3 Dec 2021 | Greece, News and features, Turkey
Ingeborg Beugel had been living and working in Greece on and off for years when, last month, a stone thrown at her head and a wave of online bullying and threats against her life forced her to return to the Netherlands. The attacks happened after she asked Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis why he “keeps lying about pushing back refugees” from Greek to Turkish waters. Her case adds to a growing list of violations against media freedoms in Greece, a worrying sign that all is not well in the European country.
“I hadn’t expected a digital witch hunt”, Beugel told Index on Censorship after she had returned to the Netherlands. Beugel is known in the Netherlands for her many reports from the Greek islands, where refugees are held in camps in dire conditions and where she tracks refugees personally, collecting first-hand evidence of those who are sent back to Turkey. Press conferences with authorities are not her cup of tea, but this time was different, she said:
“This was my chance to let two prime ministers, Mitsotakis of Greece and Rutte from the Netherlands, not get away with denial of push-backs anymore. Until the last minute I wasn’t sure how to phrase my question, but I knew I had to be sharp.”
What she came up with was: “When at last will you stop lying about the push-backs? Please don’t insult either mine or the intelligence of all the journalists in the world. There has been overwhelming evidence and you keep denying and lying. Why are you not honest?”
Mitsotakis reacted furiously, taking it as an insult to both himself and the Greek people. Asked if she had been impolite, Beugel answered: “You know what’s impolite? Pushing refugees back, which is against international law, and lying about it.”
In the evening following the press conference, a rock was thrown at her as she left a grocery shop, grazing her forehead. She ran home and only then discovered the digital witch hunt. [Some of those online were criticising Beugel for helping an asylum seeker, for which she was briefly arrested over the summer. – Editor]
A couple of days later, she was on a plane back to the Netherlands. The Dutch embassy in Athens, the Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Dutch Journalists Union NVJ strongly advised her to leave because her safety couldn’t be guaranteed anymore.
“’Let it blow over’, they said. So I’m waiting for it to blow over,” Beugel said.
Yannis Kotsifos, director of the Journalists’ Union of Macedonia and Thrace in Greece and chairperson at the European Center for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) in Germany, told Index: “Mitsotakis didn’t react in the right way to Beugel’s question and even though I didn’t like her style, I understand why she did it this way. But we need to be careful not to make the debate about press freedom political. Greece’s position on the press freedom list is in decline but it’s not just about this government. The problems are deeper rooted.”
Beugel agreed, and indeed placed the way she phrased her question in a wider context of the Greek media landscape, in which media don’t dedicate a lot of space to the illegal turning away of refugees to Turkey. “Mitsotakis’ denial keeps defining the journalistic narrative and I wanted to break that,” Beugel said. “I knew I would have a big audience at this press conference and that Greek pro-government media couldn’t ignore what I said and what then happened.”
Beugel recalls when she first started as an aspiring journalist in Greece 40 years ago. There was a lot of hope for the future, following the end of the Greek junta, a military dictatorship that lasted from 1967 to 1974.
“But now, the press is mostly in the hands of tycoons who are not in media for the sake of good journalism. Public TV works for the government in power, and has been underfunded,” she said.
Ownership is a problem, but ECPMF’s Kotsifos also highlighted a lack of self-regulation in the press, a lack of finances for independent journalism and for proper working conditions, and a growing distrust in the media because of rising polarisation.
“This leads to hate rhetoric against journalists and sometimes to physical violence,” said Kotsifos.
To break this cycle and encourage a freer press, the Media Freedom Rapid Response, a project that has monitored violations of media freedom across the EU since March 2020, and the ECPMF are conducting a fact finding mission in Greece this month.
The mission was considered necessary because of several worrying “signals”, the worst being earlier this year when crime reporter Giorgos Karaivaz was fatally shot outside his house in Athens. Other incidents include surveillance by the Intelligence Service of Stavros Malichoudis, who reports about migration and refugees.
New legislation is of concern too, most notably the proposed introduction of fines and jail sentences for journalists found guilty of publishing “fake news”, which would, MFRR said,”undermine the freedom of the press and have a chilling effect at a time when independent journalism is already under pressure in Greece”. SLAPP lawsuits, in which journalists are bombarded with legal cases to drain them financially and stifle their work, are also a huge point of concern (as reported here by Index).
Today Beugel is in Amsterdam waiting until the commotion “blows over”. She said: “I want to return as soon as possible. I miss my dogs, who are luckily taken care of by a friend. I miss my friends, my house, my work. This situation is hard, but I know there is not only rejection, but support for my work in Greece as well.”
29 Oct 2021 | About Index, Australia, News and features, The climate crisis, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
The bushfires that tore across Australia in the summer of 2019-20 left in their wake 18 million hectares of scorched land. A total of 33 people – including nine firefighters – lost their lives, and close to 3,500 homes were razed to the ground. Ecologists calculated that as many as one billion animals perished in the fires, while economists estimated the cost of recovery at an unprecedented AU$100 billion.
Faced with tallies of destruction too big to comprehend, Australians cast about for clarity on why this disaster was unfolding, and how it could be prevented from happening again the future. Conveniently, there was a living culture with 65,000 years of experience in caring for the country to turn to for answers.
The fires precipitated a sudden torrent of interest in traditional Aboriginal land management techniques. First Nations rangers, practitioners and traditional knowledge experts – so rarely afforded time on the airwaves – were widely consulted on national television and radio shows. For many Australians, it was their first time hearing about “cool burning” and “fire-stick farming”: traditional methods of burning patches of bushland at low temperatures to clear the undergrowth without damaging root systems and curtail the risk of out-of-control bushfires in the arid heights of summer.
Yet these practices are ancient. They’ve been passed down through generations of Aboriginal Australians, forming part of the symbiotic relationship that First Nations people have with the environment as custodians of the land.
“Think of it like this: an Aboriginal man 300 years ago didn’t have to worry about handing a climate emergency on to the next generation,” said indigenous cultural educator and Wiradjuri man Darren Charlwood.
“What they were handing on to their children was an understanding of how to survive, how to respect their country, how to respect their ancestors in doing so, and how to practise all this through land management, through ritual, through their interactions within their social organisation and systems.”
While the unprecedented interest in traditional knowledge from the media, the government and conservation organisations was undeniably welcome, for educators such as Charlwood – who works for Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens and the New South Wales government’s National Parks and Wildlife Service – it was also frustrating.
“If that sort of engagement had come into play a lot earlier, we probably wouldn’t have had as big a catastrophe as we did,” he said. “Traditional fire management is wonderful, and it can really help with the plight of our environment in Australia. But, mind you, this was a climate catastrophe. Traditional land management would have saved only so much. The bottom line is the climate is changing.”
The consultation-after-the-fact that occurred in the wake of the 2019-20 bushfires is symptomatic of a more troubling “selective listening” that Australia’s First Nations people encounter across the political spectrum – from the prime minister’s office to the halls of local government – especially on land and environment issues.
It’s something that Yvonne Weldon, Australia’s first Aboriginal candidate for Lord Mayor of Sydney, is looking to change.
For Weldon, the principle of inclusion is at the core of an indigenous approach to leadership and environmentalism. It’s a value she places at the heart of her campaign.
“Inclusion is who we are as First Nations people,” she said. “Our ability to be inclusive – to hear what others are saying and act with sensitivity to their existence – is how we have been able to survive.”
She added that the same logic applied to the environment. “Prior to Invasion we didn’t have polluted parts of our country. We didn’t take any more than was needed. Whatever ecosystem you were a part of, you had to live in harmony with it. You didn’t do it at the expense of other living things.”
Reaching for the top
Weldon and her team at Unite for Sydney launched their campaign at Redfern Oval in May, nearly 20 years after then-prime minister Paul Keating’s historic Redfern Speech, where he recognised the impact of dispossession and oppression on First Nations peoples, and called for their place in the modern Australian nation to be cemented.
“It’s about creating moments that represent a landmark for inclusion,” explained Weldon. “And, hopefully, those moments happen closer and closer together in time until inclusion is no longer the exception, it’s commonplace.”
Weldon is a proud Wiradjuri woman who grew up in the inner-city suburb of Redfern, Sydney. With 30 years of experience as a community organiser and campaigner, she has spent her adult life advocating for the disadvantaged. She is a board member of Domestic Violence NSW and Redfern Jarjum College – a primary school supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children needing additional learning support – as well as deputy chair of the NSW Australia Day Council. She’s also the first Aboriginal person to run for the top job at the City of Sydney Council.
“To me, the fact that I’m the first Aboriginal person to run for Lord Mayor of Sydney in 2021 is insulting,” she said. “It’s an insult because it hasn’t been done before in this country, and yet we think we have progressed.”
Running on a platform of effective climate action, genuinely affordable housing and better community engagement, the campaigner-turned-candidate sees plenty of opportunities for improvement.
“True leadership has to be inclusive of all, and what I’ve seen in local government has fallen way short of that.”
She realised she had to take a run at the job after six years as elected chair of Sydney’s Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council (LALC) – an organisation set up by law to advocate for the interests of local Aboriginal people in relation to land acquisition, use and management.
In her experience, representatives of the City of Sydney Council have chosen to engage only when it suits their purposes, and either reject proposals for meaningful change out of hand or use inordinate process as a way of keeping them in check.
It’s an all-too-familiar story in Australia, where the government has been unwilling to reach a treaty with its indigenous people comparable to those of New Zealand, Canada or the USA.
Aboriginal calls for recognition were formalised in 2017 with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the constitution, and a treaty to supervise agreement-making and truth-telling with governments.
But the historical consensus was rejected outright by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and denigrated by the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, who called it an “overreach”.
Following a 2018 parliamentary inquiry which found the Statement from the Heart should indeed be enacted, the current Australian government has delayed plans to introduce relevant legislation until after the next federal election in 2022.
A long fight
The application of “selective listening” to First Nations calls for autonomy over their own land is, historically speaking, one of the foundations that modern Australia was built on.
“The damage that’s been done to Australia over 250 years of not respecting indigenous people or knowledge… you can really see it in our environment, it’s very much on show,” said Charlwood. “Because of the way that people have introduced invasive animals and plants to Australia, because of practices like mining and the way people engage with the landscape here, Australia has lost more wildlife in a shorter time than anywhere else on Earth.”
According to Heather Goodall – professor emerita of history at the University of Technology in Sydney – there is historical evidence that Aboriginal people in New South Wales made efforts to secure broad tracts of land where they could feel a sense of safety and belonging, access sites of cultural significance and act as custodians for the environment as early as the 1840s, when the first “reserves” were established.
Despite a movement which involved direct action, writing their own petitions and recruiting sympathetic white men to convey their demands to authorities, Aboriginal people were gradually moved to government-delineated reserves, missions or small parcels of land for agricultural use.
“Consultation is often about seeking opinions which will be used to justify a decision that has already been made. It’s a very hard-to-define term that often doesn’t mean having decision-making power,” said Goodall.
That’s a sentiment Weldon can relate to. “Aboriginal people are not one people – there are hundreds of different nations and tribes and clans all across the country,” she said.
“Bearing in mind the diversity of Aboriginal Australia, often what people in power do is if they don’t want to hear what one group has to say, they’ll go to another group until they find someone to say what they want to hear. I call it ‘shopping around’.
“They’ll play people off each other, they’ll offer little crumbs, they’ll do all these types of things because that’s the colonial viewpoint. It’s about creating the notion that you’re open and inclusive, when actually you’re orchestrating it all for self.
“Sydney represents ground zero, where the impact of colonisation began,” she added. “But you can’t talk about reviving or respecting traditional knowledge if you’re not inclusive of First Nations people.”
As another generation of Aboriginal Australians stands ready to share knowledge and lead the way to a more sustainable future, the question remains whether other Australians are ready to listen – and ready to vote.
27 Sep 2021 | China
“First, we stood up, then we got rich, and now we got strong.” Chinese officials are repeating this slogan over and over, China analyst Mareike Ohlberg recently told the audience at an Index on Censorship event. “Part of being a strong country means being able to influence or determine what people talk about, not just in China but globally.”
Confucius Institutes were established in 2004 with the stated mission of teaching Chinese language and culture abroad and are widely acknowledged as one of the ways China exerts its influence around the world. In 2010, the Confucius Institute headquarters (known as Hanban) received the ‘Chinese Influence the World Award’. “People often ask me about the Confucius Institute’s role in soft power,” said its founder, Xu Lin, at the award ceremony. “We are indeed trying to expand our influence.”
Confucius was a sixth-century philosopher, educator, and quasi-religious figure, who has since come to symbolise peace and harmony. By promoting this image and avoiding any reference to Marxist ideology, a Chinese state institution has made its way onto more 550 university and college campuses, and into 1,172 primary and secondary school classrooms around the world. According to the New York Times, “The carefully selected label [of Confucius Institutes] speaks volumes about the country’s soft-power ambitions.”
In the West, the largest number of Confucius Institutes are found in English-speaking countries. Why? “The Chinese government is minimalist,” Ohlberg replied. “If you have the government in your pocket, why do you need a Confucius Institute?” The UK has approximately 30 Confucius Institutes, five in Scotland. France has 21, Germany has 19, and Italy has 16. There are 103 in the EU.
By operating primarily on campuses, Confucius Institutes are unlike other countries’ cultural organisations, like the British Council, Alliance Française, or Goethe Institutes. Tao Zhang of Nottingham Trent University believes this enables the Chinese authorities “to gain a foot-hold for the exercise of control over the study of China and the Chinese language.”
Confucius Institutes are also unlike European institutes in that they are directly managed by the Chinese government. According to the Netherlands Institute of International Relations, “[t]his offers Confucius Institutes the possibility to unilaterally promote Chinese policy and ideas in a one-sided way, to commit censorship, or to stimulate self-censorship about China among students, pupils and the wider public”.
This report looks the rise of the Institutes and whether those fighting for freedom of expression should be worried.
24 Sep 2021 | Bosnia, China, News and features, Turkey, Volume 50.03 Autumn 2021 Extras
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”117556″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Almost three decades ago, some three million books and countless artefacts went up in flames when Sarajevo’s National and University Library – inside the Vijecnica (city hall) – was burned to the ground. The destruction of the Vijecnica at the beginning of the war was a symbol for one of the aggressor’s main objectives – silencing the soul of the city and crushing the cultural identity of an entire society.”
So said Dunja Mijatović, the current Council of Europe commissioner for human rights, who was born in Sarajevo when it was part of Yugoslavia.
Just weeks before the anniversary of the burning of the library on 25 August 1992, Mijatović spoke to Index about its symbolism and what its destruction was meant to achieve.
She quoted Heinrich Heine’s play, Almansor: “Where they burn books they will also, in the end, burn people.”
Libraries and archives have been targets for centuries, and the reason is always the same: it’s about taking away knowledge and stifling free thinking.
Libraries are, and have always been, symbols of freedom – the freedom to think and learn and find documents and books to debate and discuss.
Throughout history, when authoritarians take power and seek to control thought and behaviour, they either lock up libraries or destroy the manuscripts and books inside them.
The Serbian forces who burned the Sarajevo library were seeking to obliterate evidence of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s existence as a successful multicultural and multi-ethnic state. The documents they burned told a different history from the one that the army leaders wanted to portray.
Omar Mohammed, who reported as Mosul Eye on the Isis occupation of his city in Iraq, risked his life to blog anonymously about the occupiers’ wish to destroy books as well as to execute people as they sought to repress the population.
Mohammed told Index that it was not just the university library that was destroyed in Mosul, but it was the one that was reported on the most.
Many other libraries, even private collections, were wiped out. “The only possible reason is because knowledge is power,” he said. “Once you prevent people from accessing knowledge then you will have full control over them.”
Like many other scholars who have delved into the history of libraries, Mohammed understands that it is not about the buildings themselves.
“They don’t want people to have this access because they know if people write the history, it will be completely different from the one they wanted it to be,” he said.
Targeting libraries sends out a powerful message to scholars, historians and scientists, he added.
“When they see that such people are able to totally target the libraries, that they are literally able to destroy everything, it’s a manifestation of brutality.”
Today, Richard Ovenden, the most senior librarian at the Bodleian libraries at the University of Oxford, is worried about libraries in Turkey being closed under pressure from the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
According to some sources, at least 188 libraries were closed there between 2002 and 2020.
Ovenden’s book, Burning the Books, looks at the history of the intentional destruction of knowledge. He was recently contacted by a Turkish student, who said: “I’ve just read your book and I want you to know how bad it is in Turkey, because libraries are being destroyed. And all the things that you write about are true in Turkey today.”
Ovenden said: “There is an absolutely authoritarian control over knowledge. Attacks on knowledge are being exercised by the authoritarian leader of Turkey right now. It is the ability for the population to generate their own ideas and to come up with their own thoughts that some governments, some authoritarian powers, some dictators and rulers do not like.”
When dictatorships seek to establish that certain minorities don’t exist, or haven’t lived somewhere, getting rid of the documentary evidence is very convenient.
Archives that establish the existence of Uighurs in China and Muslims in parts of India also look like targets.
Ovenden feels that what is fantastically important about libraries is that they “preserve the past thoughts and ideas of human beings so they’re parts of that evidence base”.
He added: “They’re also disseminating institutions [where] you can borrow the books, you can come and take those ideas away and write other books about them, or pamphlets, or newspaper articles, or whatever it is.”
Governments around the world are failing to protect libraries as a resource, sometimes by withdrawing or drastically reducing funding.
In the UK, almost 800 libraries closed between 2010 and 2019, and a major campaign kicked off in Australia this year to save the national archives.
Michelle Arrow, professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, argued in April that if funding cuts were not reversed, irreplaceable audio-visual collections would fall apart. After a public campaign, the national government has delivered some extra funding, but this has not solved all the archives’ problems.
She told Index that with a reduction in staff of almost 25% since 2013, more staff would be needed to deal with the large backlog of requests to view archived material.
She said the archives contained “unique records, and they touch almost every Australian: it is a democratic archive, a collection of ordinary people’s records, rather than famous or renowned Australians”.
While some countries are seeing numerous library closures due to financial or other threats, there are new defenders coming to light. In the coastal city of Santa Cruz in California, there’s a massive investment in upgrades to current libraries, and new ones are opening over the next two years.
Santa Cruz mayor Donna Meyers told Index: “In California, we just tend to believe in public institutions. We believe that public education, public libraries, all of that, lead to a better community, lead to a more informed society.”
Santa Cruz residents passed a special tax – by 78% of the vote – to pay for investment in the libraries which, Meyers says, is a sign of how committed the community is to libraries being around for future generations.
Back in Sarajevo, Mijatović can see the new library that rose from the ashes of the Vijecnica from her terrace.
She said: “One hopes that the soul and the people of Sarajevo will recover and that new generations will hopefully enjoy this magnificent symbol of Sarajevo and, more importantly, live in peace.”
Library destruction in recent history
1914: German troops destroy the library of the Catholic University of Louvain
1939: The Great Talmudic Library in Lublin is destroyed by the Nazis
1966-76: Chairman Mao destroys libraries across China as part of the Cultural Revolution
1976-79: The Khmer Rouge deliberately destroy libraries across Cambodia, including the Phnom Penh national library
2013: Islamic troops set fire to the library in Timbuktu, Mali
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