15 Mar 24 | Iran, Israel, News and features, Newsletters, Palestine, Russia
A great privilege of working at Index is, and always has been, the amazing people we get to encounter, those who look tyranny in the face and don’t cower. Iranian musician Toomaj Salehi is one such person. This week, the 2023 Index Freedom of Expression arts award winner donated the £2500 cash prize to relief funds for those affected by the floods in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province in an act of extreme generosity. We were informed of the donation by his family.
Salehi, whose music rails against corruption, state executions, poverty and the killing of protesters in Iran, has spent years in and out of jail. Today he is still not free – indeed he faces a court hearing on another new charge tomorrow. Our work with him doesn’t end with the award. But what solace to know that the money will make a tangible difference to the lives of many and that jail cannot stop Salehi from his mission to make Iran a more just country.
While Salehi, and others, confront the brutal face of censorship, those in the USA and the UK are this week dealing with the finer print – who owns what. The US House of Representatives passed a bill on Wednesday that will require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the popular video-sharing app or face a total ban. This is challenging territory. TikTok is guilty of its charges, shaping content to suit the interests of Beijing and data harvesting being the most prominent. So too are other social media platforms. If it is sold (which is still an if) we could see a further concentration of influential apps in the hands of a few tech giants. Is that a positive outcome? And how does this match up against the treatment of USA-based X? The social media platform, formerly Twitter, has Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding, the investment vehicle of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as its second largest investor. Is the US Government holding X to the same standards?
Meanwhile, the UK government (which has expanded the definition of extremism this week in a concerning way) plans to ban foreign governments from owning British media, effectively saying no to an Abu Dhabi-led takeover of the Telegraph. We have expressed our concerns about the buyout before and these concerns remain. Still, we’d like to see the final proposal before deciding whether it’s good news.
We’ve also spoken a lot this week about the decision by literary magazine Guernica to pull an article written by an Israeli (still available via the Wayback machine here) following a staff-walk out. We stand by everyone’s right to protest peacefully, of which walking out of your office is just that. But we are troubled by other aspects, specifically redacting an article post-publication and the seemingly low bar for such a redaction (and protest), which hinged on the identity of the author and a few sentences. We can argue about whether these sentences were inflammatory – I personally struggle to see them as such – and indeed we should, because if we can’t have these debates within the pages of a thoughtful magazine aimed at the erudite we’re in a bad place.
Speaking of a bad place, Russia goes to the “polls” today.
08 Mar 24 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, Russia
“Don’t go over there,” a woman warned Yaroslav Smolev – artist and musician – as he was approaching the monument to victims of Soviet-era repression in St Petersburg. He then saw the police arresting people who, like him, came to lay flowers. One of the men had his arms twisted by the officers. This was on 16 February, the day Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died, and hundreds of people came to honour him at improvised memorials.
Smolev, who spoke to Index four days later, said that the police were pushing mourners away from the monument. “We found ourselves standing [at a distance], not knowing what to do or where to go from there,” he said.
But despite the brutality of the police, he recalled seeing “mountains of flowers” at the memorial.
The next day Smolev staged a solo protest in the city centre holding a sign which read “Navalny was killed because we didn’t care.” He felt that he had to speak up, remembering Alexei Navalny who “always stood up for what he believed in – in a peaceful way”.
“I knew that I wouldn’t be allowed to stand there for a long time,” Smolev said. Some people walking by gave him sympathetic looks. One woman approached him and said: “Thank you for speaking up.”
Shortly afterwards, he was taken to the police station. The officers threatened to forcibly take his fingerprints and measurements. According to Smolev, they didn’t have the right to request these. “They said: ‘If you refuse, we will put you upside down, and get all the prints we need, from the top of your head to your heels’,” he told Index.
An officer threatened to throw him in a detention cell for “disobedience”. He told Smolev: “Handsome men like you are always in high demand [among the inmates in jail].”
Smolev had to advocate for himself as all the lawyers were busy that day. He refused to give in and was released three hours later. He would have to pay a fine of about 4,000 rubles ($44) for “violation of anti-COVID measures” – for standing on a sidewalk with a sign.
Smolev said that above all he fears that his home will be targeted now, like was the case after his peaceful protests in the past.
According to Dmitri Anisimov, a spokesman for OVD-Info, an organisation monitoring repression in Russia, at least 462 Navalny mourners were detained across the country, almost half of them in St Petersburg alone. No less than 78 were jailed up to 15 days. In some cases, people were not allowed to see their lawyers. Echoing Smolev’s story, Anisimov told Index that if the detained found themselves face-to-face with the police officers, anything could happen to them. At least six people were beaten up during their detention. Anisimov said that the police also handed out draft notices to some men who came to the improvised memorials for Navalny. Later these papers turned out to be fake. It’s one of the various intimidation tactics used by the authorities, he said.
At least 15 mourners were detained days after they came to the memorials, at their homes or on public transportation. Many of them were “in a state of shock” because they were unprepared for this, Anisimov said. According to him, they had been tracked through a system of surveillance cameras. Some of the people Index was going to speak to got scared off after these “delayed detentions”.
During the days following Navalny’s death, dozens of volunteers provided support for those detained and given jail time. Ekaterina, a 28-year-old democracy activist, was one of them.
Talking to Index from St Petersburg, she said that many people were placed in remote detention centres. She brought food for the detained: “Some bread, sausages, cheese, a little bit of sweets and water.”
She has been doing this volunteer work for two years, since she was detained during the anti-war protests which followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She told Index that people awaiting trial in detention centres are not fed properly – if at all – and are not always able to access tap water.
For Ekaterina, even though it may seem that with Navalny now gone all hope is lost, people “must continue searching for hope within each other”. “We need to help people who are still alive,” she added. “People such as political prisoners.”
When Navalny died on 16 February, she came to an impromptu memorial in St. Petersburg. There were no police around at that moment. “People came and came,” she recalled and she “got a chance to stand there and cry.”
The same day, a woman in Rostov-on-Don, around 1,800 km south of St Petersburg, also came to leave flowers in memory of Navalny at the monument to the victims of political repressions.
“There were so many police officers,” she said speaking to Index anonymously. The buses for the detained were parked next to the memorial and the police were filming people who brought bouquets. “I realised that nothing good would come out of it for me,” she said. “Call me a coward, but I decided to turn around and leave.”
Two days later the woman found out that the apartment where she is officially registered – but doesn’t live – was targeted. A police officer came to give her “some kind of warning”. She suspects that the authorities might have identified her by the car license plate while she was at the memorial – and now they are looking for her.
One of her friends, whom she had warned about the risks, came to the memorial for Navalny later that day. He was ordered by the police to write a letter of explanation stating reasons for his presence at the site.
“There are no mass killings by the authorities, nor people being hanged – but it feels that way,” the woman said. “We are so frightened that we don’t dare utter a single word, and I was too scared to even lay flowers!,” she added, outraged.
Despite this “climate of terror and fear”, as she called it, she empathised that there were many people at the memorial, who felt that it was their duty to honor Navalny.
“I think that Navalny was right when he said in a documentary about him that [if the authorities decide to kill him it means that] we’re incredibly strong,” Ekaterina, the democracy activist, told Index.
In the film his main message to the Russian people was “not to give up”.
23 Feb 24 | News and features, Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, Ukraine
As we mark the second anniversary of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine, it is imperative that we reflect not only on the ongoing conflict, the deaths, the child kidnapping, the sexual violence, the fear and the pain of the last two years, but also what came before and the impact on our collective human rights.
Many will consider 24 February 2022 as a turning point in global security and instability, which I of course do, but this wasn’t the first attack on Ukraine by Putin’s Russia. At Index on Censorship we have recorded the horrors which have occurred in Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea by Vladimir Putin in 2014. This part of Ukraine’s story is just as important as the widely-marked second anniversary of the invasion by Russia and we must share the stories of those dissidents as well as those currently on the frontline of the war.
The annexation of Crimea and the subsequent persecution of the Tatar community – an ethnic Muslim minority indigenous to the Crimean Peninsula – serve as stark reminders of the human cost of authoritarian aggression and the importance of defending fundamental rights when they are under attack rather than waiting to see what happens next. Crimea should have been a warning for the global community, it should have alerted the world to the real threat coming from the Kremlin. Instead the world was seemingly distracted and Putin suffered little consequence for his invasion. That cannot be said of the people whose land he stole. For over 10 years, the Tatars have faced systematic persecution at the hands of the Kremlin.
But even in the depths of war and despair there must always be hope.
Ukraine, in the midst of its fight for sovereignty and freedom, serves as a beacon of hope in the face of tyranny. The Ukrainian people have bravely resisted Russian aggression, not only on the battlefield but also in the realm of ideas and expression. Despite facing immense pressure and intimidation, they continue to champion the values of democracy, freedom of identity and freedom of expression.
In the midst of this conflict, individuals like Nariman Dzhelyal stand as symbols of resilience and defiance. Dzhelyal, a prominent Tatar activist, has dedicated his life to advocating for the rights of his community in the face of persecution and repression. Despite his imprisonment and harassment from the Putin regime, he has remained steadfast in his commitment to justice and human rights.
But Dzhelyal is just one of many voices Putin’s authoritarian regime has attempted to silence both in Russia and Ukraine. Countless journalists, activists and dissidents have been targeted for their speaking truth to power, their only crime being a desire for freedom and democracy. In Russia alone OVD-Info report 19,855 people have been arrested for anti-war protests in the last two years and 896 dissidents have faced criminal prosecution. Their imprisonment serves as a chilling reminder of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go to suppress dissent and maintain power.
The silencing of dissent is not only an attack on freedom but also poses a grave threat to global stability and security. We cannot stand idly by as tyrants seek to crush the voices of those who dare to speak truth to power. Silencing dissent makes the world smaller, less safe and much more dull.
On this second anniversary, let us recommit ourselves to the defence of freedom of expression and the promotion of democracy around the world. Let us stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and all those who continue to fight for their basic rights and dignity. And let us never forget the sacrifices made by individuals like Nariman Dzhelyal, who remind us that the human spirit is indomitable in the face of oppression.
Slava Ukraini
16 Feb 24 | News and features, Russia
When Alexei Navalny returned to Russia after the Kremlin had him poisoned with novichok, he took a bet that Vladimir Putin would not dare to kill the man who was on the blackest of black lists. Today Navalny lost that bet.
I met Navalny twice, once in Strasbourg and once in Moscow, and had had a long Zoom conversation with him. He was a truly extraordinary man: impossibly brave, charismatic, pig-headed, funny, great. To me, he symbolised the idea of a Russia without fascism, free and democratic. Von Stauffenberg dared to try to kill Hitler but he also did something else, he kept the idea of another Germany alive in 1944. Navalny dared to stand up to Putin and kept the idea of another Russia alive in 2024.
He could be extremely annoying. The first time we met was at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg where his lawyers were suing Russia from stopping him standing against Putin. Hearing concluded, he had ten minutes to talk to me for a BBC Panorama we were making about him called Taking On Putin. Cameraman Seamas McCracken was fixing mikes on lapels when I explained that Seamas was from Northern Ireland. Seamas stopped work. Navalny was greatly amused as precious seconds slipped away while I apologised and said that Seamas was from the north of Ireland. Only when Seamas was happy did the interview happen. But what sticks in the mind was not my Irish pal sticking up for his rights but Navalny’s amusement at my difficulty.
In Moscow, he and his supporters were under continuing attack. One of his team had been hit over the head with an iron bar, another beaten black and blue by silent thugs. And yet what you got was the real thing: sardonic, amused Navalny, punching words out at the little man in the Kremlin. Is Russia a police state?, I asked him. “Absolutely,” he replied.
He started out as a lawyer representing clients who had been wronged by Russia’s corruption engine. For a time around 2008, he dallied with the far-right, calling Chechens “cockroaches” and, later, upsetting Ukrainians by saying that Crimea is Russian. It is Ukrainian. But then he dumped that dark nonsense and set out the case for a liberal, democratic Russia.
His big moment came in 2012 when Putin switched his patsy, Dmitry Medvedev, out of the Kremlin so he could get back in again and another Russia hit the streets in their hundreds of thousands. Charismatic, funny, bitter, Navalny called Putin’s political vehicle “The Party of Crooks and Thieves” and he became a kind of rock star. One time, the police arrested him, twisting his arm behind his back so he howled in pain, before locking him in a police van. That video was seen millions of times.
Navalny got going, making brilliant videos detailing corruption in Russia. Two stand out: Putin’s Palace, which got more than a hundred million views on YouTube, setting out in fine details how his oligarchs paid for a naff palace by the Black Sea with golden toilet roll holders, and a second on his poisoning. In it, Navalny had the balls to pretend being a Kremlin high-up and called one of the poisoners. The hapless goon coughed up to the mechanism of assassination, that they lined the seams of his underpants with novichok.
He went back to Russia daring Putin to murder him. A show-trial followed, the only thing that was real was the moment when Navalny, from his glass-walled dock, cradled his hands into the shape of a heart for his wife, Yulia.
I hope that Russia will wake up from its zombie state, that Navalny will get his revenge from beyond the grave but I doubt it. Still, he lost his life standing up for another Russia and his memory will shine in history.
Farewell, my fond and foolish friend.
