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.
22 Jul 24 | Germany, News and features, Ukraine
The Babyn Yar massacre is one of the bloodiest atrocities in Ukraine’s dark history. In late September 1941, 33,771 Jewish residents of Kyiv were herded by the Nazis into a ravine (“Babi Yar” in Russian, “Babyn Yar” in Ukrainian) on the outskirts of the city. Over a two-day period, the victims were shot and buried in mass graves as part of what became known as “the Holocaust of Bullets”.
Oleg Chorny’s small-budget feature documentary From Babi Yar to Freedom tells the story of the massacre through the lens of Soviet defector and writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who first revealed the full scale of the atrocity to the world when he escaped to the UK in 1969. The film was completed in 2017, five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and is an extraordinary tribute to Kuznetsov’s determination to tell the truth in the face of a wall of Soviet censorship and disinformation.
Chorny’s documentary deserves a wide international audience, but in an irony that would not be lost on the dissidents of the 1960s, no one can see it because of a rights dispute over the central archive interview in the film owned by the giant US TV corporation CBS.
In July 1969, shortly after Kuznetsov defected, he gave a lengthy interview to the veteran CBS news journalist Morley Safer in which he opened up about his decision to escape the Soviet Union. Kuznetsov went to London, accompanied by a KGB minder, to research the time Lenin had spent there in 1903, and secretly took with him film containing the text of the full version of his book Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, stitched into his clothing. The book is based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre and Kuznetsov’s own boyhood diary.
Now, Chorny has been told that nine minutes of CBS footage from the Kuznetsov interview (freely available on YouTube) will cost $80,000 – more than the budget of the movie. Wazee Digital, a Colorado-based asset management company which negotiates on behalf of CBS, has refused to budge on this fee.
Chorny told Index that the fate of the film and the fate of Kuznetsov were intertwined in his mind. “I’m sorry, you must understand that the story with this film is a sad story for me because it was not released… But if something happened and this movie was released, I think it would be so important, because nothing has changed from these times with the KGB. You can call it the FSB, but it does not matter.”
In the documentary, Chorny follows Ukrainian writer Stanislav Tsalyk as he tracks down traces of Kuznetsov – who died in 1979 – in Kyiv and then in London. Tsalyk travels to the UK with Kuznetsov’s son Olexiy, who remained in the Soviet Union. In one of the most moving scenes, Olexiy stands next to his father’s unmarked grave in Highgate Cemetery. Olexiy, too, has now died without seeing the film released.
The story of Kuznetsov is a classic Cold War tale, but it is much more than that. It is a story about how stories themselves are told, how they can be misrepresented, and how they are suppressed.
Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar has had many lives and suffered multiple rounds of censorship. When it was first published in the Soviet Union in 1966, the censor made cuts that underplayed the suffering of the Jews. In the Soviet narrative, Babi Yar was known as a Nazi act of horror against Soviet citizens. The Jews of Kyiv were thus doubly erased: once literally and then historically. This was not all that was removed from the original text: references to cannibalism during the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, where millions died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies, and parallels between fascism and communism were all excised. Anything, in fact, that showed the Soviets as less than heroic.
The whole uncensored version is recognised as a singular masterpiece. The first chapter, Ashes, begins: “This book contains nothing but the truth.” The typefaces of the book reveal its troubled publication history, with the original text in plain type, previously censored passages rendered in bold, and later additions from Kuznetsov in square brackets.
Oddly, this adds to the experience of reading Babi Yar. Its fragmented text suits the battered and broken subject matter.
Take the following passage about Dina Pronicheva, a 30-year-old puppet-theatre actor and survivor of the massacre who later gave evidence against the Nazis. “Dina went across the hillock and sat down. Everybody there was silent, crazed with fright. She was afraid to look up: somebody might recognise her, quite by chance, and cry out: ‘She’s a dirty Jewess!’ These people would stop at nothing to save their own skins. For that reason she tried not to look at anybody, and nobody looked at her. Only an old woman sitting next to her in a fluffy knitted scarf complained quietly to Dina that she had been seeing her daughter-in-law off and had got caught… But she herself was a Ukrainian, she was no Jewess, and whoever thought it would come to this? They had all been seeing people off.”
The censored words in bold give the episode a very different meaning and emotional impact.
When Babi Yar was republished in a Vintage Classics edition in the UK last year under the title Babi Yar: The Story of Ukraine’s Holocaust, it didn’t receive the attention it deserved.
When I talked to Chorny in Kyiv over Zoom, I suggested that this latest episode in the story of the massacre is part of a pattern. I said: “Even if you go back to the origins of the story… This is a story about silence. It’s a story about censorship. It’s a story about not being able to tell the story and so…”
Chorny stopped me and said my interpretation did not go far enough: “Excuse me, this is a story of a totalitarian system which is the same as the Nazi totalitarian system. And this is a story of resistance – Anatoly Kuznetsov’s personal resistance, I mean: to escape to publish the full version in the West.”
Josephine Burton of Dash Arts has been pushing for the release of Chorny’s film since 2021, when her organisation began work on Songs of Babyn Yar, a music and theatre project that used Kuznetsov’s text in the production. Burton, who also championed the cause of the Crimean Tatars in Dash Arts’ 2022 performance Crimea 5am, told Index: “Oleg Chorny’s documentary needs to be seen. It tells a remarkable story, a vital contribution to the history of Ukraine and the Holocaust. This film should not be silenced.”
Chorny has also gained the support of the Koffler Centre in Toronto, which ran a series of events about the Babyn Yar massacre last year, including a Zoom discussion with Chorny and his team.
In the meantime, Chorny describes life in Kyiv: “We are living some kind of surrealistic reality. This is mixed with news from the front from our colleagues and friends. A lot of losses. Especially in the last year, we buried a lot of friends and some colleagues who disappeared on the front line.”
But the director has kept himself busy. Chorny has made a short film, Kyiv in the Days of War, about the aftermath of the Russian attacks in 2022, and three 15-minute films in a series about creativity and the Ukraine conflict: Art in the Land of War. In one of these, If I Stop It Means They Win, sculptor and graphic artist Oleksandr Smyrnov says: “I think that if they prevent me from doing what I’m good at and what I want to do, then they have won. That’s why I’ll keep doing it.”
Two years ago, an appeal to raise money for a headstone for Kuznetsov in Highgate cemetery raised more than $1,300. In another twist in the story, his surviving daughter has not given her permission for it to be erected. The best memorial would be the release of From Babi Yar to Freedom. [CBS was approached for a comment on this story.]
10 May 24 | Bahrain, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Ecuador, Eritrea, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Magazine Contents, Mexico, North Korea, Palestine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Volume 53.01 Spring 2024
Contents
The Spring 2024 issue of Index looks at how authoritarian states are bypassing borders in order to clamp down on dissidents who have fled their home state. In this issue we investigate the forms that transnational repression can take, as well as highlighting examples of those who have been harassed, threatened or silenced by the long arm of the state.
The writers in this issue offer a range of perspectives from countries all over the world, with stories from Turkey to Eritrea to India providing a global view of how states operate when it comes to suppressing dissidents abroad. These experiences serve as a warning that borders no longer come with a guarantee of safety for those targeted by oppressive regimes.
Up Front
Border control, by Jemimah Steinfeld: There's no safe place for the world's dissidents. World leaders need to act.
The Index, by Mark Frary: A glimpse at the world of free expression, featuring Indian elections, Predator spyware and a Bahraini hunger strike.
Features
Just passing through, by Eduardo Halfon: A guided tour through Guatemala's crime traps.
Exporting the American playbook, by Amy Fallon: The culture wars are finding new ground in Canada, where the freedom to read is the latest battle.
The couple and the king, by Clemence Manyukwe: Tanele Maseko saw her activist husband killed in front of her eyes, but it has not stopped her fight for democracy.
Obrador's parting gift, by Chris Havler-Barrett: Journalists are free to report in Mexico, as long as it's what the president wants to hear.
Silencing the faithful, by Simone Dias Marques: Brazil's religious minorities are under attack.
The anti-abortion roadshow, by Rebecca L Root: The USA's most controversial new export could be a campaign against reproductive rights.
The woman taking on the trolls, by Daisy Ruddock: Tackling disinformation has left Marianna Spring a victim of trolling, even by Elon Musk.
Broken news, by Mehran Firdous: The founder of The Kashmir Walla reels from his time in prison and the banning of his news outlet.
Who can we trust?, by Kimberley Brown: Organised crime and corruption have turned once peaceful Ecuador into a reporter's nightmare.
The cost of being green, by Thien Viet: Vietnam's environmental activists are mysteriously all being locked up on tax charges.
Who is the real enemy?, by Raphael Rashid: Where North Korea is concerned, poetry can go too far - according to South Korea.
The law, when it suits him, by JP O'Malley: Donald Trump could be making prison cells great again.
Special Report: The long reach - how authoritarian countries are silencing critics abroad
Nowhere is safe, by Alexander Dukalskis: Introducing the new and improved ways that autocracies silence their overseas critics.
Welcome to the dictator's playground, by Kaya Genç: When it comes to safeguarding immigrant dissidents, Turkey has a bad reputation.
The overseas repressors who are evading the spotlight, by Emily Couch: It's not all Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Central Asian governments are reaching across borders too.
Everything everywhere all at once, by Daisy Ruddock: It's both quantity and quality when it comes to how states attack dissent abroad.
A fatal game of international hide and seek, by Danson Kahyana: After leaving Eritrea, one writer lives in constants fear of being kidnapped or killed.
Our principles are not for sale, by Jirapreeya Saeboo: The Thai student publisher who told China to keep their cash bribe.
Refused a passport, by Sally Gimson: A lesson from Belarus in how to obstruct your critics.
Be nice, or you're not coming in, by Salil Tripathi: Is the murder of a Sikh activist in Canada the latest in India's cross-border control.
An agency for those denied agency, by Amy Fallon: The Sikh Press Association's members are no strangers to receiving death threats.
Always looking behind, by Zhou Fengsuo and Nathan Law: If you're a Tiananmen protest leader or the face of Hong Kong's democracy movement, China is always watching.
Putting Interpol on notice, by Tommy Greene: For dissidents who find themselves on Red Notice, it's all about location, location, location
Living in Russia's shadow, by Irina Babloyan, Andrei Soldatov and Kirill Martynov: Three Russian journalists in exile outline why paranoia around their safety is justified.
Comment
Solidarity, Assange-style, by Martin Bright: Our editor-at-large on his own experience working with Assange.
Challenging words, by Emma Briant: An academic on what to do around the weaponisation of words.
Good, bad and everything that's in between, by Ruth Anderson: New threats to free speech call for new approaches.
Culture
Ukraine's disappearing ink, by Victoria Amelina and Stephen Komarnyckyj: One of several Ukrainian writers killed in Russia's war, Amelina's words live on.
One-way ticket to freedom?, by Ghanem Al Masarir and Jemimah Steinfeld: A dissident has the last laugh on Saudi, when we publish his skit.
The show must go on, by Katie Dancey-Downs, Yahya Marei and Bahaa Eldin Ibdah: In the midst of war Palestine's Freedom Theatre still deliver cultural resistance, some of which is published here.
Fight for life - and language, by William Yang: Uyghur linguists are doing everything they can to keep their culture alive.
Freedom is very fragile, by Mark Frary and Oleksandra Matviichuk: The winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize on looking beyond the Nuremberg Trials lens.
19 Apr 24 | News and features, Russia, Sudan, Ukraine
The world seems to be breaking at the seams. Our news is filled with images of war and the horror and fear that accompany them. We cannot afford to turn a blind eye to the suffering and devastation wrought by war and to be distracted from established conflicts as new ones emerge.
This week, Russia's ongoing and illegal aggression in Ukraine has almost passed without comment but Russia’s announcement of more mercenaries, coupled with Ukraine's adjustment of conscription laws to enlist younger individuals, and the dwindling air defences amidst brutal bombardments by Russia on innocent families, serve as stark reminders of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
It's a scenario we've seen unfold before. Initially, a conflict captures our attention, eliciting outcry and calls for action. However, as time passes, disaster fatigue sets in, a new disaster hits the news and the plight of those affected fades from public discourse. This is understandable and a completely human reaction. Horrors being played out on television screens night after night harm wellbeing and in some situations drive communities in other nations further apart.
The situation in Sudan stands as a harrowing testament to this phenomenon. Last week marked the first anniversary of the war in the region, yet over 8 million people are displaced, journalists continue to face persecution and activists and human rights defenders who strive to tell us the stories of atrocities unfolding are finding it harder by the day.
We must not allow history to repeat itself. In Ukraine we are at risk of seeing this happen. Every conflict demands our attention and action. While these wars may seem distant, the consequences of our indifference reverberate globally. Without international pressure for de-escalation and accountability, the waves of violence will inevitably crash upon our shores.
At Index on Censorship, we understand the fundamental role that freedom of expression plays in holding power to account and safeguarding human rights. When journalists are silenced, when dissidents are suppressed, the fabric of democracy unravels, leaving room for tyranny to flourish.
The illegal invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin is not just a regional conflict; it is a test of our collective resolve to uphold the principles of peace, freedom, and justice. As the world watches, we cannot afford to look away. We must stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, amplifying their voices and advocating for an end to the Russian violence and aggression.
It is imperative that we keep the spotlight firmly fixed on Ukraine, ensuring that the atrocities committed do not fade into obscurity. Through relentless advocacy, robust journalism, and unwavering solidarity, we can make a difference. Let us not forget the lessons of the past, nor forsake our responsibility to act in the face of injustice.
Together, let us reaffirm our commitment to a world where freedom of expression is cherished, where human dignity is upheld, and where dissidents are free to highlight the plight within their nations.
