30 Jun 23 | News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine
Last week’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, provided a challenge to established western media outlets, such was the speed of the advance by the man known as Putin’s chef towards Moscow and the lack of verifiable information coming out of Russia. The subsequent accommodation between Prigozhin and Putin, apparently brokered by the Belarus leader Alyaksandr Lukashenska, has left even the most seasoned neo-Kremlinologists scratching their heads.
Step forward the Russian dissidents and independent news services. Index has been privileged to work with the opposition to Putin since long before the war in Ukraine and it was good to see them coming into their own last week. Here are some of our recommendations for those who want to stay abreast of the fast-moving and often baffling developments in Russia. Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock), the managing editor of the English-language version of the independent online site Meduza, kept his Twitter feed consistently updated during the coup-that-never-was. Where others were breathless and over-excited, Rothrock was calm and measured. His colleague Lilya Yapparova (@lilia_yapparova) provided detailed analysis on the future of Prigozhin from sources inside the Russian military and the Wagner Group itself. Yapparova’s far-reaching investigation looks into what Wagner forces might contribute to Belarusian military capacity and the organisation’s operations in Africa and Syria. She also looks into Wagner’s finances in Russia, its continued recruitment for the war in Ukraine and internet trolling operations. Yapporova quotes the work of Dossier Center, a media outlet connected to the British-based Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsksy, which tracks criminals associated with the Russian president. Khodorkovsky himself was active on his Telegram channel throughout the mutiny and accessible to non-Russian speakers through the messaging app’s translate function. Controversially he urged Russians to support Prigozhin’s coup. His view was that anything would be better than Putin. The Russian billionaire later concluded that the outcome of Prigozhin’s operation was not important. “The very fact that this happened is a powerful blow to Putin after which he will be perceived differently by millions.”
Doxa, the publication founded by students opposed by Putin and now outlawed by the regime, continues to do a good job of aggregating news from reliable sources. This week it included a report from The Bell, founded by Russian financial journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya, suggesting that Prigozhin’s troll factory companies have been paralysed following raids after the uprising and were looking for a new owner. Osetinskaya, a former editor of Russian Forbes magazine, was declared a foreign agent after condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
In a new development this week, Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian news outlet whose editor Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, was put on the Kremlin’s list of “undesirable” organisations. This makes it a crime for the publication, now based in Latvia, to operate in Russia. It is also now illegal for Russians to engage with the publication or share its content online.
OVD-Info, the human rights project which won the 2022 Index on Censorship campaigning award, decided not to provide a running commentary of events and stuck to its mission of reporting on arrests of regime opponents. In his weekly newsletter Dan Storyev, English editor of OVD-Info, wrote: “Russia has had a busy few days as I am sure we all know. This newsletter is not for military analysis so I won’t cover Prigozhin’s manoeuvres here — but it’s important to remember, that in the end, it is going to be ordinary Russians, Russian civil society who would bear the brunt of any violence that a coup, or a paranoid preventive crackdown could unleash.”
If there is one thing that unites all the outlets mentioned here (beyond their undoubted courage), it is the care they take in the sourcing of all information they publish. In the post-truth world of Putin’s Russia, facts are precious commodities.
30 Jun 23 | Belarus, News and features, Russia, United Kingdom
Yesterday I met with a close friend who happens to be a journalist. In the way that friends do, we were talking about our families, work and what we were going to do over the summer.
We both have lives that are ludicrously busy but as she was talking about the stories she has had to cover over the last two weeks I was struck by not just the importance of her journalism but the demands we place on individual journalists as the vital storytellers of the news we consume every day.
Our world can be a scary and complex place. Every week it feels as though we have had an excess of news stories and little time to absorb one story before the world throws something else at us. And that just refers to the news we manage to hear and read. We are completely dependent on incredible journalists who ensure that the most challenging of stores are comprehensible for the rest of us. Highlighting the key issues that we need to be worried about.
It’s easy for all of us to listen to the news and then move on with our days. After all, we each have our own dramas, our own worries and our own concerns. But we get on with our lives reassured that someone is always shining a spotlight on the things that we need to know about. That teams of dedicated investigative journalists are working day in and day out to hold power accountable. Demanding answers from those who have power and exposing where we as citizens have been let down.
So this blog is a celebration of investigative journalists. Brave, dedicated, professional, honest and incredibly determined people. Who in the last week have ensured that Stephen Lawrence’s family know the name of another suspect – thank you Daniel de Simone.
Journalists who have proved that the Wagner Group is still recruiting in Russia and Belarus – thank you Sarah Rainsford and BBC Verify.
Journalists who proved beyond doubt that Christmas parties happened at the Conservative Party HQ during the Covid lockdown – thank you John Stevens and Mikey Smith.
Each of these stories represent dozens more covered this week in every country that is lucky enough to have a free media.
We shouldn’t just seek to protect our hard-won rights to media freedom, every so often we need to celebrate the journalists who strive to uncover the truth every day and that’s what I’m doing today.
05 Apr 23 | Egypt, News and features
If Priscilla Chan, an American citizen and wife of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg, was passing through Cairo International Airport and was stopped by a police officer who searched her phone illegally would she file a lawsuit? Possibly.
If Priscilla and her husband were Egyptian then the answer is definitely not. It is common knowledge that in Egypt, the police are above the law. If this hypothetical situation actually came to pass, I would advise Mark Zuckerburg not to run any social media campaigns publicising what happened with his wife because he would either be arrested or forcibly disappeared. Even if our hypothetical Egyptian Mark Zuckerberg managed to flee the country after that, he wouldn’t be able to create a campaign to help those in similar dangers -Facebook only allows political campaigns for those physically inside the country. If he managed to seek help from a friend or family member inside Egypt, then they will also likely be arrested immediately; Facebook’s policy now requires someone’s full name in order to make a political campaign or advertisement. Thus, my advice to you my friend would be to internalise your anger. Facebook’s policies aid and abet tyrants. That is what Egyptians must face.
In 2017, the executive boards of Facebook, Twitter, and Google all announced that they found Russian hackers had bought ads on their platforms and used fake names a year previously to create controversial stories and spread fake news ahead of the American presidential elections of 2016. The companies handed over three thousand divisive ads to the US Congress, which they believed were bought by Russian parties in the months leading up to the elections in order to influence the outcome.
Between them, the tech companies appointed more than a thousand employees to review ads to ensure they are consistent with their terms and conditions and prevent misleading content. This was intended to deter Russia and others from using their social networks to interfere in the elections of other nations.
This led to Mark Zuckerburg’s announcement that outlined steps to help prevent network manipulation, including imposing more transparency on political and social ads that appear on Facebook. This included making advertisers provide identifying documentation for political, social and election-related ads. Likewise, he announced that the advertisements would have to bear the name of the person that funded the advertisement, and that the predominant funder of the advertisement must reside in the country itself, and the financing must be done locally.
I find that there is a significant gap between the reality of what is truly happening in the Middle East and what the West understands about it. What is happening in Egypt specifically is not comparable to anything happening in the US or Europe and thus the international policies for such companies cannot be developed based on the desires and needs of only the American public.
These laws were supposed to help American society be more transparent but instead are being used as a weapon by the Egyptian regime in order to crack down on people’s rights and freedoms and they put human rights activists in Egypt in further danger.
Revealing the full names of those creating political or human rights campaigns leads to these individuals being constantly under threat, of both their posts being taken down and a potential government crackdown on them. As a result, these laws become a means of control for the government to further silence the voices of the masses. We, as human rights defenders in Egypt, need security and privacy, as the nature of our work exposes violations within systems and governments. There are a large number of risks that we are already exposed to daily because of our activity, and it is possible to monitor us in many ways, including the digital system, in which the system can currently determine all our activity through such transparency laws.
We are not looking for equal rights or to enter elections, rather we are merely attempting to possess our own humanity, preserve our dignity, and stand up for our rights. We dedicate our lives for equality and to prevent infringements on the rights of those in our society. Now that our activism is deemed nearly impossible by your laws, Mr Zuckerburg, you truly leave us with no option as we cannot put our families and communities at risk of imprisonment due to our names and the names of those helping us being made available.
I urge you to make digital privacy and security of human rights defenders a top priority, as today these activists have become truly vulnerable to repressive tactics as the Egyptian regime uses your laws as a loophole to remove opposition.
We have already had bad experiences with your laws.
Human rights defender Sherif Alrouby has been imprisoned by the Egyptian regime for years and we attempted to campaign for his release. We tried to spread a song entitled ‘Sherif Alrouby is imprisoned oh country’ and were impeded by Facebook’s policies. We had no option but to stop our campaign in order to prevent any security issues with the individuals that funded our advertisement as their full names were displayed.
Facebook’s policies impede our work as human rights defenders. We recognize that you support freedom of speech and desire increased transparency, but you do not realise the severity of what is happening in Egypt. A prime example of the severity of the situation is the killing of activist Shady Habash inside prison for merely making a song criticising the regime’s policies during the reign of El-Sisi. Likewise, my friend Galal El Behiery spent more than six years in prison for writing the song’s words – he has been on hunger strike in prison for more than 14 days.
I urge you all to understand the differences between nations. Egypt is not a transparent nation. Rather, it is an oppressive nation that exploits transparency to kill and dispose of opposition.
02 Mar 23 | Afghanistan, Burma, China, Hungary, News and features, Poland, Russia, United Kingdom, United States
Academic freedom is under attack. Photo: Edwin Andrade
Students should be encouraged to challenge ideas and question the world around them. Higher education is meant to teach us how to think freely, and for ourselves. Unsettling new data published by the Academic Freedom Index proves that this freedom is under threat. The report finds that academic freedom is in decline for over 50 percent of the world’s population and that many people on campuses worldwide have significantly less freedom today than they did ten years ago. In the past decade, academic freedom has improved in only a handful of countries, affecting just 0.7% of the world’s population. The most populous of these countries is Uzbekistan, a closed autocracy in which universities and scholars still face severe limitations, such as the government’s control over contacts between universities or scholars and foreign entities.
AFI’s data signals a decline across all regions and all region types. Our own ranking, the recently published Index Index, a project that uses innovative machine learning techniques to map the free expression landscape across the globe, shows just how this plays out on a country-by-country basis. Some obvious patterns can be drawn. Dwindling academic freedom clearly correlates to the deterioration of democracy in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Russia and Belarus. Political developments, including military coups in countries such as Myanmar and Afghanistan, have coincided with severe declines in academic freedom. In December 2022, the latter saw a ban by the Taliban on women and girls attending universities, a ruling that illustrates how academic freedom extends beyond what is taught on campuses and delineates one’s freedom to simply exist within academic spaces.
That said, the data shows that declines in academic freedom worldwide have occurred in different political settings and do not always follow the same pattern. Liberal democracies such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom are among the countries under which freedom is proven to be under threat. The AFI attributes this to ‘differences between individual and institutional dimensions of academic freedom’. This demarcates the difference between the freedom of an individual to teach, research and communicate freely and an institution’s autonomy and freedom to operate without government regulation. The AFI report gives a number of examples showing how disaggregation has occurred.
China, for instance, has witnessed a decrease in institutional academic freedom since 2010, when the State Council launched a ten-year strategy for education reform. Chinese universities have since remained in a subordinate position to the party-state, with universities that maintain leadership and management systems controlled by the university’s party committee. The party sets the boundaries of permissible research, exchange, and academics’ public speech. This system facilitated a serious decline in the freedoms enjoyed by academics under President Xi Jinping who has consolidated and centralised power, reestablished the party’s control over information, education and media, and made censorship in China a fact of life. Moreover, the draconian National Security Law enacted in Beijing in 2020 has exacerbated pressure on academic freedom.
The United States, however, presents an altogether different picture. Despite being lauded as a bastion of free expression, the US has seen a visible decline in academic freedom since 2021. This is because educational matters in the USA are largely regulated by individual states, which have increasingly used their authority to interfere in academic affairs. Several Republican-led states have adopted bills that ban the teaching of concepts related to “critical race theory” in universities. Conservative groups have lobbied state legislatures in attempts to withdraw funding from subjects such as gender, minority studies, and environmental science. Some institutions have introduced self-censoring measures following abortion bans to avoid persecution by state governments. In September 2022, Idaho’s flagship university curtailed individual academic freedom by blocking staff from discussing abortion or emergency contraception on campus.
Mexico’s government, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has weakened institutional autonomy by regularly appointing university directors, often resulting in student protests. Attacks on (predominantly female) students, protests against these harassments, and a drug war fought on university campuses has also fuelled a decline in campus integrity, university safety and academic freedom.
The underwhelming glimpse of hope that emerges from this year’s findings (compared with 2022) is that the number of countries with improvements in academic freedom grew from two to five. Overall, the data signals a shift toward a less free world, in a worse state than it was 10 years ago. It’s a tough pill to swallow.
