08 Nov 24 | Czech Republic, Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Poland
There is a grainy photograph on the first page of the January 1990 edition of Index on Censorship magazine showing a group of twenty or so smiling friends of various ages. They are dressed in the non-descript shabby style favoured by most European intellectuals of the period. They could easily be mistaken for a group of academics on a field trip if it weren’t for the sign in Polish behind them which reads: State Border: Crossing Forbidden.
The picture was taken on 9 July 1988 at a secret location on the Polish-Czech border. This unruly band of comrades has been brought together by the bitter and often lonely struggle against Stalinism, their friendship formed in an underground network of Polish-Czech solidarity. The cause often seemed hopeless and at the time the picture was taken this obscure group of writers and activists could never have imagined that the whole edifice they had spent their lives opposing was about to collapse.
As it turned out, this photograph represented one of the most extraordinary gatherings of dissidents in the whole of the Cold War. Look closely and you can see Václav Havel, the Czech dissident playwright, who would become President of Czechoslovakia just 20 months after the photo was taken. Ján Čarnogurský, a Catholic anti-communist activist, who became the Prime Minister of Slovakia in 1991 is also there as is Jan Ruml, who went on to become the Czech interior minister from 1992 to 1997. Jan Urban led the Civic Forum campaign in the elections of 1990, but decided not to become Prime Minister in the new government. A year on, Jacek Kuroń, known as the godfather of the Polish opposition, would be the minister for employment in the first Solidarity government.
Mirosław Jasiński, a leading member of Polish-Czechoslovak Solidarity became a prominent Polish diplomat. Among them also are opposition journalists Petr Pospíchal and Petr Uhl, who founded the East European Information Agency and Adam Michnik, perhaps Poland’s most celebrated journalist, who became the first editor of the independent newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza in May 1989 and later an MP before returning to journalism.
The only woman in the photo is Anna Šabatová who went on to become the ombudsman of the Czech parliament and was the first East European woman to receive the United Nations Human Rights Prize.
No one predicted the events of 1989, the 35th anniversary of which, will be celebrated this year. The first signs came in the spring of that year, when the Polish government and Solidarity reached an agreement to legalise the free trade union and hold elections. In June, the Communists were humiliated at the polls and in August Solidarity’s Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Prime Minister.
A parallel process in Hungary saw the creation of independent parties in February 1989. By the beginning of May, the authorities had dismantled the barbed wire on the frontier with Austria. The borders of the old Communist bloc started to fray and then come apart at the seams. In September, Budapest announced that East Germans would be given passage through Hungary into Western Europe. Young people across Eastern Europe began to make their way in numbers to Vienna to get their first taste of western consumer goods and freedom. Then, in November, the
movement became irresistible as the Berlin Wall itself crumbled and fell under the weight of sledgehammers. In Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution ushered in the peaceful transition to democracy and by Christmas, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu was gone. Crucially, unlike in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet army did not intervene.
For young people across Europe, these were life-changing events. As a wide-eyed 23-year-old journalist, I travelled across Eastern Europe in December 1989. In East Berlin, I spoke to students loyal to the regime whose world had been turned upside down, who asked me to reassure them about the key role played by the Communist Party of Great Britain in the fight against racism and the National Front. In Leipzig I saw the thousands of people taking part in candlelit demonstrations around the city. In Prague I grumbled to two journalists who worked for the trade union newspaper that there would soon be a McDonald’s on Wenceslas Square and witnessed their pure delight as they looked me in the eye and said “Yes!” I remember a mixture of emotions among the people I met: hope and optimism about the future of an undivided Europe, certainly, but also a degree of fear and uncertainty about whether the transition would remain peaceful. Common to everyone though was the feeling of pure surprise. Absolutely no one had expected this, even a year earlier.
Index’s co-founder, the poet Stephen Spender, captured this feeling well in his speech to English PEN at a party for his 80th birthday on 6 December 1989, published in the February 1990 edition of Index magazine. He suggested that a motto for his kind of writer, opposed both to Stalinism and McCarthyism, should be “the politics of the unpolitical”, but asked what the role of such writers should be after the end of the Cold War.
“It is essential to ask this question because we are now entering what less than even a year ago was an almost unthinkable period,” he said. “How unthinkable is to me made vivid by recalling that at the beginning of 1989 I remarked to Isaiah Berlin, who, like me, has in 1989 reached his 80th year – he and I each other’s oldest living friend – that the one thing I wished to see was the collapse of the dictatorships in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He agreed but said that this would not happen in our lifetimes. Well, now it has happened, and the results are completely bewildering.”
How bewildered might Stephen Spender be 35 years later. No one talks about “the politics of the unpolitical” anymore. But those of us who were there in 1989 still remember the sense of surprise that everyone who thought they could predict the future was wrong and that feeling, for a short while, that everything was possible.
25 Sep 24 | News and features
We are writing to bring attention to the case of the visual and performance artist and master’s student, ODEE, who is being sued for damages (including legal fees likely upwards of £500,000) in the High Court in London on the 25 and 26 September 2024. The lawsuit has been brought against ODEE by Samherji, one of Europe’s largest fishing companies based in Iceland, for the unauthorised use of its website and brand.
ODEE’s art piece centres around the concept of corporate responsibility through a fictional apology – via a website he created and a mural at the Reykjavík Art Gallery – for the alleged corruption committed by Samherji to secure fishing quotas in Namibia revealed in 2019 by the whistleblower, Jóhannes Stefansson, and which quickly became known as the #Fishrot Scandal.
Samherji has exercised its rights to challenge ODEE by issuing an interim injunction to require him to take down the website with the spoof apology, and he did so in May 2023. The court will need to decide whether to vary or discharge the injunction, and whether the artist should be liable for Samerjhi’s legal costs and alleged damages. However, the question remains as to whether such action is proportionate, or an attempt to silence those who speak out against corruption.
The alleged corruption is currently the focus of a high-profile trial in Namibia in which 10 suspects have been charged including the former Ministers of Justice and Fisheries – the majority of whom have been held in custody since 2019, and who may face even longer jail terms if convicted. Investigations into Samherji’s activities are continuing in Iceland.
Ensuring that whistleblowers can disclose information about wrongdoing in the public interest is vital for democratic accountability – so that proper investigations can occur, and those responsible are held to account. Protecting whistleblowers safeguards the public’s right to know, an essential element of the right to freedom of expression.
Artistic freedom of expression – through film, theatre, literature, painting and conceptual art, among many other media – is also vital to a healthy democracy and to public discourse and the development of ideas. Artistic expression allows individuals, communities and societies to consider and examine moral and ethical choices, as well as how power works and affects us, whether it is political, social or economic.
Freedom of expression links whistleblowers and artists – individuals must be protected from the powerful who wish to stop them speaking up. Jóhannes Stefansson and ODEE deserve our support. In today’s world, where we face existential challenges to protect our natural resources, environment and climate systems, we can ill afford to let these voices be silenced.
We, the undersigned, therefore, urge Samherji to drop its disproportionate case against the artist, ODEE.
SIGNED BY:
African Centre for Media & Information Literacy (Nigeria)
Artistic Freedom Initiative (International)
Blueprint for Free Speech (International)
Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation (Malta)
Disruption Network Lab e.V. (Germany)
Centre for Free Expression (Canada)
Civil Liberties Union for Europe
Citizens Network Watchdog Poland
Climate Whistleblowers (France)
GlobaLeaks (Italy)
Government Accountability Project (USA)
Index on Censorship (UK)
Institute for Public Policy Research (Namibia)
Justice and Environment (EU)
Oživení (Czech Republic)
Pištaljka (Serbia)
Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF)
Pro Publico (International)
Protect (UK)
Shadow World Investigations (UK)
Spotlight on Corruption (UK)
The Whistleblower House (South Africa)
Transparency International Ireland
Transparency International Italy
Whistleblowers-Netzwerk e.V. (Germany)
Whistleblower Chile
Whistleblowing International Network
* Protect is a registered Charity in England and Wales No.1025557
** WIN is a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation No. SC048595
07 Aug 24 | Belarus, Lithuania, News and features, Ukraine, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
Andrej Strizhak, a human rights activist and Belarus exile, uses an electric scooter to go around the streets of Vilnius’s old town.
“It is a very convenient means of transportation,” he told Index, sitting in a coffee shop at The House of the Signatories where Lithuania’s Act of Independence was signed in 1918.
Strizhak is founder of the Belarus Solidarity Foundation, Bysol, a humanitarian organisation which gives financial help to political prisoners, striking workers and other activists critical of the repressive regime of President Aliaksandr Lukashenka. Recently Bysol has also focused on aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion that Vladimir Putin launched in February 2022.
For Strizhak, both struggles are connected.
“Belarus’s ‘freedom key’ is in Ukraine, and many Belarusians are helping fight the war in Ukraine,” he said. “If Putin fails, then Lukashenka will lose his principal ally.”
His colleague, former male model, fitness trainer and media celebrity turned political activist Andrey Tkachov, joined us in the café. Tkachov like Strizhak is in his thirties. He’s an immensely tall and striking figure, dressed in black. He oversees the management of the Medical Solidarity Fund, operating under the Bysol Foundation umbrella. He sees the conflict in stark terms.
“It is a war between good and evil. Russia is knowingly bombing hospitals and we are working on getting medical supplies and equipment.”
Bysol has raised over $10.7 million and acts as a platform for other organisations or individuals to raise funds for humanitarian causes.
Most of it has been done through cryptocurrency because, as Strizhak explained, it is “hard for the government to trace these transactions.”
During the first days of the Ukrainian war, Bysol received requests for cash to buy vehicles, drones and first aid kits; funds were needed for emergency contraceptive and rape kits for Ukrainian war victims of sexual abuse and for legal fees to pursue justice for war crimes. Within a few days, Bysol raised over $130,000 for Ukrainian humanitarian causes and for Belarusian volunteers working in Ukraine.
As the war progressed, the foundation used its money to aid wounded Belarusian fighters to obtain medical assistance, move to Poland or Lithuania and heal from PTSD. Bysol handed over radios, sets of uniforms for medical doctors and anti-thermal camouflage cloaks to the Belarusians fighting in Ukraine.
They gave others help too.
For those who refused to fight or faced repression for opposing the war, Bysol staff drafted manuals on evacuation from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. They also posted instructions in a Telegram chat group, BysolEvacuation. Users issued advice on how to leave the war zone, discussed visa procedures and shared experiences on border crossings.
Strizhak and other activists first established Bysol in August 2020, as a response to violence against the opposition after the Belarus presidential election which saw Lukashenka winning a sixth term in office. Strizhak had already been detained several times by the police for his political activities and during the election summer, friends advised him to go on “vacation” abroad. He traveled to Kyiv, hoping to spend a month in Ukraine. There, building on his humanitarian work and crowdfunding skills, Strizhak came up with the idea of a fund-raising organisation.
He was joined in Ukraine by Tkachov, with whom he had worked during the Covid-19 pandemic and who had just been released from police custody. Tkachov had stayed in Belarus and joined anti-government protests in Minsk, witnessing police using grenades and shooting at peaceful opposition.
“The day after the elections, my friend and I took a ride around Minsk to check the aftermath of the protests,” Tkachov told Index. “An OMON (special police force) car stopped us and took us to a detention centre.” Officers gave Tkachov some “special attention” for his critical political opinions. He was handcuffed and beaten.
“Some of us fainted from the pain and from the inflicted injuries. We laid in puddles of blood and urine and prayed to be alive,” he said. Eventually, he lost consciousness when a soldier stepped on his neck.
“I regained consciousness only when police brought me to the prison, and a soldier poured water on me,” he said.
Together with the other 35 detainees, he spent three days in a cell suitable to accommodate 10 people.
In the late autumn of 2020 both dissidents decided to move to Lithuania, a member state of the EU and NATO, determined to expand Bysol. “Ukraine did not feel safe enough for us,” explained Strizhak.
Strizhak first raised money through a friend in the Netherlands who opened a fundraising account on Facebook. “We couldn’t do it from Belarus or Ukraine. Only people who live in ‘the white-world’ – the USA or Western Europe – can open fundraising accounts on Facebook,” he said.
Help started pouring in and more so when they were established in Vilnius. The most active supporters of the fund were and still are the Belarusian diaspora.
Walking a thin line between publicity and safety, Bysol has come to rely on cryptocurrency. Using traditional currency, customers rely on bank services and often pay high fees for financial transactions that might take a few days to complete, but cryptocurrency is a digital currency based on a network spread across many computers, unregulated by central government authorities. Unlike traditional financial institutions, opening a cryptocurrency wallet does not require identification verification, credit, or background checks: a person needs just a laptop or a smartphone with an internet connection and there is virtually no way for the government officials to stop, censor or reverse these transactions.
People find Bysol through social media and by word of mouth and the foundation follows a rigorous verification process before providing any help.
“We can’t name recipients and they can’t say ‘Thank you’ to us,” Strizak said.
Tkachov focuses on supporting Belarusian medical professionals and medical causes.
“Medical doctors actively expressed their opposition to the government’s actions. They were the ones who saw wounded, beaten and dead protesters. They described people arriving at the hospital as if they were brought from a battlefield with gunshot wounds or limbs ripped off by grenade explosions,” he said. Many medical doctors who expressed their disagreement about the government’s actions were laid off from state-run hospitals.
The Department of Investigation Committee in Minsk has initiated criminal proceedings against Strizhak who is accused of providing “training of individuals to take part in group activities, grossly violating public order” and financing extremism. Bysol itself has been labelled an extremist organisation and Belarus has listed its founders on the country’s wanted list and the wanted list of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), made up of Russia and other ex-Soviet states still in Russia’s orbit.
Tkachov said he was always interested in history, especially events leading to the outbreak of World War II. “I could not understand why the powerful states could not prevent it,” he said. “Witnessing unfolding events in Ukraine, I finally understood it. When I think about how much more needs to be done, I worry my efforts are not enough, or are not effective enough. We need to help many people.”
Since his early years, Strizhak was determined to bring change to society: “I can’t tolerate hypocrisy, lies or double standards,” he said. He travelled to the Donbas region of Ukraine from 2017 to 2020 to document war crimes committed by pro-Russian separatists. He has mourned the death of close work partners.
Although he is now far from the war zone, he visualises his efforts with a consciousness of the samurai way of “dying before going into battle.” Like Japan’s ancient warriors, he said, he is waging his humanitarian efforts fully committed and without fear.
01 Aug 24 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia, Statements
Index on Censorship welcomes the news that Vladimir Kara-Murza, a journalist, author, filmmaker and fierce Putin critic, and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich have today been released as part of a multi-country prisoner exchange including Russia and the USA.
The prisoner swap, one of the largest ever, has taken place in Ankara under the auspices of the Turkish National Intelligence Agency and involves 26 people held in Russia, Belarus, the USA, Germany, Slovenia, Norway and Poland. The exchange follows private discussions between the intelligence services of Russia and the United States and is the largest such exchange in decades.
Index has long championed the causes of Kara-Murza and Gershkovich.
Kara-Murza, a British citizen and father of three, had been a tireless pro-democracy campaigner and a champion of legislation that has provided for human rights violators and corrupt officials around the world to be subject to asset freezes and visa bans (so-called Magnitsky Acts). Kara-Murza was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2022; he was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize the same year.
In mid-July, WSJ reporter Gershkovich was sentenced to 16 years in a high-security penal colony on espionage charges. He was arrested in March 2023 while on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg 1,600 km east of Moscow with prosecutors arguing that he worked for the US Central Intelligence Agency, claims which the journalist, his employer and the US government denied.
Jessica Ní Mhainín, Head of Policy and Campaigns at Index on Censorship, said, “In most of Europe, Kara-Murza is rightly lauded for his work in defence of human rights and was awarded the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize in 2022. During his time in detention, he was held in solitary confinement and has had access to medical treatment restricted despite suffering from polyneuropathy, a condition affecting his central nervous system, brought on by two failed poisonings by FSB agents in 2015 and 2017.”
Index on Censorship CEO Jemimah Steinfeld said: “Evan Gershkovich’s trial was held in secret and his conviction is widely regarded as politically motivated. Index will continue to stand up for press freedom both in Russia and in other countries worldwide. His release has come not a moment too soon but we will continue to fight for the release of reporters unjustly held in countries around the globe for doing their jobs.”
Sasha Skochilenko, who was sentenced to a seven-year jail term for distributing anti-war leaflets in a Russian grocery store, and Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty who was seized by Russian authorities on a trip to visit her mother and has been in prison since October, are among those have who also been released. Former US Marine Paul Whelan, who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020 on espionage charges, has also been freed.
Vadim Krasikov, a colonel in Russia’s FSB intelligence service, who has been serving a life sentence in a German jail since 2019 for the murder in broad daylight in a Berlin park of dissident Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, is also part of the exchange.
For more information, please contact policy and campaigns manager Jessica Ní Mhainín on [email protected] or acting editor Sally Gimson on 07890 403338 or [email protected]
