Index on Censorship weekly round-up
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Friday, 08 December 2023
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The Iranian hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi
Music can be extraordinarily powerful. Think of the joyous and uplifting feeling that a piece of religious music can induce. Or how lyrics of a teenage rock band can make you understand for the first time who you really are. Or how listening to some songs with another person can make you fall in love.
Music can also drive people to protest and the power of music to move people to action is one of the reasons that tyrants so often try to silence them. It is why Pussy Riot is a thorn in the side of the Putin regime and why the group’s founder, Nadya Tolokonnikova, has been beaten, jailed and forced into exile.
Another group of musicians who have fallen foul of intolerant regimes is the Afghanistan’s all-female Zohra Orchestra. After the fall of Kabul in 2021, the orchestra’s building was seized by a guerilla group and many of the instruments destroyed. Some of the orchestra’s members escaped the country to safety, although some have had to remain behind.
Like Afghanistan, Iran has a very poor track record when it comes to musicians. In 2013, the musician Mehdi Rajabian was arrested on charges of “unauthorised art activity and insulting religious sanctities” and given a six-year prison sentence and fine. He served three years before his release. In 2020, he was rearrested after the release of his album, Middle Eastern, for featuring a woman singer, something that is banned in the country.
Iranian hip-hop artist Toomaj Salehi is another thorn in the Iranian regime’s side. (Our CEO talks about Salehi in her weekly blog which focuses on the regime's penchant for the death penalty ([link removed]) .)
In October 2022, after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, Salehi was arrested or changers of “corruption on Earth” for writing songs about the nationwide protests that followed. The 33-year-old rapper spent more than a year in prison, including 252 days in solitary confinement, during which he sustained physical injuries. After this release on bail, Toomaj posted a video saying that the injuries were as a result of torture and that he was filing a lawsuit against the authorities. This, apparently, was a breach of his bail conditions and he was violently rearrested. The authorities said that Salehi had been rearrested “for publishing false information and disturbing public opinion” by making public his claims about torture.
His fate remains unclear. In October, Index recognised Salehi’s activism by giving him one of our Freedom of Expression awards. On the night of the awards, guests listened to his music as well as to protest songs from other musicians. If you want to hear that same playlist you can listen to it here ([link removed]) .
Along with the news of Salehi’s arrest, it’s been a tough week elsewhere in the world of music as we heard the sad news of the death of one of Ireland’s greatest musicians, Shane MacGowan, founder and angry frontman of The Pogues.
The Pogues were no strangers to protest music. The two-parter Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six focused on Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles and the band supported those framed for IRA bombings in the 1970s. In it MacGowan sings: “There were six men in Birmingham, in Guildford there's four, who were picked up and tortured and framed by the law, and the filth got promotion, but they're still doing time, for being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time.”
Yet the point at which the world of The Pogues intersects with the world of Index on Censorship most of all becomes obvious at this time of year. Many have called for the Christmas classic Fairytale of New York to be banned or to have some of its lyrics edited out.
The BBC, for example, has often refused to play the original version, saying that the line “You cheap lousy faggot” is homophobic and the line “You’re an old slut on junk” is misogynist.
Back in 2018, MacGowan said of the row: “The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak and with her character. She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person. She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history, and she is down on her luck and desperate. Her dialogue is as accurate as I could make it, but she is not intended to offend. She is just supposed to be an authentic character, and not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable. Sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty in order to tell the story effectively.”
Censoring song lyrics feels as wrong to me as, say, putting out sterilised versions of Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton books. Musicians have it in their blood to be angry, to protest and to want to make their listeners feel the same way. They will never stop doing it and we shouldn’t ask them to do so.
Mark Frary, Associate editor
** Art institutions accused of censoring pro-Palestine views
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An open letter published by Artists for Palestine which claims that Palestinian voices are being censored has been signed by more than 1500 artists. Photo: Ash Hayes/Unsplash
"Any control imposed on art, regardless of the reasons behind it, is unacceptable to an artist,” Ai Weiwei told Index today ([link removed]) . The Chinese artist was speaking to Index following the publication of an open letter by Artists for Palestine, which has been signed by more than 1,500 artists including Oscar-winning actor Olivia Colman, and which accuses art institutions in the West of “systematically repressing, silencing and stigmatising Palestinian voices and perspectives.” This claim raises serious concerns regarding the current climate of free speech within the art world.
** UK’s hostile environment continues to silence already persecuted people
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By going ahead with the Rwanda plan, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak risks silencing already persecuted people. Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
After the infamous “go home” vans, the Windrush scandal and a (failed) policy to push back people crossing the channel on boats, this week the UK government sharpened its latest tool in its hostile environment box: the Rwanda plan, writes assistant editor Katie Dancey-Downs ([link removed]) . UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak threw a surprise press conference about the government’s Rwanda policy, now freshly emboldened with a new treaty following the Supreme Court’s declaration that Rwanda is not a safe country for UK asylum seekers. The prime minister said he would “finish the job” of getting his controversial deportation plan off the ground.
** Saying goodbye to Kissinger the criminal
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Henry Kissinger supported the murderous regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Credit: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 CL)
It is oddly appropriate that Henry Kissinger should have died in the year that commemorates the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile — the cataclysmic overthrow of its democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and the end of a fleeting attempt to create a socialist society without resorting to violence, a first in the history of revolutions. Read Ariel Dorfman's obituary ([link removed]) of President Nixon's national security advisor.
** Vote for your 2023 Moment of Freedom
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The Index team and our supporters have come together to identify moments in the past 12 months when the world did not seem so dark. Help us choose the most inspiring and you could one of a selection of exclusive prizes. Vote now here ([link removed]) .
[link removed] removal of juries in High Court defamation actions is one of many proposed reforms put forward by the Irish government in the draft scheme of the Defamation (Amendment) Bill earlier this year, but it has quickly emerged as one of the most divisive. Many experts contest the benefits of removing juries from defamation proceedings, arguing that they are too important a democratic institution to do away with. Read our new report on the issue ([link removed]) .
** From the Index archives
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** Poland’s redemption songs
by Martin Bright
Autumn 2022
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As well as Shane MacGowan, this week we also lost the poet Benjamin Zephaniah. Last year Martin Bright wrote about Zephaniah’s appearance at a 1989 reggae festival ([link removed]) that was held in, of all places, a shipyard in Gdansk to mark the introduction of martial law in Poland.
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Index on Censorship defends people's freedom to express themselves without fear of harm or persecution. We publish censored writers and artists, monitor and campaign against censorship, and encourage debate.
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