Angola’s opposition begins to speak up

12 Apr 12 | Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa

In his 32 years in power, Angola’s President José Edouardo Dos Santos has adopted the maxim, “if you can’t beat them, buy them”. The silence of rappers, journalists and the occasional university professor has been secured for a few petro dollars, a sports car or a villa. But in the past year, new voices that won’t be silenced have emerged.

On 4 April, 2012, the country celebrated 10 years of peace. In the decade since the end of the country’s 27-year civil war, the economy has boomed and its diplomatic influence has expanded. But as war memories have receded, inequality has deepened as a tiny elite has reaped a rich peace dividend of oil and diamonds. Despite extensive infrastructure work — paid for with loans secured by oil — the majority of the population has remained poor and voiceless.

We are a simulated democracy. Angola is really a dictatorship,

said Elias Isaac, country director for the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (Osisa).

This year is due to see elections being staged under a constitutional rearrangement ushered through parliament in 2010 that critics say could give Dos Santos another 10 years in power. Most analysts expect the poll to take place in August.

Human rights activists, including Isaac, travelled to South Africa earlier this month to mark their country’s 10 years of peace and to call for more international support for those bold enough to question President Dos Santos’s rule. They said there were already clear signs of the electoral process being manipulated in favour of Dos Santos and his staunchest supporters in the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

Horácio Junjuvili, a representative of the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) told journalists in Cape Town:

“Elections must be announced with 90 days’ notice. But already, even before the poll date has been given, the manipulation has begun with the appointment of Susannah Ingles, a lawyer who is a member of the MPLA, as president of National Electoral Commission (NEC). The opposition has appealed against her appointment and we are refusing to attend NEC meetings.”

The activists said that two protests against Ingles’s appointment planned for 10 March had been violently suppressed. In the southern coastal town of Benguela, armed police used batons to break up a gathering of about 20 people. In the capital, Luanda, the days preceding the planned demonstration were marked by raids on suspected participants.

On the morning of the planned protest, 30-year-old rapper Luaty Beirâo, who was one of the organisers, was beaten at the scene of the Luanda gathering and had to have stitches to his head. Filomeno Vieira Lopes, the 57-year-old secretary-general of opposition party Bloco Democratico was beaten with truncheons and sustained wounds to his head and arm that had to be treated in hospital.

Two days later, police bearing a warrant citing “crimes of outrage against the State” descended on the offices of the outspoken weekly newspaper,  Folha 8, and confiscated 20 computers. Its editor, William Tonet, said the move was in retaliation at a photomontage published in December which lampooned President Dos Santos and his entourage.

Junjuvili said opposition to the ruling clique around President Dos Santos had become more vocal and courageous since March 2011 when protests began against the high cost of living and lack of political freedom. He said:

Angola is another example of the southern African phenomenon where power that has emerged from a guerilla movement does not entertain the idea of a change of power

Marcolino Moco, who was the first prime minister of independent Angola and remains a member of the MPLA, even though he is one of President Dos Santos’s harshest critics, said the situation is worsening. ”The president’s family has bought banks, ports, telephone companies and last month he made one of his sons a director of the oil sovereign fund. He gave a television channel to another of his children. The country is run like a family dynasty.”

Elias Isaac said western countries and entities had willingly sacrificed their principles and morals so as not to lose their economic foothold in Angola and their access to its oil. ”The European Union says it cannot put human rights issues on the table because if it does so it will lose out to China. The EU has already announced that it will not send observers to the forthcoming elections. The International Monetary Fund has opted to complete its loan disbursement and to turn a blind eye on $32 billion dollars that are unaccounted for in Angola’s public accounts. We do not see any prospect of the Angolan people being helped through western or regional African diplomacy,” he said.

But there are signs that Angolan activists are becoming more bold — or at least are increasingly less likely to be cowed – as they challenge the Dos Santos empire. Rapper Beirâo, whose protest movement is called Central 7311 — named after its first demonstration on 7 March 2011 — has instructed fellow activists to gather film and photographic evidence of protests and broadcast it on social media.

In an interview with this writer in Luanda in September last year, 19-year-old psychology student Diana Perreira said young people all over the country were using phone text messages to link up and organise protests. She had been the victim of an attempted kidnapping by plainclothes officers after she attended the trial of 24 people arrested at a demonstration in Luanda on 3 September.

Perreira said: “He was a big guy with a blue T-shirt – it must have been an agent from the secret services. With a friend, I had left the court to buy some food during a break. What we understood was that it was a kidnap. It could have been just an attempt to scare us. That is how they work. They work with fear and make people scared.”

She did not wish to name the group she belongs to and said she and her friends function by forming loose associations that are regularly disbanded and re-formed to avoid surveillance. She said that with other young demonstrators she believes Angola’s wealth is being mismanaged. ”The definition I have of democracy is freedom and equality and we don’t have that in our country,” said the student.

Alex Duval Smith is a freelance foreign correspondent, currently based in South Africa

Moscow journalists protest against Uzbekistan censorship

05 Apr 12 | Russia

Journalists and photographers gathered near the Uzbekistan embassy in Moscow to protest against the deportation of their colleague Victoria Ivleva and Uzbekistan authorities’ policy towards foreign journalists.

Ivleva, a photojournalist for Novaya Gazeta, was deported from Uzbekistan without explanation on 23 March. She arrived in the country’s capital Tashkent to hold free training courses for her Uzbek colleagues, but was refused permission to enter the country or contact Russian officials and then was put on a flight back to Russia.

Ivleva speculates that she was refused entry because the training was being organised by Umida Akhmedova — a notable local photographer who was charged on “insult and libel against Uzbek nation” after creating a documentary dedicated to women’s rights in Uzbekistan in 2010. But her expulsion could also be due to an article she wrote six years ago. Entitled The Country of Fish the article describes how Uzbek people were humiliated and silenced by the authorities.

Ivleva’s colleagues waited until the beginning of April to hold a protest sanctioned by Moscow’s authorities.  They gathered in Uzbek national clothes, with placards saying “A man with a camera is no enemy to the state” and other slogans. They told journalists that people of two countries, that once were fellow citizens, “should not suffer from deportations”.

Uzbek embassy staff did not come out of the building to meet the protesters, but were  seen videoing them through the window.

As one of the protesters, Daniil Kislov editor-in-chief of Fergana online media, told journalists that since 2005 Uzbek authorities have banished reporters from all the leading agencies, making the country a “burnt information field”.

Paris university accused of censorship after Israel conference shut down

02 Mar 12 | Uncategorized

A Paris university closed its doors for two days this week after members of Collectif Palestine Paris 8 threatened to hold an unauthorised conference on the campus. The conference, entitled “New sociological, historial and legal perspectives on the boycott campaign: Israel, an Apartheid State?”, was scheduled to take place on 27 and 28 February at the University of Paris 8, in the northern suburb of St Denis. However, the university’s president, Pascal Binczak, who had originally agreed to the conference taking place within the university’s precincts, withdrew permission several days earlier.

The closure of the university was ordered by Binczak after Collectif Palestine Paris 8 announced that the conference would still take place at Paris 8 in spite of Binczak’s announcement. Students arriving on Monday morning found the gates locked and all lectures cancelled. Photocopied leaflets and volunteers directed conference participants to another venue nearby.

In an article published on 24 February in Le Monde, Binczak justified his decision, citing security concerns and objecting to the unbalanced nature of the conference which breached laws concerning objectivity and diversity of opinion on university campuses. Binczak strongly objected to claims that he had bowed to pressure from the CRIF (Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France), the official Jewish umbrella organisation of France, which had raised concerns about the conference some days before the decision to withdraw permission was taken by the university’s administration. In an article published on the CRIF website on 14 February, Marc Knobel claims that calls for a boycott, whether cultural or academic, incite discrimination which is illegal within the precincts of a university.

In a strongly worded response to Binczak, also published in Le Monde, the conference organisers accused the university of censorship and argued that the cancellation amounted to a serious attack on freedom of speech. An open letter to Pascal Binczak on Mediapart, an independent online news outlet founded by a former editor of Le Monde, has garnered several hundred signatures from academics both in France and abroad.

Three professors from Paris 8 responded to the petition with a further article published in Le Monde on 27 February explaining why they refused to sign the open letter. Objecting to what they consider the instrumentalisation of political dogma and propaganda in the guise of academic debate, they point out that without free dialogue there can be no freedom of thought, and counter claims by the organisers that the two-day programme could be considered a conference, given the absence of genuine debate from all sides.

Natasha Lehrer is a writer and translator. She lives in Paris.

Bahrain: Teacher re-arrested for speaking against human rights violations

20 Oct 11 | Index Arts, Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost

The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights reports that Jaleela Al Salman, vice president of the Bahrain Teachers Association was arrested on 18 October from her home without a warrant. On 25 September, a military court sentenced Al Salman to three years in prison, on charges of “inciting hatred towards the regime”, “calling for a teachers strike”, as well as “attempting to overthrow the ruling system by force.” Al Salman was initially detained from 29 March until 21 August after going on hunger strike, and has been vocal about the current state of human rights in Bahrain during the past few weeks. Her trial for appeal will take place on 1 December.