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The spring issue of Index magazine is special. We are celebrating 50 years of history and to such a milestone we’ve decided to look back at the thorny path that brought us here.
Editors from our five decades of life have accepted our invitation to think over their time at Index, while we’ve chosen pieces from important moments that truly tell our diverse and abundant trajectory.
Susan McKay has revisited an article about the contentious role of the BBC in Northern Ireland published in our first issue, and compares it to today’s reality.
Martin Bright does a brilliant job and reveals fascinating details on Index origin story, which you shouldn’t miss.
Index at 50, by Jemimah Steinfeld: How Index has lived up to Stephen Spender’s founding manifesto over five decades of the magazine.
The Index: Free expression around the world today: the inspiring voices, the people who have been imprisoned and the trends, legislation and technology which are causing concern.
“Special report: Index on Censorship at 50”][vc_column_text]Dissidents, spies and the lies that came in from the cold, by Martin Bright: The story of Index’s origins is caught up in the Cold War – and as exciting
Sound and fury at BBC ‘bias’, by Susan McKay: The way Northern Ireland is reported continues to divide, 50 years on.
How do you find 50 years of censorship, by Htein Lin: The distinguished artist from Myanmar paints a canvas exclusively for our anniversary.
Humpty Dumpty has maybe had the last word, by Sir Tom Stoppard: Identity politics has thrown up a new phenonemon, an intolerance between individuals.
The article that tore Turkey apart, by Kaya Genç: Elif Shafak and Ece Temulkuran reflect on an Index article that the nation.
Of course it’s not appropriate – it’s satire, by Natasha Joseph: The Dame Edna of South Africa on beating apartheid’s censors.
The staged suicided that haunts Brazil, by Guilherme Osinski: Vladimir Herzog was murdered in 1975. Years on his family await answers – and an apology.
Greece haunted by spectre of the past, by Tony Rigopoulos: Decades after the colonels, Greece’s media is under attack.
Ugandans still wait for life to turn sweet, by Issa Sikiti da Silva: Hopes were high after Idi Amin. Then came Museveni …People in Kampala talk about their
problems with the regime.
How much distance from Mao? By Rana Mitter: The Cultural Revolution ended; censorship did not.
Climate science is still being silenced, by Margaret Atwood: The acclaimed writer on the fiercest free speech battle of the day.
God’s gift to who? By Charlie Smith: A 2006 prediction that the internet would change China for the better has come to pass.
50 tech milestones of the past 50 years, by Mark Frary: Expert voices and a long-view of the innovations that changed the free speech landscape.
Censoring the net is not the answer, but… By Vint Cerf: One of the godfathers of the internet reflects on what went right and what went wrong.[/vc_column_text][vc_custom_heading text=”Five decades in review”][vc_column_text]An arresting start, by Michael Scammell: The first editor of Index recounts being detained in Moscow.
The clockwork show: Under the Greek colonels, being out of jail didn’t mean being free.
Two letters, by Kurt Vonnegut: His books were banned and burned.
Winning friends, making enemies, influencing people, by Philip Spender: Index found its stride in the 1980s. Governments took note.
The nurse and the poet, by Karel Kyncl: An English nurse and the first Czech ‘non-person’.
Tuning in to revolution, by Jane McIntosh: In revolutionary Latin America, radio set the rules.
‘Animal can’t dash me human rights’, by Fela Kuti: Why the king of Afrobeat scared Nigeria’s regime.
Why should music be censorable, by Yehudi Menuhin: The violinist laid down his own rules – about muzak.
The snake sheds its skin, by Judith Vidal-Hall: A post-USSR world order didn’t bring desired freedoms.
Close-up of death, by Slavenka Drakulic: We said ‘never again’ but didn’t live up to it in Bosnia. Instead we just filmed it.
Bosnia on my mind, by Salman Rushdie: Did the world look away because it was Muslims?
Laughing in Rwanda, by François Vinsot: After the genocide, laughter was the tonic.
The fatwa made publishers lose their nerve, by Jo Glanville: Long after the Rushdie aff air, Index’s editor felt the pinch.
Standing alone, by Anna Politkovskaya: Chechnya by the fearless journalist later murdered.
Fortress America, by Rubén Martínez: A report from the Mexican border in a post 9/11 USA.
Stripsearch, by Martin Rowson: The thing about the Human Rights Act …
Conspiracy of silence, by Al Weiwei: Saying the devastation of the Sichuan earthquake was partly manmade was not welcome.
To better days, by Rachael Jolley: The hope that kept the light burning during her editorship.
Plays, protests and the censor’s pencil, by Simon Callow: How Shakespeare fell foul of dictators and monarchs. Plus: Katherine E McClusky.
The enemies of those people, by Nina Khrushcheva: Khrushchev’s greatgranddaughter on growing up in the Soviet Union and her fears for the US press.
We’re not scared of these things, by Miriam Grace A Go: Trouble for Philippine
journalists.
Windows on the world, by Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee: Poems from Iran by two political prisoners.
Beijing’s fearless foe with God on his side, by Jimmy Lai: Letters from prison by the Hong Kong publisher and activist.
We should not be put up for sale, by Aishwarya Jagani: Two Muslim women in India on being ‘auctioned’ online.
Cartoon, by Ben Jennings: Liberty for who?
Amin’s awful story is much more than popcorn for the eyes, by Jemimah Steinfeld: Interview with the director of Flee, a film about an Afghan refugee’s flight and exile.
Women defy gunmen in fight for justice, by Témoris Grecko: Relatives of murdered Mexican journalist in brave campaign.
Chaos censorship, by John Sweeney: Putin’s war on truth, from the Ukraine frontline.
In defence of the unreasonable, by Ziyad Marar: The reasons behind the need
to be unreasonable.
We walk a very thin line when we report ‘us and them’, by Emily Couch: Reverting to stereotypes when reporting on non-Western countries merely aids dictators.
It’s time to put down the detached watchdog, by Fréderike Geerdink: Western newsrooms are failing to hold power to account.
A light in the dark, by Trevor Philips: Index’s Chair reflects on some of the magazine’s achievements.
Our work here is far from done, by Ruth Smeeth: Our CEO says Index will carry on fighting for the next 50 years.
In vodka veritas, by Nick Harkaway and Jemimah Steinfeld: The author talks about Anya’s Bible, his new story inspired by early Index and Moscow bars.
A ghost-written tale of love, by Ariel Dorfman and Jemimah Steinfeld: The novelist tells the editor of Index about his new short story, Mumtaz, which we publish.
‘Threats will not silence me’, by Bilal Ahmad Pandow and Madhosh Balhami: A Kashmiri poet talks about his 30 years of resistance.
A classic case of cancel culture, by Marc Nash: Remember Socrates’ downfall.
"Our need today is for organs of consciouness that could help us to know and to care about other members of the same intellectual community, much as Christians once were vigilant for other Christians in times of religious persecution."
THUS WROTE THE poet Stephen Spender in the founding manifesto of this magazine. As Spender outlined, Index came into being after Pavel Litvinov, a Soviet physicist and dissident, called on the international community to help those being censored in the USSR. The year of our first publication was 1972. The Cold War was not yet a chapter in a history textbook, nor was apartheid. Spain, Portugal and Greece were still under military dictatorships. Mao Zedong was the leader of China. The challenges were great and our mission was to concern ourselves with all because censorship was not a one-sided issue. “The problem of censorship,” Spender wrote, “is part of larger ones about the use and abuse of freedom.” Since 1972 we have done our best to live up to the ideals of the founding manifesto. We have covered the wars, the revolutions and the protests. We have smuggled writings out of prison and published material banned elsewhere. We have provided a forum for critical debate and waded into the thorniest issues of the day. And we have dealt with the complexity of technology, both a blessing and a curse. Our articles have rippled across the world in myriad ways, influencing statesmen and laymen alike, and providing a refuge for the persecuted. To mark our half-century we have created a birthday issue. It is not a celebration in the conventional sense. By all means, our refuge should no longer exist. But in 2022 the battles remain as large. We need to continue to shout. And we want to celebrate the brave and brilliant people who got us to this place – and do a little back-patting too over our role in documenting abuses and sometimes lessening them. And so to our anniversary special. We have asked editors from the five decades to reflect on their time at Index and we’ve selected pieces from our archive to accompany them. This was no easy task. As Spender wrote, the “material by writers which is censored in Eastern Europe, Greece, South Africa and other countries is among the most exciting that is being written today”. How right he was. We have therefore not tried to choose the best – a mission impossible. Instead we’ve picked articles that capture a moment in time and reflect our rich, varied history. At the same time, we’ve invited journalists around the globe to revisit articles published in our first year and consider them from the vantage point of 2022, such as Susan McKay’s look at the contentious role of the BBC in Northern Ireland then and now. In our culture section, Nick Harkaway reimagines the early days of Index, a fantastically fun accompaniment to Martin Bright’s deep-dive into the real Index origin story. Moving to today, Indian journalist Aishwarya Jagani brings you an alarming tale of women who found themselves on an auction site and we publish letters from prison by the Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai. As for the future, Sir Tom Stoppard considers mob justice and its ramifications. “In being concerned with the situation of those who are deprived of their freedoms one is taking the side of openness,” wrote Spender in the manifesto. Onwards we march.
Andrey Kurkov is an Ukrainian author who has written about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts and also 19 novels, including the bestseller Death and the Penguin. Read More
Andrey Kurkov is an Ukrainian author who has written about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts and also 19 novels, including the bestseller Death and the Penguin.
Peter Tatchell is the director of human rights organisation the Peter Tatchell Foundation and highly acknowledged for his work with the LGBT movement.
Peter Tatchell is the director of human rights organisation the Peter Tatchell Foundation and highly acknowledged for his work with the LGBT movement.
Rahima Mahmut is the director of the World Uyghur Congress (UK) and Adviser to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Rahima Mahmut is the director of the World Uyghur Congress (UK) and Adviser to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.
Hong Kong Watch's Benedict Rogers. Credit: Hong Kong Watch
Benedict Rogers was surprised when he heard that he’d been accused by police in Hong Kong of jeopardising China's national security and threatened with jail time under the draconian National Security Law. The chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, a charity that campaigns for human rights in the former British colony, told Index that while he knew there was an extra-territorial element to the law, he didn’t believe “they’d go this far”.
Three weeks ago Rogers learnt that the website attached to Hong Kong Watch had been blocked in Hong Kong. After making enquiries about why he received letters back charging him under the law.
“I guess the letters I received were an answer to the inquiry,” he said.
Passed in the summer of 2020, the National Security Law caused global outcry in its implications for freedoms in Hong Kong as it effectively made any form of dissent illegal. But it was not just the punishment for dissent within its borders that caused alarm - even those outside Chinese territory could be charged with breaking it. Index wrote about the law at the time, calling it a "devastating blow to Hong Kong’s autonomy".
Approaching two years since its passage, scores of arrests and prison sentences have been handed out to protesters and journalists in Hong Kong. This though is the first time the law has been used against an advocacy group outside of Hong Kong.
Rogers is a British human rights activist and journalist based in London. In addition to his work at Hong Kong Watch, he is co-founder and deputy chairman of the Conservative Party's human rights commission, a member of the advisory group of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China and an advisor to the World Uyghur Congress.
The action is a clear attempt by Beijing to make anyone, anywhere feel vulnerable. They want to reinforce the message that no corner of the globe is beyond their reach, something we have been reporting on recently in our series Banned by Beijing. That it comes on the back of the Hong Kong Watch website being shut down is another worrying sign that Beijing is trying to shape Hong Kong - which does not have a Great Firewall – in its own image.
Rogers says he is not concerned for his own safety and that he has already taken measures to protect those he does communicate with inside Hong Kong, measures that he will take even further now. He sees it as another “sad deterioration in the Hong Kong situation”.
Today our fears lie with all those who want to promote respect for free speech and human rights within China and Hong Kong and might not do so following this message. People in Hong Kong itself already live with the daily fear of repercussions as they see more and more of their friends, relatives and associates being arrested and jailed. We don't want this fear to infect those outside, to stop them honestly reporting on the situation and communicating with those inside. We need a united front to campaign against Beijing's actions.
We are also fearful for those in other authoritarian countries around the world. The move comes less than a fortnight after Russia passed its "fake news" law to imprison anyone inside Russia criticising the war in Ukraine. Putin passed this law overnight. We fear he could look to Beijing and decide to extend it to critical voices outside the country, who are playing such a crucial role in revealing the horrors of Ukraine and holding him to account.
Echoing our concerns, Lord Patten of Barnes, the last British Governor of Hong Kong and a patron of Hong Kong Watch, said:
“This is another disgraceful example of Mr Putin’s friends in Beijing and their quislings in Hong Kong trying not only to stamp out freedom of expression and information in Hong Kong but also to internationalise their campaign against evidence, freedom and honesty.”
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has called it "unjustifiable".
"Attempting to silence voices globally that speak up for freedom and democracy is unacceptable and will never succeed," she said.
Rogers, who spoke to Index in 2017 about threatening letters he received from Hong Kong to his London home (also sent to his neighbours’), says the last four to five years has seen a succession of threats including letters and emails, with this action being the latest and most extreme. Still, he says he will not let this attack silence him.
“We’re not going to take the website down. We’re needed more than ever,” he told Index.
In October 1999, a crowd gathered outside Buckingham Palace to jeer at Jiang Zemin, then China’s president as he ate dinner inside with Queen Elizabeth. “Free Tibet!” and “Nazi China,” they shouted. For Jiang, who was known to be sensitive to criticism (he had earlier told Swiss lawmakers that they had “lost a good friend” after they declined to quash similar protests) it was surely an uncomfortable moment. It was also a sign of a robust democratic principle: the right to peaceful assembly and protest.
I lived in Guangzhou at the time and watched coverage of Jiang’s UK visit on Hong Kong terrestrial TV, beamed from across the border about 130km away. But at just the point where cameras panned over the protestors and their placards, the screen was abruptly replaced with a test card. I later learned that beetle-browed apparatchiks spent their days waiting to pounce on any broadcast that offended mainland sensibilities. Like the Stalinist cult of Soviet Russia, China could not endure the friction of free expression.
Censorship this crude can be grimly funny. Blanking TV screens is an electronic update of photographic ‘retouching’, when Soviet bureaucrats diligently scratched out images of political figures who had been purged or executed by the regime of Joseph Stalin. In the late 1980s, British television producers hired voice actors to precisely mimic Sinn Fein politicians in a creative attempt to work around a government ban on terrorist spokespersons. But it was hard to find much humor in China’s didactic prohibitions, except for the unintentional kind.
I taught at the Guangdong University of Technology until 2000. In the evenings I would traipse to the university internet centre, a crowded room full of battered old computers to send emails home. Large signs on the wall warned against browsing for anything to do with politics, religion or sex. In the classroom I was also instructed to avoid those taboos. It was made known to me that a cadre from the Communist Party was in the classroom ready to flee to the dean should I break the rules, for which I would be fired and sent home.
The state graduated from these primitive attempts to restrict internet searches to erecting the Great Chinese Internet Firewall, one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of online censorship. YouTube and Facebook were banned in 2009, later Google, Dropbox and Wikipedia. Foreign newspapers (including my own – The Economist and The Independent) and the New York Times have been repeatedly blocked, domestic journalists imprisoned, foreign journalists intimidated or kicked out.
One of the bleakest developments of the last decade has been watching the dead-hand of this official repression seep into Hong Kong. The province was hardly paradise – crowded, venal and with eye-popping disparities in wealth. Nevertheless, its cinemas, newspapers and bookstores did not live in fear of being gagged or shut down. One of the first books I bought there was The Private Life of Chairman Mao, a memoir by Mao’s doctor Li Zhisui, which chronicles, among other things, the Chinese leader’s alleged fondness for sex with young girls.
Long before the National Security Law (NSL) dropped like a dirty bomb in the summer of 2020, bookstores and public libraries were removing critical titles about Mao, history, the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and the democracy movement. The closures last year of the anti-communist Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s largest-selling newspaper, and online website Stand, which scrubbed all its old articles, are only the tallest trees to be toppled by the law.
Programmes have been cancelled and reporters sacked, moved or banned from covering press events. Foreign journalists, such as Aaron McNicholas, a former Bloomberg reporter from the same Irish town as myself (Clones) have had their visa applications rejected (he was forced to return home in September 2020). Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), the public service station I used to watch while in Guangdong, has pulled back from interviews and removed archives that might trigger the censors.
Self-censorship is the worst kind, said the Czech-born movie director Milos Forman, because it twists spines, destroys character and turns us into hypocrites. It’s also the “goal” of all repressive regimes, said one Hong Kong-based journalist. “You start to question yourself whether that story you’re researching is still doable in light of the NSL,” said the journalist who requested anonymity. “They can slice and dice that law in whatever way they wish, and if you cross the line, you can be arrested and denied bail.”
More reporters are getting the message. In the last month, over half a dozen have reportedly quit the newsroom of The South China Morning Post, once one of the crowns in Rupert Murdoch’s empire, now owned by Alibaba, a Chinese internet company run by billionaire Jack Ma. Ma disappeared from public view for three months in November 2020 after he criticised the country’s creaking financial system. Many will have surely heeded the lesson: if China’s richest man can be brought to heel, who cannot.
Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, has punctuated this historic assault on a first-world media with a series of surreal statements denying it is happening. In January, she said her government did “not seek to crack down on press freedom.” Last year, in a Trumpian touch, she said her government was the “worst victim” of fake news, the prelude to what many fear will be more legislation targeting the internet.
As the scale of the government’s ambitions to throttle free expression became clear, Lam insisted that journalists were safe – as long as they obeyed the security law. Of course, as media watchdog Reporters Without Borders noted, the scope of the four new offences that can be wielded against journalists - secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers – is so “deliberately vague and catch-all” as to make all but government stenography a dangerous proposition (life imprisonment is the mandated punishment).
Beyond the silenced reporters, activists and politicians, various sectors of Hong Kong society, such as unions, are “quietly shutting down”, said the anonymous journalist, citing “fear of repercussions”.
“That bedrock of civil society is slowly – actually quickly - being eroded,” he said.
One of the last public memorials to the Tiananmen incident – a statue of piled-up corpses to commemorate those killed – was removed from the University of Hong Kong in December. “Hong Kong has now become a place where those who speak out against such draconian measures await the midnight knock,” writes Michael C Davis, a professor of law at the university until 2016.
David Law, who also taught at the university but who recently left Hong Kong, says the removal of the ‘pillar of shame’ was a shock. “It isn’t necessarily the most telling event but it is the most visible, something that people saw and remember and can relate to as a common point of reference – literally a landmark,” he says. “It has been valuable for getting people to literally see what is happening. Symbols do that.”
I was last in Hong Kong in 2013, on a book tour, giving a couple of talks on the Fukushima nuclear accident that had occurred two years previously. I had been invited by activists campaigning for the closure of the Daya Bay Nuclear Power Plant across the border in Guangdong. I wrote back to them this month as I was researching this article, asking if the new law had affected their activities, but I got no reply. It’s possible they hadn’t received my mail – or that they cannot respond. That’s what happens when everyone is afraid.
Pondering all this over the last week, I recalled gleefully smuggling my Mao book back across the border in late 1999 and debating with my wife whether to teach it in journalism class, which I eventually did.
I’d love to frame this decision, which broached two of three of the university’s banned topics, as a daring jab at the censors, or a pedagogic exercise in challenging perspectives - but I was mostly curious about the reaction of my students. They had been taught a precise formulation on Mao’s rule – 70% good, 30% bad – a calculation that included nothing about his sexual proclivities. In the end, one or two were furious at this new information but if the dean got wind of it, I never heard. Perhaps the university was short of teachers.
Or perhaps the students knew already. One of the surprises of being in China was the knowing cynicism and dry humour that peppered chats about the country’s rulers. It would be good to be able to talk again to my now middle-aged students about how such cynicism finds expression in the age of Xi Jinping. As we know, attempts to use online euphemisms and code, such as images of Winnie the Pooh to lampoon the tubby tyrant have been squashed, proving again that despotism and humorlessness are natural partners, and, as British contrarian Christopher Hitchens once said, censorship inevitably degenerates into absurdity and corruption.