The conflict over Crimea and the fighting in eastern Ukraine has resulted in a media war, which has left both Russian and Ukrainian journalists struggling to report accurately on the situation, writes Mapping Media Freedom correspondent Andrey Kalikh.
In Russia, the partisan media environment has been driven by state-backed broadcasters. Federally financed TV channels — Russia 1 and RT — toe the government line on events in eastern Ukraine and Crimea. In 2015, the government boosted its funding of media to 72 billion rubles ($1.2 billion).
Mapping Media Freedom is monitoring the situation with Ukrainian media and journalists working in Russia. These are some of the cases filed by MMF Russian correspondents.
Reporting teams working for Ukrainian television outlets were barred from attending the March 2016 trial of Nadezhda Savchenko, a pilot captured by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine and handed over to Russian military forces. Savchenko was accused of having directed artillery fire that killed two Russian journalists.
Former Los Angeles Times correspondent Sergei Loiko, a Russian, has been repeatedly harassed in Moscow, where he is based, following the publication of articles on the conflict and his book The Airport, a novel set amid the battle for Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine. In October 2015 he received a threatening phone call, followed in April 2016 by an incident during which four unknown perpetrators approached him as he was entering independent TV Dozhd’s studio to participate in a live programme.
Some journalists have been barred from entering Russia altogether. In one case, Sergei Supinsky, an AFP photographer based in Ukraine, was stopped from traveling to Moscow from Minsk. Supinsky was told he could not board his flight. No reason was given for the ban.
Russian journalists and activists have also become targets for pressure if they are perceived as supporting Ukraine or objecting to Russian involvement in the conflict.
In April 2016, Mikhail Afanasyev, an independent Novaya Gazeta correspondent based in the Republic of Khakassia posted a photo on Facebook of Kiev’s Maidan Square, where he had recently visited. He was immediately targeted with threats and insults by people referring to themselves as “patriots”.
In December 2015, a blogger from the Siberian city of Tomsk received a five-year sentence for “extremist” videos published on his YouTube page. In one of his videos, later removed, Vadim Tyumentsev referred to refugees from eastern Ukraine “who come and stay in Tomsk, although there are enough other problems in the city”. He accused officials of providing more help to the newcomers than the local population.
This article was updated on 6 September 2016 to provide more context and clarification.
Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are five recent reports that give us cause for concern.
16 August, 2016 – IMC TV reporter Gulfem Karatas and cameraman Gokhan Cetin were assaulted and detained while covering the police raid on the daily Ozgur Gundem. Footage of the attack was shared via IMC TV Twitter account, showing police grabbing the camera and physically assaulting the reporter, who is heard screaming in the footage.
Karatas and Cetin were detained along with journalists Günay Aslan, Reyhan Hacıoğlu, Ender Öndeş, Doğan Güzel, Ersin Çaksu, Kemal Bozkurt, Sinan Balık, Önder Elaldı, Davut Uçar, Zana Kaya, Fırat Yeşilçınar and Mesut Karnak.
In an official statement IMC TV said: “During the live broadcast, the police prevented Gulfem Karatas and Gokhan Cetin from reporting and detained them violently along with at least 21 Ozgur Gundem employees. We condemn this unacceptable treatment to our colleagues who were on duty and ask for their immediate release.”
The journalists were in an area of the city where former professional football player Nikola Mijailovic is building the controversial aqua park. Mijailovic approached the journalists and shouted a series of insults about them and their families. He reportedly told them that they should be put in a gas chamber together.
According to P24, the 23 members of staff were taken into custody. They are: Editor-in-Chief Zana Kaya, journalists Zana Kaya, Günay Aksoy, Kemal Bozkurt, Reyhan Hacıoğlu, Önder Elaldı, Ender Önder, Sinan Balık, Fırat Yeşilçınar, İnan Kızılkaya, Özgür Paksoy (DİHA news agency) , Zeki Erden, Elif Aydoğmuş, Bilir Kaya, Ersin Çaksu, Mesut Kaynar (DİHA), Sevdiye Gürbüz, Amine Demirkıran, Baryram Balcı, Burcu Özkaya, Yılmaz Bozkurt (member of the press office of the Istanbu Medical Chamber), Gülfem Karataş (İMC), Gökhan Çetin (İMC) and Hüseyin Gündüz (Doğu Publishing House).
11 August, 2016 – Dmitri Remisov, the Rostov-on-Don regional correspondent for Rosbalt news agency, told the agency that he was repeatedly assaulted by police officers while being questioned at the regional Center for Counteracting Extremism.
According to Remisov, he was asked to come to the CCE to answer questions related to a criminal case “on the preparation of a terrorist act” in Rostov, a city in south-west Russia.
He reported that two police officers asked him whether he knew certain individuals, where most of the people he was asked about were opposition activists.
For the past six months the Index on Censorship Youth Advisory Board has attended monthly online meetings to discuss and debate free speech issues. For their final assignment we asked members to write about the issue they felt passionately about that took place during their time on the board.
Simon Engelkes – Terrorism and the media in Turkey
When three suicide bombers opened fire before blowing themselves up at Istanbul Atatürk airport on 28 June 2016, Turkey’s social media went quiet. While the attacks were raging in the capital’s airport, the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan blocked social networks Facebook and Twitter and ordered local media not to report the details of the incident – in which at least 40 people were killed and more than 200 injured – for “security reasons”.
An order by the Turkish prime minister’s office banned sharing visuals of the attacks and any information on the suspects. An Istanbul court later extended the ban to “any written and visual media, digital media outlets, or social media”. Şamil Tayyar, a leading deputy of the ruling Justice and Development Party said: “I wish those who criticise the news ban would die in a similar blast.”
Hurriyet newspaper counted over 150 gag orders by the government between 2010 and 2014. And in March 2015, Turkey’s Constitutional Court approved a law allowing the country’s regulator to ban content to secure the “protection of national security and public order” without a prior court order. Media blackouts are a common government tactic in Turkey, with broadcast bans also put in place after the bombings in Ankara, Istanbul and Suruç.
Emily Wright – The politics of paper and indirect censorship in Venezuela
Soaring inflation, high crime rates, supply shortages and political upheaval all typically make front-page news. Not so in Venezuela, where many newspapers have suspended printing because of a shortage of newsprint.
For over a year now, the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro has centralised all paper imports through the Corporación Maneiro, now in charge of the distribution of newsprint. It is a move the political opposition is calling a form of media censorship, given that many newspapers critical of Chavismo and Maduro’s regime, have been struggling to obtain paper to print news.
In January, 86 newspapers declared a state of emergency, announcing they were out of stock and their capacity to print news was at risk. El Carabobeño, which is critical of the government and Chavismo, stopped circulating in March due to a lack of paper. A year earlier the newspaper had been forced to change its format to a tabloid, and reduce its pages, after running as a standard newspaper since 1933.
Censorship is an long-term problem in Venezuela but it is taking new, covert forms under Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. Media outlets are being economically strangled through tight regulation. On top of this huge fines for spurious charges of defamation or indecency linked to articles have become commonplace. Correo del Coroni, the most important newspaper in the south of the country, went bankrupt in this fashion. In March it was fined a million dollars and its director sentenced to four years in jail for defamation against a Venezuelan businessman. A month earlier it was forced to print only at weekends after being systematically denied newsprint.
Under Maduro’s regime, censorship in Venezuela has gone from piecemeal to systemic and the public’s right to information has been lost in the mix. Unable to mask the country’s hard realities with populist promises like his predecessor did, Maduro has been cracking down on the media instead.
Reporters Without Borders recently rated the press in Venezuela as being among the least free in the world, ranking it 139 out of 180 countries, below Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Freedom House recently rated the press in Venezuela as Not free.
Mark Crawford – The UK government’s anti-BDS policy
In February this year, the British government banned public boycotts of Israeli goods. In recent years, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign has become popular among those in opposition to the oppression of the Palestinian people, whereby Israeli goods, services and individuals are evaded or censored.
It’s illogical to punish an entire nation, as BDS does, for the actions of those in power. The answer to this illiberal policy must not be, however, to hand greater power to faceless, bureaucratic law enforcement to suppress freedom of expression.
As a result of the government’s clampdown, the board of trustees at my students’ union, UCLU, has already overridden a pro-BDS position democratically endorsed – however poorly – by its Union Council; but as well as emboldening the very illiberal voices that thrive on the aloof vilification of bureaucrats, the board even elected to censor council’s harmless and necessary expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The cure for faulty ideas and tactics is better ideas and better politics – translated through debate and honest self-reflection. Not only have legal shortcuts never worked, but they’re ideologically hypocritical and politically suicidal.
Ian Morse – Twitter’s safety council
Twitter unveiled its safety council in February. Its purpose is to ensure that people can continue to “express themselves freely and safely” on Twitter, yet there are no free speech organisations included.
So while the group ostensibly wants to create safety, its manifesto and practice suggest otherwise. The group doesn’t stop incitements of violence, it stops offensive speech. Safety only refers to the same attempts to create “safe spaces” that have appeared in so many other places. There is a difference between stopping the promotion of violence within a group – as Twitter did with 125,000 terrorism-related accounts – and stopping people from hearing other people’s views. Twitter has a mute and block button, but has also resorted to “shadow banning”.
It’s indicative of two wider trends: the consolidation of “speech management” in Silicon Valley, and the calamitous division of the liberal left into those who allow the other side to speak and those who do not.
Layli Foroudi – Denied the freedom to connect: censorship online in Russia
The United Nations Human Rights Commission has brought the human rights framework into the digital age with the passing of a resolution for the “promotion, protection, and enjoyment of human rights on the internet”, particularly freedom of expression.
Russia opposed the resolution. This is unsurprising as the government institutionalises censorship in legislation, using extremism, morality and state security as justifications. Since November 2012, the media regulatory body Roskomnadzor has maintained an internet blacklist. Over 30,000 online resources were listed in April, plus 600,000 websites that are inaccessible due to being located on the same IP address as sites with “illegal” information.
This year, the internet in Russia has experienced increased censorship and site filtering under the influence of Konstantin Malofeev whose censorship lobbying group, the Safe Internet League, has been pushing for stricter standards in the name of Christian Orthodox morality, freedom from extremism and American influence.
Activists in Russia have claimed that their messages, sent using encrypted chat service Telegram, have been hacked by Russian security forces. Surveillance was what originally drove Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram and social network VKontakte, to set up the encrypted service as he and his colleagues felt the need to correspond without the Russian security services “breathing down their necks”. Durov himself lives in the US, a move prompted by the forced sale of VKontakte to companies closely aligned with the Kremlin, after the social network reportedly facilitated the 2011 protests against the rigging of parliamentary elections. His departure confirms theories about the chilling effect that crackdowns on expression can have on innovation and technology in a country.
In June a new law was passed which requires news aggregators, surpassing one million users daily, to check the “truthfulness” of information shared. Ekaterina Fadeeva, a spokesperson for Yandex, the biggest search engine in Russia, said that Yandex News would not be able to exist under such conditions.
Madeleine Stone – The murder of Joe Cox
The brutal daylight murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox may not initially seem like a freedom of speech issue.
In Britain, we imagine political assassinations to take place in more volatile nations. We are often complacent that our right to free speech in the UK is guaranteed. But whilst there are people intimidating, attacking and murdering others for expressing, campaigning on and fighting for their beliefs, this right is not safe. For democracy to work, people need to believe that they are free to fight for what they believe is right, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum. Jo Cox’s murder, which for the most part has been forgotten by British media, should be a wake-up call to Britain that our freedom of speech cannot be taken for granted.
Belarus Free Theatre have been using their creative and subversive art to protest the dictatorial rule of Aleksandr Lukashenko for over a decade.
Facing pressure from authorities since their inception, the theatre company nonetheless thrived underground, performing in apartments, basements and forests despite continued arrests and brutal interrogations. In 2011, while on tour, they were told they were unable to return home. Refusing to be silenced, the group set up headquarters in London and continued to direct projects in Belarus. In 2016 the group was shortlisted for Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Arts Award.
Why is it important to mount Burning Doors at this time?
Koliada: Freedom of expression in that geopolitical knot where we come from and where more than 200 million people live under severe pressures of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes. If we do not talk and alert people living in western, democratic countries to our stories, their countries will be infiltrated in different forms, initially unnoticeably, by people manipulating the authorities who say it’s all in the name of the law.
Where did the idea come from?
Koliada: The idea behind Burning Doors is at the heart of Belarus Free Theatre. Close your eyes, just for a moment, and imagine that a theatre company based here in the UK could be prohibited to perform shows by Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane, and needs to perform underground. Even operating underground, the actors and managers could be arrested by MI5, riot police or the Met, and audience members threatened and told that they could lose their jobs and education.
(Our audience is a very young one and, of course, they are not scared of the secret services, so what would happen in those cases is that their parents would be threatened with professional retribution.)
I’ll continue and ask you to imagine that all of it has happened and continues to happen to a UK based-theatre company, one that is known and performs across the world, and yet can only exist because its founding members are exiled from their homeland and they now have political asylum in the UK. This has been our story for the past 11 years.
It’s in our blood to feel all the symptoms of dictatorship. Last year when we mounted Staging A Revolution: I’m with Banned which brought international attention to banned artists in Belarus, Ukraine (Ukrainian artists who spoke out against the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and are now prohibited in Russia), and Russia, it was the first time anyone had mounted an artistic solidarity event with Eastern Europe since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Around the same time that the Festival took place, filmmaker Oleg Sentsov and contemporary artist Petr Pavlensky were arrested. Masha Alekhina, a member of Pussy Riot who served two years in jail, got in contact with us and suggested we work together. We knew we had to do it. We were intrigued by the artistic possibilities of working with a real witness talking about her own personal experiences and bringing her into our Minsk-based ensemble of actors, the most talented and bravest in the world. We wanted to connect Masha’s story to those of other persecuted contemporary actors and through a prism of their personal stories to speak openly about the hypocrisy of politicians and to inspire our audiences to reflect on the reality that we as human beings need to stand up together against repressive regimes. It’s important for us to reemphasise that we are not heroes, we are not victims, we are contemporary artists.
Does BFT think that building cross-border alliances with artists will have an impact on the threats to freedom of expression?
Koliada: Any cross-borders alliances of artists expands audiences. It transforms all of us into a movement. Why do dictators put contemporary artists into jails? Because they want to show with a single example that it’s dangerous to resist systems through the arts. They become scared when we stand up together against them. It’s very simple in thought and action but this is what makes them go into panic mode. Ai Wei Wei was under a house arrest when he created the visual icon for our campaign, Staging A Revolution: I’m with Banned. More than 600,000 people across the world saw it online, and people from more than 37 countries supported our campaign. This kind of collective action makes dictators feel sick and it’s then that they start to make the mistakes that lead to their collapse.
It’s unprecedented for us as a theatre company making work for more than eleven years under dictatorship to collaborate with a woman who served a two-year term in a Russian jail. Within days of announcing this collaboration to the media in the UK, it spread across the world. Even this level of coverage is terrifying to people like Putin or Lukashenko because it demonstrates the tidal wave of support for non-violent resistance by creating art. Art is more powerful than political rhetoric. When Mick Jagger, Tom Stoppard and Vaclav Havel made a video supporting the people of Belarus, we were arrested by the KGB. They knew that it was instigated and created by members of BFT. We understood then that the support of artists across the world was more terrifying to them than statements from politicians.
I think it’s time for all of us to make steps forward and to start to act together with artists, human rights defenders, politicians and journalists, because dictators are scared of a strong mutual position.
How has BFT’s mission evolved since being founded a decade ago?
Koliada: From the very beginning we were only interested in people. Human life is the most interesting subject matter for us. We started with our own personal taboos, then society’s taboos, then moved onto a global dimension. The only thing that is unchanging is our fundamental interest in people. When we perform in different continents across the world, people tell us that they find our work so powerful because they always find themselves within us. And likewise, we find ourselves in our audiences.
How else can people support BFT and Burning Doors?
Koliada: Information is the key. If people know what we do, why and how, we have the chance to continue to exist. People knowing of our existence and our work helps on many different levels including our financial sustainability. Last week, President Obama extended sanctions in Belarus stating that Belarus is “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States of America and its foreign affairs”. Yet at the same time, the EU is playing a badly orchestrated geopolitical rebranding game to try to convince people that “Belarus is normal”. It’s not. It has been a dictatorship in Europe for 22 years, political opponents have been murdered and their bodies never found. Those who perpetrated those crimes are still in power. Even this week, there is a trial underway against Eduard Palchis, who is a blogger and journalist. It seems that Belarus might have seized another political prisoner if human rights organisations across the world do not intervene.
And for BFT more specifically, this month we launched our first-ever Kickstarter campaign. We need to raise £20,000 in the month of June to bring our tireless, extraordinarily brave troupe of actors to the UK to work with them on our new work, Burning Doors. Every pound will help us get there. Please consider finding out more and supporting us today.
Each week, Index on Censorship’s 