10 Jun 10 | Index Index, minipost
Three members of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party were sentenced to six months each for speaking Kurdish in an election campaign. Although the election campaigners claimed to have welcomed the meeting in Kurdish, they were sentenced for”committing a criminal offence by violating the laws related to oral and written election propaganda to be made in Turkish only”. The sentences come only days after journalist Irfan Atkan was jailed for 15 months, and his editor fined for publishing an article quoting a member of the Kurdistan Workers Party.
09 Jun 10 | Index Index, minipost
In addition to blocking Youtube, Turkey has now blocked access to various Google functions. The High Council for Telecommunications has revealed that since June 2010, Turkish internet service providers have been instructed to block Youtube-linked IP addresses. On 4 June, Google investigated complaints that certain Google services, including Google Analytics and Google Docs, were restricted. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has estimated that 3700 websites are currently blocked in Turkey, including GeoCities, gay community sites and Kurdish sites.
08 Jun 10 | Index Index, minipost
The acting editor-in-chief of Sudanese newspaper Ajras Al-Huriya, Faiz Al-Silaik, has announced that the paper will protest censorship by not publishing for one week. The Sudanese authorities introduced pre-publication censorship for two daily newspapers in May. On Saturday the security forces visited four other independent/opposition papers, directly censoring much of their content. The press crackdown is focused on reporting of a doctor’s strike, and the arrest warrant the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued for President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir for war crimes in the Darfur region of Sudan.
08 Jun 10 | Uncategorized
Dutch writer Frank Westerman will be speaking to Index on Censorship’s John Kampfner at the Free Word Centre tonight (book here).
Readers may have heard Westerman on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning (listen here), describing how he discovered the first known film of Turkmen people — Kara Bogaz — a Soviet propaganda film from the 1930s, showing how communism brought prosperity and civilisation to the nomadic people.
The film was never actually shown. Why? At the time, Stalin would demand that he be the first person to see all films made in the USSR. The film’s creator, Konstantin Paustovsky (who had adopted the film from his 1932 book), made the mistake of allowing the French communist critic Henri Barbusse see the film. Barbusse subsequently praised Kara Bogaz in the pages of Izvestia, saying it portrayed a “great many authentically socialist moments” (incidentally, Barbusse died just three days after the publication of the review in August 1935).
Paustovsky and his filmmaking comrades, clearly terrified of the consequences of crossing Stalin, decided to stifle their film, through the odd tactic of stringing out the editing process indefinitely, thereby rendering the film unavailable for release.
Such a small, petty reason for stifling such a significant historical work. But as is often pointed out, tyrannies rule not through consistency, but through capriciousness. The subjugated must never know whether they’re on the right side or not from one day to the next.
