Abstract
A round-up of events in the world of free expression from Index’s unparalleled network of writers and activists
PICTURED: A protester takes shelter behind a rubbish bin adorned with an image of Myanmar armed forces chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing during a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon in March 2021
PIONEER REPORTER
MY INSPIRATION
I WAS A TEENAGE journalism student when I first discovered the magnificent Nellie Bly.
It was my first week at university in Northern Ireland and my tutor handed each person in our class a list of suggested books to read for the upcoming term.
When scouring the shelves of the campus library, I stumbled across Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs – a book which, 15 years later, I still pick up and flick through when I need inspiration.
Put together by the wonderful Eleanor Mills and Kira Cochrane, it is one of the first detailed collections of groundbreaking journalism by women over the past 100 years. It includes powerful pieces such as Martha Gellhorn’s Dachau, Audre Lorde’s haunting That Summer I Left Childhood Was White, and the late Ruth Picardie’s deeply emotive and last ever Observer column, Before I Say Goodbye.
It was in this anthology that I found Nellie, a fierce female who trailblazed her way through newspaper journalism and paved the way for female investigative reporters around the world.
Born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in 1864, she began her career after her parents’ deaths by writing a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch.
That letter – signed simply “Lonely Orphan Girl” – piqued George Madden so much, he immediately hired her.
Madden suggested she change her name to Nellie Bly, taken from a popular Stephen Foster song of the time, and the rest, as they say, is history.
From the moment she entered journalism, Nellie refused to conform.
Instead of writing about society gatherings and parties, a genre in which many women journalists were pigeonholed at that time, she sunk her teeth into social issues affecting women, from divorce laws to factory working conditions.
When working for The New York World in 1888, she feigned insanity to be committed into an asylum where she lived side by side with vulnerable women to expose the horrific, rat-infested and abusive conditions they were incarcerated in.
Her fearless piece, Ten Days in a Mad-House, led to the City of New York spending an extra $1 million a year on the care of those with serious mental health issues. She risked her freedom and her welfare for the truth.
Pioneering female investigative journalist, Nellie Bly who wrote Ten Days in a Mad-House
She saw it as a small price to pay to highlight injustice, particularly for women who at that time didn’t even have the right to vote.
Bly left journalism to get married and ran her husband’s Iron Clad Manufacturing business. When it went bust she returned to journalism and filed stories from the Eastern Front during World War I. Bly was the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria. She was arrested when she was mistaken for a British spy. She died aged 57 in 1922.
It’s been more than 100 years since Nellie Bly penned her last article, but the bravery, tenacity, and resilience she showed back then still inspires me today.
In her own words: “I said I could and I would. And I did.”
Timeless.
You may have missed
Protests against the laws prohibiting criticism of the monarchy have continued after former civil servant Anchan Preelert was jailed for 43 years. The 65-year-old shared audio and video clips on social media. Her initial sentence of 87 years was halved after a guilty plea.
Photographer Andy Aitchison was arrested at his home on 28 January after covering a protest at Napier Barracks, a Kent asylum seekers’ camp.
His fingerprints were taken and his mobile phone and memory card were seized after he was held on suspicion of criminal damage
The case was dropped but Aitchison was later issued with a £200 fixed penalty fine for breaching Covid-19 rules. The police later said that fine had been issued erroneously.
On 9 February, Hungarian radio station Klubrádió was forced off the air and can now only broadcast online. It was one of the few remaining radio stations opposed to prime minister Viktor Orbán.
In 2018, Orbán told the European Parliament that “we would never sink so low as to silence those with whom we disagree”.
Two historians were forced to apologise to the niece of a Polish former mayor after a co-authored book spoke of the complicity of some Catholic Poles during the Holocaust.
The Polish government had previously sought to criminalise any suggestion of Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities carried out in the country.
Drawing fire
BEFORE HE WAS arrested in May 2020, Bangladeshi cartoonist Ahmed Kabir Kishore chronicled the early days of the corona virus pandemic. His Life in the Time of Corona cartoons reflect Kishore’s concerns about marginalised groups and the poorest in Bangladesh, as well as scepticism about the efficiency and parity with which PPE and vaccines would be distributed.
Kishore was eventually released from custody in March 2021. He described how, during his interrogation and torture at the hands of the police. His cartoons were projected on a screen. It seems the police were seeking to clarify whether any of the figures portrayed were intended to represent prime minister Sheikh Hasina or her father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. It is considered a crime in Bangladesh under the 2018 Digital Security Act to make false statements about either political figure. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in 1975.
PEOPLE WATCH
AFTER YEARS OF surveillance and harassment, the co-founder of the Moroccan Association of Investigative Journalism was convicted of fraud and of endangering state security in January and sentenced to a year in prison. As well as writing a weekly column for Le Journal, Monjib is a historian and human rights activist. The 60-year-old is currently on hunger strike.
ON 2 MARCH, a Belarusian court sentenced the independent Tut.by journalist to six months in prison for disproving the authorities’ account of the death of a protester, who died during an anti-regime demonstration last November. Barysevich used medical records to prove that the protester had died of severe injuries, widely believed to have been inflicted by police.
FORMER INDEX STAFF member Aliaksandrau is a long-standing champion of free expression. He has written about the suppression of dissent in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia and the arrest and persecution of journalists. He was detained along with his partner, Irina Zlobina, in Minsk on 12 January on public order charges relating to protests against president Alexander Lukashenko.
FOLLOWING YEARS OF intimidation and threats, the filmmaker and human rights defender – who was a prominent critic of Hezbollah and other sectarian factions – was found dead in his car by Lebanese police. He had been shot four times in the head and once in the back. Many people including his sister accuse Hezbollah of the murder, but the group has denied being involved.
CREDIT: (Monjib) Index; (Barysevich) Tut.by/Baj.by; (Aliaksandrau) @aliaksandrau; Roman Deckert; (Loach) Filmoteca de Catalunya; (Navalny) Evgeny Feldman / Novaya Gazeta; (Sultan) Free Aasif Sultan
Cartoonists & Covid
A YEAR IN, the picture is clear: human rights groups everywhere agree that the pandemic has provided a pretext for governments to advance authoritarian, populist and nationalist agendas. Indeed, last spring CRNI helped Index on Censorship’s efforts to map violations by reporting multiple incidents of threat to cartoonists as part of Index’s Disease Control? project.
Our network of cartoonists rated criminalisation as their chief anxiety prior to Covid-19. At the time of writing, cartoonists are at various stages of investigation or prosecution by national or regional governments in multiple locations; some are profiled in this issue. Our top priority is Ahmed Kabir Kishore, sorely abused by Bangladesh’s police.
Additionally, the murder of teacher Samuel Paty in Paris last October has reintroduced the spectre of extremist violence to the wider conversation about cartooning. If a cartoon cannot be examined in an academic context then all hope is lost.
And in difficult days, the expression of dissatisfaction with power is the most natural human impulse. Cartoonists exemplify this, whether with the bluntest of caricatures or with the most nuanced of satirical allusions. We will continue to defend them.
SPEAKING THE UNSPEAKABLE
As well as the magazine, Index produces content online. Here are the stories that have been the most read on our website
STEPHEN POLLARD, EDITOR of The Jewish Chronicle, wrote for Index after students at St Peter’s College, Oxford, invited filmmaker Ken Loach to speak about his films and the Board of Deputies of British Jews weighed in, demanding that the invitation be withdrawn.
Pollard wrote: “Vile as I – and, let’s be clear, many others – may find him to be, if a group of Oxford students wish to hear from Ken Loach, so be it. He has broken no laws when speaking and has as much right to put forward his views – and, of course, to talk about his films to a group of people interested in hearing from him about them – as anyone else.”
Read the story:
PUTIN RIVAL ALEXEI Navalny has been sent to a penal colony after being sentenced in a Russian court to two years and eight months in jail for violating parole – charges which Navalny’s supporters say are trumped up.
However, Navalny has been criticised for his previous stance on immigration and racial slurs he has previously used, leading to some withdrawing their support for the dissident.
We wrote in March about Index’s stance. “Index on Censorship was established to provide a voice for dissidents living either under authoritarian regimes or in exile. Throughout our history extraordinary people have written for us and we have campaigned for their freedom. Every time Index seeks to intervene there is obviously a consideration made about who we seek to shine a light on.”
Read the story:
FOR OUR END-OF-YEAR campaign, we called on our readers to send messages of support to six activists or journalists who were in jail. We received hundreds of submissions wanting to pledge their support for Aasif Sultan (pictured), who was arrested in Kashmir after writing about the death of Buhran Wani; Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, jailed for writing about the practice of stoning in Iran; Hatice Duman, the former editor of the banned socialist newspaper Atilim, who has been in jail in Turkey since 2002; Khaled Drareni, jailed in Algeria for “incitement to unarmed gathering” simply for covering the weekly Hirak protests that are calling for political reform in the country; Loujain al-Hathloul, a women’s rights activist known for her attempts to raise awareness of the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia; and Yuri Dmitriev, a historian being silenced by Putin in Russia for creating a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror and facing fabricated sexual assault charges.
Read the story:
World In Focus: Myanmar
Some 20 journalists have been arrested for covering protests in Yangon, according to the website Reporting Asean. Many were released shortly after, but Kay Zon Nway from Myanmar Now, Aung Ye Ko from 7Day, Ye Myo Khant from the Myanmar Pressphoto Agency, Hein Pyae Zaw from ZeeKwat Media, and freelance reporter Banyar Oo are still being held and have all been charged with incitement. AP photo-journalist Thein Zaw who was also charged was released after a hearing on 25 March 2021.
Kaung Myat Hlaing (also known as Aung Kyaw) a reporter with the Democratic Voice of Myanmar (DVB), was targeted by police after reporting on anti-regime protests and how a pregnant woman in the city had been beaten up. The journalist live-streamed his own arrest in March which showed police and military surrounding his home, firing into the air and throwing stones at his house. The DVB news agency confirmed his detention in a statement and called for his release as well as the release of other journalists.
Six journalists have been arrested in Shan over the last couple of months, but others have been attacked. A freelance reporter for the Shan Herald news agency, went to take photos of soldiers and found himself being assaulted by them. “They chased after him, and hit him in the chest with the barrel of a gun,” said Sai Mun, an editor at the agency. “When he fell to the ground, they smashed the mobile phone he was taking photos with. They told him he couldn’t take photos, and said he could be killed if he did.”
ASSANGE: FORGET WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW
JULIAN ASSANGE’S EXTRADITION trial in January meant that our social media channels were buzzing with news of the WikiLeaks founder. Our most popular tweet in the quarter related to Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi’s successful attempt to gain access to the full documentation held by various authorities related to the Assange and WikiLeaks cases via Freedom of Information legislation.
Our interview with Assange’s partner Stella Moris and RSF’s Rebecca Vincent
Our call to the Russian authorities to stop the harassment and prosecution of Sergey Smirnov, the editor-in-chief of independent Russian media outlet Mediazona struck a chord with our followers. Smirnov received 25 days of administrative arrest after retweeting a joke that mentioned a forthcoming anti-government protest.
Our call for messages of support for historian Yuri Dmitriev hit home too.
Dmitriev was jailed for three and a half years in 2020 on fabricated sexual assault charges after he annoyed Vladimir Putin by creating a memorial to the victims of Stalinist terror.
Yuri was one of six activists who were included in our 2020 year-end JailedNotForgotten campaign.
Another of the activists was award-winning journalist Aasif Sultan who has been detained in Kashmir for more than 800 days after writing about the death of the militant Buhran Wani.
In late December, Index wrote to United Nations Secretary–General António Guterres to protest the execution of journalist Ruhollah Zam
Our CEO Ruth Smeeth wrote, “On Saturday 12 December, a member of the UN General Assembly and a signatory of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Islamic Republic of Iran, executed a journalist in cold blood, Ruhollah Zam. His apparent crime was ‘corruption on Earth’, or rather being a leading dissident against the Government.”
Also engaging our followers on social media were our thoughts on the Scottish Government’s Hate Crime and Public Order Bill. Our view
Rounding out our top ten tweets was a report from the NetBlocks observatory revealing that social media and messaging apps in Senegal had been disrupted after clashes between protesters and anti-riot police in Dakar following the arrest of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko.
Tech watch
A VIDEO OF a politician in an embarrassing situation goes viral. People on social media call for his resignation. But the video is a deepfake, footage that has been seamlessly and expertly manipulated to present something as real that is not.
Video editing technology that would once have been available only to Hollywood studios is now available on everyone’s smartphone.
Deepfake Tom Cruise videos may seem like harmless fun but they are blurring the lines of reality.
In early 2020, India’s Bharatiya Janata Party produced deepfakes of its president Manoj Tiwari. There was no sinister motive: it was just to show Tiwari speaking in the more than 20 different languages to appeal to more voters.
What is real? In February, a video appeared of a fitness instructor in Myanmar taking a class against a backdrop of a military coup. Was it a deepfake? Probably not, but no one could be sure.
With a deepfake app on your smartphone, it’s quick and easy to embarrass your rivals. And if you get filmed making a shady deal? What then? Denounce it as a deepfake. Plausible deniability.
CREDIT: Chris Ume
