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INDEX ON CENSORSHIp | VOL.52 | NO.4 The Index 2023 FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AWARDS Index on Censorship recognised inspirational people in the arts, campaigning and journalism from around the world at its annual event in London in October. Learn more about our winners AN IRANIAN RAPPER, an Indian fact-checker and an Afghan with a motorbike classroom. One thing that connects these three is the time they’ve spent, or are still spending, behind bars. The other is that they all took home 2023 Freedom of Expression Awards, wrote assistant editor Katie Dancey-Downs at the time of their announcement. Every year Index and its supporters gather in London to celebrate these annual awards and the relative safety we feel is in stark contrast to the positions our awards nominees find themselves in. This year was no different. Toomaj Salehi, a well-known hip-hop artist from Iran, took home the 2023 Arts Award. Even if we’d wanted to bring Salehi to London to receive his award, it would have been impossible. At the time of the awards he was in jail, sentenced to five and a half years for “corruption on earth”. In November he was released on bail, only to disappear again. Salehi sings about injustice and abuses by the Iranian authorities — even earlier arrests didn’t stop him from standing up to atrocities through his music. After supporting protests after the death of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, Salehi was once again arrested, this time violently, and it’s believed he was tortured into a false confession. Our Campaigning Award winner comes from Afghanistan, the brilliant Matiullah Wesa. Through his organisation Pen Path, Wesa has been protecting education in the country, even more so after the Taliban takeover. Since 2009, he has re-opened over 100 schools closed by the Taliban in remote villages, as well as establishing new ones. He’s given pens and books to hundreds of thousands of children, and set up libraries in rural areas. And he’s set out on a motorbike, using it as a mobile classroom, complete with a computer C R E D I T: A d r i a n a B i a n c h e d i World In Focus: Ecuador Drug cartels have turned a once-peaceful South American nation into one of the most violent in the world 1. Quito Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s presidential election in October, becoming the country’s youngest ever president at 35 years old. His victory brought an end to an election campaign fraught with corruption and violence, with the most harrowing event being the assassination of presidential candidate Fernado Villavicencio, who was vocal in his criticism of organised violence and was targeted by gangs. Noboa has pledged to tackle the drug trafficking crisis that has plagued the country in recent years, and to slow the rapidly rising rates of violent crime. These bloody events serve as a chilling reminder of the influence held by drug cartels and gangs in the region and how extreme violence is used to suppress dissidents. 2. Guayaquil As the country’s largest port city, Guayaquil has become the epicentre of Ecuador’s drug trade and is no stranger to violence. In one particularly concerning incident in March, journalist Lenin Artieda was wounded when a bomb disguised as a USB stick that had been sent to him exploded. Journalists at several news outlets had been sent similar packages, and a terrorism investigation was launched. The specific targeting of journalists has horrifying implications for free speech in the region, and the Ecuadorian government put out a statement declaring that “any attempt to intimidate journalism and freedom of expression is a loathsome action that should be punished with all the rigour of justice”. 3. Colombian border Colombia’s role in Ecuador’s descent into drug violence was evidenced in October when six Colombian nationals suspected of assassinating presidential candidate Villavicencio were found dead in a Guayaquil prison. Boundaries have blurred between the two states, with cartels in Colombia taking advantage of Ecuador’s close proximity and comparatively weak laws and institutions. The murder of Villavicencio, who was also a prominent journalist, and the suspects involved is a demonstration of Ecuador’s current culture of fear and violence, where any semblance of free speech is rapidly dissipating. 8 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG
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Up FRONT screen, speakers and bookcase. But in March this year, he was detained by the Taliban and had his house raided. He spent seven months in prison, his family banned from visiting him, before he was released at the end of October. This year’s Journalism Award winner is Mohammed Zubair. He co-founded the fact-checking platform Alt News, set up to dismantle propaganda networks and debunk fake news. After setting its sights on political fact-checking and amplifying dissidents, the outlet came under pressure from the outside. And it wasn’t long before Zubair himself became a target. He was arrested in June 2022 for a tweet, and bailed. But every time he was released on bail, he was arrested again for something else — a cycle which lasted for almost a month. No doubt a very long time when you’re in and out of prison. Sir Salman Rushdie was given the Trustees Award, accepted on the night by actor Colin Firth. It won’t be news to Index readers that Rushdie has faced appalling threats to his life since publishing The Satanic Verses, the most serious of which was an attempted murder in New York in August 2022, leaving him blind in one eye. Rushdie joined the event by video link, and said: “My connection with Index goes back really a long way…something like 40 years on and off that we have done things together. You know, I can’t avoid saying that the work is more important than ever because it seems like the urge to censor is stronger than ever and doesn’t come only from one direction. It comes from every possible direction, from the young and the old, the left and the right, and needs to be resisted as strongly as ever.” 2 3 COLOMBIA 1 ECUADOR PERU VENEZUELA BRAZIL The person I return to MY INSPIRATION As protests engulf Guatemala, acclaimed writer Eduardo Halfon reflects on his roots ABOVE: Award-winning writer Eduardo Halfon HIS NAME WAS Juan Sandino, but my brother and I called him Juan Sandía, which means Juan Watermelon in Spanish. He was my Polish grandfather’s gardener and driver. As kids, growing up in the Guatemala of the 1970s (before having to flee the country for good in 1981, because of the long and bloody civil war), we were fascinated by Juan Sandía. By the way he lisped his words. By his gold-plated teeth. By his black and bristly porcupine hair. By his right ring finger. We liked to stare at that right ring finger resting on the gearshift and ask Juan Sandía to tell us the story – or the stories, rather, for he had multiple versions – of how and where he had lost the upper half. It was he who had taught me how to bend a football; how to remove the peel of a tangerine in one single ribbon; how to find beetle larva hidden deep in the mud and how to catch cicadas from the highest branches of a weeping willow by tying a bucket to the end of a long pole. And it was also he who, fulfilling an ancient Mayan tradition, had buried my navel. Or so he liked to tell me. That a few days after I was born, he had entered my bedroom and found on the mattress of the crib the last bit of umbilical cord that had just come off my navel (muxu’x he called it in Kaqchikel). And that after offering it to my mother – I can imagine my mother looking at Juan Sandía with surprise and telling him that Jews bury the foreskin, not the navel – he had taken it with him to his village in a plastic bag and then waited until the next full moon and buried my navel that very night in his small plot of land at the edge of a river. And that there, Juan Sandía would tell me, in some Guatemalan village, on the muddy bank of some Guatemalan river, among the cornstalks and the black bean bushes and next to the navels of his ancestors and of his children and grandchildren, he’d planted my roots. INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG 9

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INDEX ON CENSORSHIp | VOL.52 | NO.4

The Index

2023 FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AWARDS

Index on Censorship recognised inspirational people in the arts, campaigning and journalism from around the world at its annual event in London in October. Learn more about our winners

AN IRANIAN RAPPER, an Indian fact-checker and an Afghan with a motorbike classroom. One thing that connects these three is the time they’ve spent, or are still spending, behind bars. The other is that they all took home 2023 Freedom of Expression Awards, wrote assistant editor Katie Dancey-Downs at the time of their announcement.

Every year Index and its supporters gather in London to celebrate these annual awards and the relative safety we feel is in stark contrast to the positions our awards nominees find themselves in. This year was no different.

Toomaj Salehi, a well-known hip-hop artist from Iran, took home the 2023 Arts Award. Even if we’d wanted to bring Salehi to London to receive his award, it would have been impossible. At the time of the awards he was in jail, sentenced to five and a half years for “corruption on earth”. In November he was released on bail, only to disappear again. Salehi sings about injustice and abuses by the Iranian authorities — even earlier arrests didn’t stop him from standing up to atrocities through his music. After supporting protests after the death of Jina “Mahsa” Amini, Salehi was once again arrested, this time violently, and it’s believed he was tortured into a false confession.

Our Campaigning Award winner comes from Afghanistan, the brilliant Matiullah Wesa. Through his organisation Pen Path, Wesa has been protecting education in the country, even more so after the Taliban takeover. Since 2009, he has re-opened over 100 schools closed by the Taliban in remote villages, as well as establishing new ones. He’s given pens and books to hundreds of thousands of children, and set up libraries in rural areas. And he’s set out on a motorbike, using it as a mobile classroom, complete with a computer

C R E D I

T:

A d r i a n a

B i a n c h e d i

World In Focus: Ecuador

Drug cartels have turned a once-peaceful South American nation into one of the most violent in the world

1. Quito Daniel Noboa won Ecuador’s presidential election in October, becoming the country’s youngest ever president at 35 years old. His victory brought an end to an election campaign fraught with corruption and violence, with the most harrowing event being the assassination of presidential candidate Fernado Villavicencio, who was vocal in his criticism of organised violence and was targeted by gangs. Noboa has pledged to tackle the drug trafficking crisis that has plagued the country in recent years, and to slow the rapidly rising rates of violent crime. These bloody events serve as a chilling reminder of the influence held by drug cartels and gangs in the region and how extreme violence is used to suppress dissidents.

2. Guayaquil As the country’s largest port city, Guayaquil has become the epicentre of Ecuador’s drug trade and is no stranger to violence. In one particularly concerning incident in March, journalist Lenin Artieda was wounded when a bomb disguised as a USB stick that had been sent to him exploded. Journalists at several news outlets had been sent similar packages, and a terrorism investigation was launched. The specific targeting of journalists has horrifying implications for free speech in the region, and the Ecuadorian government put out a statement declaring that “any attempt to intimidate journalism and freedom of expression is a loathsome action that should be punished with all the rigour of justice”.

3. Colombian border Colombia’s role in Ecuador’s descent into drug violence was evidenced in October when six Colombian nationals suspected of assassinating presidential candidate Villavicencio were found dead in a Guayaquil prison. Boundaries have blurred between the two states, with cartels in Colombia taking advantage of Ecuador’s close proximity and comparatively weak laws and institutions. The murder of Villavicencio, who was also a prominent journalist, and the suspects involved is a demonstration of Ecuador’s current culture of fear and violence, where any semblance of free speech is rapidly dissipating.

8 INDEXONCENSORSHIP.ORG

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