civil defamation laws across the EU – with significant differences in defences, costs and damages. Excessive costs and damages in civil defamation and privacy actions is known to chill free expression, as authors fear ruinous litigation, as recognised by the European Court of Human Rights in MGM vs UK.[5] In 2008, Oxford University found huge variants in the costs of defamation actions across the EU, from around €600 (constituting both claimants’ and defendants’ costs) in Cyprus and Bulgaria to in excess of €1,000,000 in Ireland and the UK. Defences for defendants vary widely too: truth as a defence is commonplace across the EU but a stand-alone public interest defence is more limited.
Italy and Germany’s codes provide for responsible journalism defences instead of using a general public interest defence. In contrast, the UK recently introduced a public interest defence that covers journalists, as well as all organisations or individuals that undertake public interest publications, including academics, NGOs, consumer protection groups and bloggers. The burden of proof is primarily on the claimant in many European jurisdictions including Germany, Italy and France, whereas in the UK and Ireland, the burden is more significantly on the defendant, who is required to prove they have not libelled the claimant.
Privacy
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to a private life throughout the European Union. [6] The right to freedom of expression and the right to a private right are often complementary rights, in particular in the online sphere. Privacy law is, on the whole, left to EU member states to decide. In a number of EU member states, the right to privacy can restrict the right to freedom of expression because there are limited protections for those who breach the right to privacy for reasons of public interest.
The media’s willingness to report and comment on aspects of people’s private lives, in particular where there is a legitimate public interest, has raised questions over the boundaries of what is public and what is private. In many EU member states, the media’s right to freedom of expression has been overly compromised by the lack of a serious public interest defence in privacy law. This is most clearly illustrated by the fact that some European Union member states offer protection for the private lives of politicians and the powerful, even when publication is in the public interest, in particular in France, Italy and Germany. In Italy, former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi used the country’s privacy laws to successfully sue the publisher of Italian magazine Oggi for breach of privacy after the magazine published photographs of the premier at parties where escort girls were allegedly in attendance. Publisher Pino Belleri received a suspended five-month sentence and a €10,000 fine. The set of photographs proved that the premier had used Italian state aircraft for his own private purposes, in breach of the law. Even though there was a clear public interest, the Italian Public Prosecutor’s Office brought charges. In Slovakia, courts also have a narrow interpretation of the public interest defence with regard to privacy. In February 2012, a District Court in Bratislava prohibited the distribution or publication of a book alleging corrupt links between Slovak politicians and the Penta financial group. One of the partners at Penta filed for a preliminary injunction to ban the publication for breach of privacy. It took three months for the decision to be overruled by a higher court and for the book to be published.
The European Court of Human Rights rejected former Federation Internationale de l’Automobile president Max Mosley’s attempt to force newspapers to give prior notification in instances where they may breach an individual’s right to a private life, noting that the requirement for prior notification would likely chill political and public interest matters. Yet prior notification and/or consent is currently a requirement in three EU member states: Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
Other countries have clear public interest defences. The Swedish Personal Data Act (PDA), or personuppgiftslagen (PUL), was enacted in 1998 and provides strong protections for freedom of expression by stating that in cases where there is a conflict between personal data privacy and freedom of the press or freedom of expression, the latter will prevail. The Supreme Court of Sweden backed this principle in 2001 in a case where a website was sued for breach of privacy after it highlighted criticisms of Swedish bank officials.
When it comes to data retention, the European Union demonstrates clear competency. As noted in Index’s policy paper “Is the EU heading in the right direction on digital freedom?“, published in June 2013, the EU is currently debating data protection reforms that would strengthen existing privacy principles set out in 1995, as well as harmonise individual member states’ laws. The proposed EU General Data Protection Regulation, currently being debated by the European Parliament, aims to give users greater control of their personal data and hold companies more accountable when they access data. But the “right to be forgotten” clause of the proposed regulation has been the subject of controversy as it would allow internet users to remove content posted to social networks in the past. This limited right is not expected to require search engines to stop linking to articles, nor would it require news outlets to remove articles users found offensive from their sites. The Center for Democracy and Technology referred to the impact of these proposals as placing “unreasonable burdens” that could chill expression by leading to fewer online platforms for unrestricted speech. These concerns, among others, should be taken into consideration at the EU level. In the data protection debate, freedom of expression should not be compromised to enact stricter privacy policies.
This article was posted on Jan 2 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
[1] Article 208 of the Criminal Code.
[2] Article 168(2) of the Criminal Code.
[3] Article 248 of the Criminal Code prohibits ‘disparagement of the State and its symbols, ibid, International PEN.
[4] Index on Censorship, ‘UK government abolishes seditious libel and criminal defamation’ (13 July 2009)
[5] More recent jurisprudence includes: Lopes Gomes da Silva v Portugal (2000); Oberschlick v Austria (no 2) (1997) and Schwabe v Austria (1992) which all cover the limits for legitimate criticism of politicians.
[6] Privacy is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights through Article 7 (‘Respect for private and family life’) and Article 8 (‘Protection of personal data’).
13 Dec 13 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
Grafitti of Tommie Smith, John Carlos and Peter Norman showing solidarity for the civil rights movement at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968 (Image: Newtown graffiti/Wikimedia Commons)
Athletes preparing to head off to Sochi Winter Olympics in February, have been reminded that they are barred from making political statements during the games.
”We will give the background of the Rule 50, explaining the interpretation of the Rule 50 to make the athletes aware and to assure them that the athletes will be protected,” said IOC President Thomas Bach in an interview earlier this week. Rule 50 stipulates that ”No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” Failure to comply could, at worst, mean expulsion for the athlete in question.
Political expression is certainly a hot topic at Sochi 2014. The games continue to be marred by widespread, international criticism of Russia’s human — and particularly LGBT– rights record. The outrage has especially been directed at the country’s recently implemented, draconian anti-gay law. Put place to “protect children”, it bans “gay propaganda”. This vague terminology could technically include anything from a ten meter rainbow flag to a tiny rainbow pin, and there have already been arrests under the new legislation.
The confusion continued as the world wondered how this might impact LGBT athletes and spectators, or those wishing to show solidarity with them. Russian authorities have for instance warned of possible fines for visitors displaying “gay propaganda”. Could this put the Germans, with their colourful official gear, in the firing line? (Disclaimer: team Germany has denied that the outfits were designed as a protest.)
On the other hand, Russian president Vladimir Putin has promised there will be no discrimination at the Olympics, and IOC Chief Jaques Rogge, has said they “have received strong written reassurances from Russia that everyone will be welcome in Sochi regardless of their sexual orientation.”
On top of this, the IOC also recently announced that there will be designated “protest zones” in Sochi, for “people who want to express their opinion or want to demonstrate for or against something,” according to Bach. Where these would be located, or exactly how they would work, was not explained.
But while the legal situation in Russia adds another level of uncertainty and confusion regarding free, political expression for athletes, rule 50 has banned it for years. And for years, athletes have taken a stand anyway.
By far the most famous example came during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City — American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, on the podium, black gloved fists raised in solidarity with the ongoing American civil rights movement. The third man on the podium, Australian Peter Norman, showed his support by wearing a badge for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. All three men faced criticism at the time, but the image today stands out as one of the most iconic and powerful pieces of Olympic history.
However, the history of Olympians and political protest goes further back than that. An early example is the refusal of American shotputter Ralph Rose to dip the flag to King Edward VII at the 1908 games in London. It us unknown exactly why he did it, but one theory is that it was an act of solidarity for Irish athletes who had to compete under the British flag, as Rose and others on his team were of Irish descent.
The Cold War years unsurprisingly proved to be a popular time for athletes to put their political views across. When China withdrew from the 1960 Olympics in protest at Taiwan, then recognised by the west as the legitimate China, taking part. The IOC then asked Taiwan not to march under the name ‘Republic of China’. While considering boycotting the games, the Taiwanese delegation instead decided to march into the opening ceremony with a sign reading “under protest”.
The same year as the Smith and Carlos protest, a Czechoslovakian gymnast kept her face down during the Soviet national anthem, in protest at the brutal crackdown of the Prague Spring earlier that year. And that was not the only act of defiance against the Soviet Union. During the controversial 1980 Moscow Olympics, boycotted by a number of countries over the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the athletes competing also took a stand. The likes of China, Puerto Rico, Denmark, France and the UK marched under the Olympic flag in the opening ceremony, and raised it in the medal ceremonies. After winning gold, and beating a Soviet opponent, Polish high jumper Wladyslaw Kozakieicz also made a now famous, symbolic protest gesture towards the Soviet crowd.
But there are also more recent examples. At Athens 2004, Iranian flyweight judo champion Arash Miresmaeili reportedly ate his way out of his weight category the day before he was set to fight Israeli Ehud Vaks. “Although I have trained for months and was in good shape, I refused to fight my Israeli opponent to sympathise with the suffering of the people of Palestine” he said. A member of the South Korean football team which beat Japan to win bronze at the 2012 London Olympics, celebrated with a flag carrying a slogan supporting South Korean sovereignty over territory Japan also claims.
When the debate on political expression comes up, the argument of “where do we draw the line” often follows. If the IOC is to allow messages of solidarity with Russia’s LGBT population, should they allow, say, a Serbian athlete speak out against Kosovan independence? Or any number of similar, controversial political issues? Is it not easier to simply have a blanket band, and leave it at that?
The problem with this is, as much as the IOC and many other would like it, the Olympics, with all their inherent symbolism, simply cannot be divorced from wider society or politics. The examples above show this. With regards to Sochi in particular, the issue is pretty straightforward — gay are human rights. Some have argued we should boycott a Olympics in a country that doesn’t respect the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, or indeed the Olympic Charter. This is not happening, so the very least we can is use the Olympics to shine a light on gay rights in Russia. At its core, the Olympics are about the athletes — they are the most visible and important people there. It remains to be seen whether any of them will take a stand for gay rights, outside cordoned-off protest areas, in the slopes and on the rink, where the spotlight shines the brightest. And if they do, they should have our full support.
This article was posted on 13 Dec 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
