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]
31 Jul 24 | Europe and Central Asia, Germany, News and features, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024
On 14 February, as the upper echelons of Germany’s Green Party prepared to descend on the south-western town of Biberach for their annual meeting, demonstrators blocked access to the town hall with tractors, paving stones, sandbags and manure.
Things took a more aggressive turn when three police officers were injured by protesters hurling objects. Police intervened with pepper spray and a protester smashed a window of federal minister of agriculture Cem Özdemir’s car. The Green Party cancelled the meeting because of safety concerns.
In the state of Thüringen, 200 farmers and demonstrators attempted to block roads to stop a company visit by vice-chancellor Robert Habeck. They insulted the company’s employees and threatened to hang journalists. A week later, an angry crowd followed and heckled party leader Ricarda Lang in Schorndorf, in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, until police stepped in – then the crowd attacked the officers, injuring some of them.
These attacks were far from isolated incidents. In 2021, the party was the most successful of its kind in Europe and the poster child of the continent’s hopeful environmentalist movement, having joined a government coalition for the first time.
Today, it is coming under attack – verbally and violently – unlike any other party.
According to German parliament figures, 44% of the politically motivated attacks recorded in 2023 targeted Green Party representatives, three times as many as their coalition partners or the opposition.
Early this year, another angry mob prevented Habeck, once one of Germany’s most popular politicians, from getting off a ferry in northern Germany. In September 2023, a man threw a rock at party leaders at a campaign event in Bavaria. And earlier that year, Lang found a gun cartridge in her letterbox.
Violence against MPs and politicians is on the rise across the EU, and in May Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot in an assassination attempt. But in Germany, this violence disproportionately targets Green Party politicians.
Local party members and supporters have refused to join the electoral campaign out of fear, according to Carolin Renner, a local party speaker in Görlitz, a far-right stronghold where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party won 32.5% of the vote in the 2021 election.
It’s hard to pin down when the mood began to swing against the Green Party. “I think this hate was always there,” Renner told Index, adding that it might have been when AfD drifted to the far-right around 2015.
But things took a turn for the worse in 2020 and 2021 when Covid restrictions generated massive anti-lockdown movements in Germany. At the end of 2021, the Green Party formed a government coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP).
“That’s when it really got out of hand,” Renner said. “We had people calling to say they were coming into our office and going to kill us and our families.” People slapped stickers on the doors, others spat on the windows and others glued the building’s doors so members couldn’t get in. “I was handling all the reporting to the police at the time, and I had to file at least one report per week,” she said. “It was pretty bad.”
Since the 2021 election, several political parties have tried to portray the Green Party as an urban elitist movement out of touch with the population. It is a favourite target of the far-right AfD, and its representatives have recently said it was “not surprising” that it was coming under attack.
But other parties have joined in attacking them, too. “It seems that the Greens were identified as the main political opponent by several, very different parties,” said Hannah Schwander, a professor of political sociology and social policy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Markus Söder, the leader of the centre-right Christian Social Union in Bavaria, said the Greens were “the number one party of prohibition”, falsely claiming it planned to ban meat, firecrackers, car washing and balloons. And the far-left party leader Sahra Wagenknecht has branded the Greens “the most dangerous party in the Bundestag”.
Even Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor from coalition partner the SPD, said it “remains a party that likes bans”.
“When you have politicians or the media who take up these narratives, that creates an atmosphere in which it seems legitimate to attack politicians – verbally, at first,” said Schwander. “But as we see now, that translates into action as well.”
The politicians’ rhetoric was accompanied by an onslaught of online campaigns. According to Raquel Miguel, a senior researcher with EU Disinfo Lab – an independent non-profit that gathers intelligence on disinformation campaigns in Europe – Green Party members were the most targeted by hoaxes during the 2021 election year. She said that they exaggerated the party’s inexperience and proposals, falsely claiming the party planned to ban fireworks or family barbecues, for example.
“Online campaigns contributed to stirring up hatred against individuals but also to discrediting and undermining trust in politicians, dehumanising them and making them more susceptible to attacks,” Miguel told Index. “And dehumanising contributes to accepting violence.”
In conspiracy-minded far-right groups congregating on the social messaging platform Telegram, the party was depicted as an enemy trying to “take away your way of life, your steak, the sugar from your coffee”, said Lea Frühwirth, a senior researcher with the non-profit Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy. “What that does psychologically is [make it feel] like an invasion of your personal space.”
The media have reported that the attacks on the Green Party’s annual meeting in Biberach and the heckling of the party’s leader in February originated from conspiratorial Telegram channels.
Violence against the party is on the rise, just as green parties faced the worst losses in the 2024 European Parliament elections. The party’s share in Germany appears to have plummeted since the last elections. However, researchers say that the population has not turned against climate issues. “The data shows that there hasn’t really been a widespread backlash against green policies,” said Jannik Jansen, a policy fellow focusing on social cohesion and just transition policies at the Jacques Delors Centre think-tank within Berlin’s Hertie School, which focuses on governance. Jansen co-authored a recent study of attitudes to climate policy among 15,000 voters in France, Germany and Poland. “The political mainstream hasn’t really shifted in this sense,” he said.
But polarisation and extremism have risen. Schwander said some climate issues had become more politicised, and society in general has become more polarised – although in a peculiar way. “People don’t seem to be more polarised on issues than they were before, but they dislike people who think differently more,” she said.
Political violence has risen considerably. Police recorded 2,790 incidents of physical or verbal violence against elected politicians in 2023 – and the figure has nearly doubled in the last five years. Attacks resulting in physical injury also appear to be on the rise.
Twenty-two politicians have been attacked so far in 2024, compared with 27 for all of 2023, according to federal police.
The number of politically motivated crimes has also risen to record-high levels, driven by a rise in right-wing extremism. According to government figures, the country recorded 60,028 offences in 2023 – the highest level since records began in 2001.
But things appear to be going better in the far-right stronghold of Görlitz. “This year, we only had maybe two or three direct attacks,” said Renner. She said the biggest incident happened during the farmers’ protests that shook Europe in late 2023 and early 2024.
“Shortly before Christmas, someone dumped a big load of horse shit right in front of our door at the Zittau office,” she said, adding that the decrease in attacks might be due to the police being more actively involved.
She said the party had also put in place a safety plan ahead of the European elections, requiring members to move in groups of at least three and sharing the list of party events and members’ whereabouts with the police at all times.
Attacks seem to have spilled over to other parties. In early May, European MP Matthias Ecke, from the SPD, was seriously injured when four young men assaulted him while he put up campaign posters in Dresden. He had to be taken to hospital and required surgery. That same evening, a Green Party campaigner was assaulted in the same area, allegedly by the same group. And a few days later, it was the turn of AfD politician Mario Kumpf, who was attacked in a supermarket.
Renner told Index that someone tore down nearly every party’s electoral posters in the northern part of the Görlitz district. “There’s not one poster left except for the far-right,” she said. “It’s not just the Greens anymore – it’s democracy itself that’s being attacked.
28 Jun 24 | Europe and Central Asia, European Union, News and features
While the outcome of the 2024 election is yet to be finalised, results at the time of writing show that Eurosceptic conservatives are on course to win an extra 14 seats (taking them to 83), while right-wing nationalists will gain nine seats (to 58). Overall, the right, including centre-right politicians of the European People’s Party grouping, has done well, largely at the expense of the liberal and green party groupings. With just five nations out of 27, including Italy and Estonia, remaining to publish their final results, the overall picture is unlikely to change dramatically.
The move to the far right is evident across Europe. France, which elects 81 members to the European Parliament (EP), was perhaps where this was most evident. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party is projected to receive around 31-32% of the vote, against President Macron’s centrist party, which is estimated to reach around 15% of the vote. Macron was so concerned about his party’s poor showing that he has called an election in the country. Belgium’s prime minister also handed in his resignation after the nationalist New Flemish Alliance emerged as the big winner after regional, national and European Parliament elections were held in the country on Super Sunday.
In Germany, Eurosceptic parties are projected to secure over 16% of the EP vote. The AfD tripled its support from voters under 24 from 5% in 2019 to 16% and gains six seats to reach 15. The Greens lost nine seats from 21 last time around. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party gained nearly 26% of the vote, gaining three seats, while in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s anti-immigration Party for Freedom gained six seats with 17% of the vote. A similar story played out in Poland, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria and Croatia.
But what is driving Europe’s veer to the right?
There is some evidence that the success of the far right comes from millennial and Gen Z voters shifting towards these parties. A third of French voters under 34 and 22% of young German voters favour their country’s far right, while in the Netherlands, the Party for Freedom has become the largest party among under-34s.
Young Europeans, mainly those aged 18-29, overwhelmingly rely on social media for daily news consumption. In Italy and Denmark, nearly three-quarters of young adults use social media for news daily (74% and 75%). A recent German youth study found that 57% of youth prefer social media for news and political updates.
There is growing concern that external actors, particularly from Russia, may have influenced the elections.
Media reports reveal that EU leaders were so concerned about foreign interference in the elections that they set up rapid alert teams to manage any serious incidents. Officials told the Guardian that disinformation has reached “tsunami levels.”
The evidence points to Russia.
Last December, France’s VIGINUM group, which is tasked with protecting France and its interests against foreign digital interference, published a report revealing a network of nearly 200 websites with addresses of the form pravda-xx.com or xx.news-pravda.com, where xx is the country identifier.
The sites, which generate little new content themselves, instead amplify existing pro-Russian content from state sources and social media, including posts from military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk. Pro-Russian content relating to the Ukraine war is a particular favourite.
Thirty-four fact-checking organisations in Europe, showed that the Pravda network had spread to at least 19 EU countries. Fact-checking organisation Greece Fact Check, in cooperation with Pagella Politica and Facta news, has since noticed that the Pravda network has been attempting to convey large amounts of disinformation and pro-Russia propaganda to sway EU public opinion.
The organisation said that “minor pro-Russian politicians who run for the elections are quoted by state media such as Ria and then further amplified by the Pravda network, in what seems an attempt to magnify their relevance”.
A report by EDMO on EU-related disinformation ahead of the elections found that it was at its highest ever level in May 2024. Ministers for European affairs from France, Germany, and Poland cautioned about efforts to manipulate information and mislead voters. Across the EU, authorities observed a resurgence in coordinated operations spreading anti-EU and Ukraine narratives through fake news websites and on social media platforms Facebook and X.
Among the false stories that emerged and covered were reports that EU President Ursula Von der Leyen had links to Nazism and had been arrested in the European Parliament.
In Germany, there were stories circulating that the country’s vote was being manipulated, ballot papers with holes or corners cut were invalid and that anyone voting for the far-right party AfD would follow stricter rules. Other stories attempted to trick voters into multiple voting or signing their ballot papers, practices that would invalidate their votes.
The report also noted that around 4% of such disinformation articles have been created using AI tools.
The tsunami of disinformation looks unlikely to fade away any time soon. The Guardian says that the EU’s rapid alert teams have been asked to continue their work for weeks after the election.
A senior official told the paper, “The expectation is that it is around election day that we will see this interruption of narratives questioning the legitimacy of the European elections, and in the weeks around it.”
01 May 24 | Belarus, China, Greece, Iran, News and features, Palestine, Russia
In my work as a journalism lecturer, I am increasingly struck by the fact that many students don’t read books. By this I don’t mean they don’t read – they read all the time, constantly scrolling on their phones, laptops and devices. I mean physical books. As for newspapers: forget it. For this reason, I have taken to reading to them. I tell them to put their phones away (which some find almost impossible), to close their laptops and… listen. I don’t ask them to sit in a circle on the carpet, but it’s not far short of that… it is a moment for meditation, what some have come to call mindfulness. I have read them all sorts of authors: Orwell, Conrad, the great Dutch journalist Geert Mak, Joan Didion. They wriggle and fidget, but in the end their breathing calms down, their faces relax, and they sit and listen.
And I am going to do the same with you today. You are all busy people so I won’t ask you to put away your phones and devices, but I will ask you to listen as I read to you from one of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler. Perhaps not so widely read today, Koestler was best known for his anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon, but was also a prolific journalist and essay writer. This essay, On Disbelieving Atrocities, is from a collection of essays called the Yogi and the Commissar, published in 1944. The essay itself was originally published in the New York Times under the title The Nightmare That is a Reality. He describes the “mania” he feels when telling the world about Nazi atrocities. “We, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years,” he says. But the screamers are struggling to be heard.
“We said that if you don’t quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worthwhile. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not.
But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.”
Koestler’s words still have the power to shock 80 years later…
I have been proud over the years to be something of a screamer — for the Observer, the New Statesman and most prominently as the journalist portrayed in the Hollywood film Official Secrets (dir. Gavin Hood 2019).
I now work as editor-at-large for Index on Censorship, initially set up in 1972 to publish and promote the work of dissident writers from behind the Iron Curtain. There has never been more for us to scream about. The atrocity deniers are everywhere: suggesting that outrages committed by Iran, Russia, Belarus, China are mere Western propaganda. We saw it on October 7th and we see it in Gaza.
My favourite screamer (and Koestler’s heir in some ways) is the journalist and academic Peter Pomerantsev. His second book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019), should be required reading on all journalism (and public relations) courses. Pomerantsev comes from the same tradition as Index — his parents were Soviet dissidents arrested for “distributing harmful literature”. He warns that Putin’s Russia has ushered in a new age of atrocity denial driven by the troll farms of St Petersburg.
His family’s experience gives Pomerantsev a personal, visceral respect for objective truth, facts, reality. He tells the story of the legendary dissident publication The Chronicle of Current events.
“The Chronicle was how Soviet dissidents documented suppressed facts about political arrests, interrogations, searches, trials, beatings, abuses in prison. Information was gathered via word of mouth or smuggled out of labour camps in tiny self-made polythene capsules that were swallowed and then shat out, their contents typed up and photographed in dark rooms. It was then passed from person to person, hidden in the pages of books and diplomatic pouches, until it could reach the West and be delivered to Amnesty International, or broadcast on the BBC World Service, Voice of America or Radio Free Europe.” (This Is Not Propaganda, p 2)
Where does this leave us? We who are committed to telling the truth. We who respect facts. Are we listening to the screamers?
On the plane to Zurich, I was given my complimentary copies of Forbes and Vanity Fair and the answer was right there. Vanity Fair carried an article about Alexei Navalny, who grew to prominence through his exposure of corruption in Putin’s Russia, while the cover of Forbes was devoted to the Boeing whistleblower John Barnett. We perhaps need to start thinking about whistleblowers as corporate dissidents, as truthtellers, not subversives to be closed down.
Because Navalny and Barnett are both, in their way, screamers.
This is the transcript of a speech made to a meeting of chief communications officers from leading global companies in Zurich
