18 Apr 23 | Afghanistan, FEATURED: Francis Clarke, News and features
Last Thursday, human rights organisation Anotherway Now hosted a screening of the Sky News documentary ‘Defying the Taliban: women at war in Afghanistan’. This was followed by a panel discussion hosted by Index on Censorship’s Editor-at-large Martin Bright.
Part of the discussion challenged the British government to create a route for Afghan women to apply safely for asylum into the UK. Zehra Zaidi, from the advocacy group Action for Afghanistan, said people need to show they are taking up the issue with the government. She added: “We also need to show it’s not a vote loser. That it’s the right thing to do, and the compassionate thing to do. We must keep fighting.”
The first of three documentaries looking at the fight for women’s rights in the world’s most hostile environments, Special Correspondent Alex Crawford travelled to Afghanistan over a year after the Taliban takeover.
Despite being a country where women’s rights plummeted under one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, we saw young women training as gynaecologists and paediatricians, with higher-level education currently allowed for women. However, with secondary education banned for young girls and women, it’s clear this will be a rare sight in the future. With medics generally only treating their same sex in Afghanistan, a ticking time bomb awaits.
What was striking is how women operated in the underground. Crawford used her network of contacts to show us a hidden world, including a safe house in Kabul run by rights activist Mahbouba Seraj, who is a 2023 Nobel Peace Prize nominee. A rare refuge from the brutal world outside, Seraj explained she takes in abused women and girls from all over Afghanistan, adding: “The Taliban don’t want us to exist. That’s why there’s no schools or work, or why women shouldn’t be walking on the street.”
Seraj doesn’t fear the Taliban though. “I find it ridiculous, insulting and annoyingly childish. But am I scared? No”, she said.
A secret network of schools also operates across Kabul, run by volunteers who teach maths and English to a younger generation of girls.
We’re shown secret workshops where women make art out of weapons and bullets; and make beautiful dresses where they can artistically portray their tough situation. Proceeds are used to feed their families, but also gives the women the freedom to expose their treatment in a male-dominated society. However, the freedom to artistically express is no longer an option for Farida (not her real name), once one of Afghanistan’s most celebrated painters. She said: “The Taliban burnt my gallery and said you can’t work on (paint) the faces of women.
“It killed me. We are empty. Now we don’t have hopes, and we don’t have dreams.”
Postcards of artwork by Farida that was smuggled out of Afghanistan (source: Sky)
During the post-screening discussion, Crawford explained the Taliban’s hypocrisy as the official reason given for banning women from attending medical school is male/female segregation isn’t possible, but female-only medical schools are closed anyway.
Zahra Joya, an exiled Afghan journalist and founder of Rukhshana media, urged everybody to keep the conversation about Afghanistan alive after the screening. She said: “This film shows the full-scale war against women in Afghanistan. Keep them in your mind and speak up.”
Calling for a show of hands from the audience, Zaidi asked the audience if anybody knew there is currently no asylum route into the UK for Afghan women. “There is none!”, she exclaimed. “None of those women in the film can apply to the British government for asylum. Our petition alone in August had 470,000 signatures to prioritise Afghan women and girls.”
Zaidi believed the Afghanistan crisis is being purposely mixed up with the small boats’ crisis and “illegal” migration bill, so it won’t stand on its own as a genuine issue in the UK. To wrap up, she offered her dream encounter with the British home secretary.
“I like a challenge. I see myself sitting opposite Suella Braverman inviting Afghan refugees to the UK if it’s the last thing I do!”
22 Sep 22 | Iran, News and features
Iranians are again finding it impossible to access the internet and social media messaging platforms after yet another shutdown by the country’s authorities. The move comes after protests erupted in the country, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini (right) last Friday.
Critics say the shutdown of services and the filtering of content is restricting freedom of expression and preventing peaceful protest. Access to news in Iran is strictly controlled by the government and for many Iranians, their only access to independent news sources is through digital platforms.
Amini, a Kurdish woman from Saggez in Iranian Kurdistan, was visiting relatives in Tehran on 13 September when she was arrested by the Gasht-e Ershad. These so-called “morality police” uphold respect for Islamic morals, including detaining women who they see as being improperly dressed, such as wearing revealing or tight-fitting clothing or not wearing the required hijab.
The morality police detained Amini as she and her brother were coming out of the city’s Haqqani metro station. Eyewitnesses said Amini was brutally assaulted by the agents inside their vehicle and then taken to a police station.
Two hours after her arrest, Amini went into a coma. She was then taken to Kasra Hospital where doctors said she had suffered a heart stroke and brain haemorrhage due to a fractured skull. She died on Friday, 16 September.
Ever since her death, protests have spread across the country, reaching more than 80 cities nationwide. In typical fashion, the authorities have responded by shutting down access to the internet in a bid to quell the protests.
Iran is one of the world’s biggest censors of the internet. The country has been concerned about the internet since the turn of the millennium and has been operating a sophisticated system of hardware and software-based content filtering ever since. A broad project now known as the National Information Network (NIN), and similar to China’s Great Firewall, was launched in 2005. It requires companies to use Iranian data centres and forces internet users to register using their social IDs and telephone numbers.
NIN was finally fully implemented in 2019 and that same year Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said of the internet, “During these past 40 years, and today as ever, the enemy’s propaganda and communication policy, as well as its most active programmes, have revolved around making people and even our officials and statesmen lose their hope in the future. False news, biased analysis, reversing facts, concealing the hopeful aspects, amplifying small problems and berating or denying great advantages, have been constantly on the agenda of thousands of audio-visual and internet-based media by the enemies of the Iranian people.”
The country also has a history of using internet shutdowns to crack down on dissent.
In 2019, protests broke out across the country when the Iranian government announced a 50 per cent increase in fuel prices and monthly rationing of petrol. More than 100 people died, according to reports. The government swiftly shut down the internet and mobile networks for several days.
In February 2021, at least ten fuel couriers in Sistan and Baluchistan province on the border with Pakistan were killed after a two-day stand-off triggered by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blocking the road to the city of Saravan. The killings triggered demonstrations, leading to further deaths, and the regime shut down the internet across several cities in the province.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said at the time: “Blanket internet shutdowns violate the principles of necessity and proportionality applicable to restrictions of freedom of expression and constitute a violation of international human rights law.”
The protests around the death of Mahsa Amini have seen the Iranian authorities reach for the internet shutdown playbook once more.
NetBlocks and AccessNow report that internet access began to be disrupted in Tehran and other parts of the country on the day of Amini’s death and on Monday 19 September, internet access was shut down almost totally in parts of the Kurdistan province.
The KeepItOn coalition, of which AccessNow is a member, said that this represents Iran’s third internet shutdown in less than 12 months. They said the “repressive, knee-jerk response to recent protests seriously interferes with people’s right to freedom of expression and assembly”.
Iranians have increasingly resorted to using unfiltered channels to get their news, as the only parts of the internet that they can access are censored. By 2018, it was believed that more than half of Iran’s population were using Telegram. In April that year the judiciary banned the popular messaging app, claiming it has been used to organise attacks and street protests. Since then, Iranians have switched to WhatsApp and Instagram.
It comes as no surprise that with the current protests NetBlocks has reported that access to Instagram, one of the last remaining social media platforms in Iran, was restricted across all major internet providers on Wednesday 21 September.
The authorities appear to have clamped down because of the widespread nature of the protests and, perhaps more worryingly for the regime, a large number of video clips that have gone viral and which they are keen to suppress.
A peaceful protest in Saqqez
Not just the young
A clip of several men defending a woman who has removed her hijab
Another video clip shared on Twitter by British comedian Omid Djalili, whose parents are Iranian, suggested that, perhaps, attitudes may finally be changing in Iran.
Responding to the crackdown on protest and the internet shutdowns, experts from the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Procedures group said in a statement, “Disruptions to the internet are usually part of a larger effort to stifle the free expression and association of the Iranian population, and to curtail ongoing protests. State-mandated internet disruptions cannot be justified under any circumstances.”
“Over the past four decades, Iranian women have continued to peacefully protest against the compulsory hijab rules and the violations of their fundamental human rights,” the experts said. “Iran must repeal all legislation and policies that discriminate on the grounds of sex and gender, in line with international human rights standards.”
Speaking to Index, exiled Iranian film-maker Vahid Zarezdeh said the WhatsApp and Instagram ban means he has been cut off from his young son and the rest of his family still in the country.
He said, “In the absence of independent parties and free media, Iranian society gets its news and events, social and political issues from the internet. News reaches its audience very quickly and people can easily distinguish fake news from real news. How, you ask? The solution is very easy. By looking at the state television, you can understand which news is true and which is false. Whenever the government reacts sharply to news and prepares a report, it is very likely that the news is true, and when it ignores the news and is indifferent, it means that it is fake.”
State TV has been reporting on the protests but its coverage has focused less on the protests by women and instead suggesting that the unrest has been caused by Iran’s enemies, rather than spurred on by the regime’s crackdown. Certainly, TV viewers in the country have not seen the clips above.
“This is a system of repression and the Iranian regime does not care what the world community thinks about it and human rights,” said Zarezdeh.
He added, “It’s more than forty years since Iranian women started to be ignored by the Islamic regime. Now they have found the courage and belief to stand in front of the bullets with empty hands and without a scarf.
01 Jul 22 | Opinion, Russia, Ruth's blog, United Kingdom
Index on Censorship was launched in the early 1970s. In theory the world was a very different place, but in recent days the news does feel a little like déjà vu.
Fifty years ago, the world was split into two main camps – the West and the Soviet bloc – with a Cold War dominating geo-politics in the hope of preventing a hot war.
In 1972 the inflation rate in the UK was 7.13%.
The wider economic situation in Britain led to significant industrial action, with 23,909,000 working days affected in that same year.
China was still diplomatically isolated – although 1972 saw the first public efforts of engagement with the West, when President Nixon visited Beijing.
Back in the US, women were demanding rights over their bodies, with Roe vs Wade being upheld by the US Supreme Court the following year.
As Mark Twain said: “History doesn’t repeat – but it does rhyme.”
I really want to believe that as democratic societies we are on a progressive arc – that governments, and more importantly their electorate, over time becomes more liberal, more tolerant, and more enlightened. That is after all why I am an advocate of freedom of expression – the more people can debate and engage and argue, the better our collective societies become.
The events of 2022, so far, are challenging this core belief. And it would be easy to roll over and believe that the end is nigh. But we can’t and we won’t. I believe in people – I believe in the power of politics and most importantly I believe that our core democratic values overcome tyranny.
But there is one thing that we need to embrace as the world seems bleak. Nothing happens in isolation and our core values are not things that we can be complacent about.
Democratic leaders let our global institutions atrophy – our post-Covid world is a direct consequence of failing to invest in the global post-war institutions which we established to protect international law and to provide a place for global diplomacy.
The attack on women’s rights in the US hasn’t happened by accident, it’s a consequence of people voting – or not voting. Turnout in the 2016 general election in the US was less than 60% and that gave us Donald Trump.
So, there is a lesson to be learned from what is happening in democratic societies across the world – and that lesson isn’t to walk away, it is to get more involved. It’s to demand more and to demand better of those that seek to lead us. It’s to exercise every campaigning option that is given to us and protected for us by our rights to freedom of expression. And, most crucially it is to make a stand against those politicians that seek to cultivate hate and division – because their success leads to attacks on our core human rights – including what we do to our own bodies.
17 Dec 21 | Afghanistan, Magazine, Media Freedom, News and features, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021, Volume 50.04 Winter 2021 Extras
As a woman and a journalist, I have been living my worst nightmare since 15 August 2021, the day the Afghan capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban. Since that Sunday, I have been reporting about what women have lost – and what they continue to lose – as the new regime expands its power.
The Taliban have limited every aspect of women’s lives, from banning them from school and work to introducing long black uniforms that cover them from head to toe. Having grown up in Kabul since 2001, when the Taliban were deposed, I never imagined a return to the days when women were forced to stay home because of their gender.
When I was working as a journalist based in Kabul between 2011 and 2017, the media was the last hope for dissidents. Now the media, which continue to expose wrongdoing, have turned into dissidents. Today, making an editorial decision in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is literally making a decision about life and death.
In our small newsroom at Rukhshana Media, an all-women news website, one recurrent concern is how to tell a story with minimum risk to the people involved. The journalist is often the first to face the consequences of his or her work.
Journalism under the Taliban
Afghanistan has never been a safe country for journalists but, after 2001, the nascent Afghan media were freer than media in neighbouring countries.
Now they can hardly function without getting visits and calls from the new rulers in charge – the group that labelled the media a military target and continued to threaten them before coming to power in mid-August.
Media outlets are closing and journalists are being arrested, tortured and being forced to go on the run.
On 14 August, the day before Kabul fell, Mujeeb Khalwatgar, executive director of the Afghan media advocacy group Nai, told me his organisation had heard from journalists in Baghlan, Kandahar and Herat provinces that the Taliban were searching for them.
The same day, I talked to a young journalist from the north-eastern province of Badakhshan who said his name was on the Taliban’s blacklist. He was hiding outside Fayzabad, the provincial capital.
Days before the Taliban took Fayzabad, one of his female colleagues was attacked by a man who covered his face. She survived the attack, but they were worried whether they could survive the new regime.
I talked to several women reporters from the provinces who sought shelter in Kabul as the Taliban took over, hoping to leave the country on evacuation flights. Many of them didn’t make it.
In early November, a 24-year-old-woman, one of only three female journalists in an entire province – who asked me not to name the province – said she was on a Taliban blacklist, according to a relative who was working with the militants. The radio station she worked for was among more than 150 media outlets forced to close because of Taliban-imposed restrictions and the economic crisis a month after Kabul fell.
As the breadwinner of a family of nine, the change in rulers meant she not only lost her job but is on the run for her life, simply for being a woman journalist. In the past two months, she has been forced to change her place of residence seven times to hide from the Taliban.
Women journalists are disappearing
An Afghan female journalist attends a Taliban news conference. Photo REUTERS/Jorge Silva
Two weeks after the Taliban’s return to power, Reporters Without Borders warned that “women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital”. The organisation noted that, of about 700 women journalists with jobs in Kabul, more than 600 had not returned to work. Some fled while others were forced to stay at home or go into hiding.
Our investigation at Rukhshana Media shows that there are no women journalists in radio or TV working in the western provinces of Herat, Farah, Badghis and Ghor.
The systematic removal of women from the media landscape is not the only immediate consequence of the Taliban’s return to power. Just three weeks after their takeover, the militants arrested 14 journalists, with at least nine of them subjected to violence during their detention, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Among those detained were an editor and four other journalists at Etilaat Roz, a newspaper that was a winner of Transparency International’s Anti-Corruption Award in 2020. Two of them were tortured by the Taliban and needed hospital treatment.
Today, journalists – both men and women – are still on the run. In November, I talked to a 31-year-old journalist who for the past eight years has been an investigative reporter for local print and online outlets. Since 15 August, he has been on the run with his family of four, having spent nights in five different places. He is particularly worried about his investigations into the Taliban-run religious schools.
“No one is listening to my calls for help, no one. I am just hoping the Taliban don’t catch me alive,” he said.
Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch have issued warnings about the Taliban censorship of media, especially their “media regulations” which require journalists and media not to produce content “contrary to Islam” and not to report on “matters that have not been confirmed by officials”.
The chief editor of a radio station in Kabul who, despite not having a passport, attempted (unsuccessfully) to get on an evacuation flight out of the country in late August, told me his story. Now he is back at work, where, in one month, the Taliban have visited his office four times. Twice when his colleagues used the word “Taliban” instead of “the Islamic Emirate”, he received calls warning him to be careful with the choice of words.
He says his radio station, like all other Afghan media outlets, is under the Taliban’s scrutiny. Three of his colleagues in other provinces have been ordered by provincial officials to send their news first to the Taliban before it is signed off for broadcast.
With reliable sources of information having dried up and journalists either on the run or operating in an environment of fear, censorship and self-censorship, it is becoming harder to be a journalist.
The new environment creates opportunities for the circulation of false stories and propaganda on social media. Lately, it has become difficult to distinguish between real news and propaganda. Many on social media, including some journalists, are propagating stories that correspond with their biases and social and political prejudices which then will be used by some international media to verify their own assumptions and biases.
Fake news
Exposing false and misleading stories has been one of the primary goals of our team at Rukhshana Media, where we investigated two stories directly connected to misinformation and staged reporting in the past two months.
Many news outlets reported that Mahjabin Hakimi, a 25-year-old professional volleyball player, was beheaded by the Taliban. The reports were based entirely on the claim of her coach in Kabul’s volleyball club who spoke under a pseudonym. But our investigation, in which we interviewed five sources, including her parents and a friend who was present the day her body was found, showed that she died on 6 August – nine days before the Taliban took over Kabul.
In the second story, several people connected to the family of a nine-year-old girl featured in CNN’s bombshell report on child marriage told Rukhshana Media the report was invented.
Our reporters are working on the ground to bring women’s stories to the surface of a male-dominated Afghan media. In the past months, we have partnered with two international newsrooms, The Guardian and The Fuller Project, which has helped amplify the voice of Afghan women to wider audiences outside the country.
With women journalists remaining at risk, we are trying to create opportunities for them to continue their work and tell the stories of women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where they are banned from work and education and have no idea when they will be able to return to public life.
