Taking action together for Human Rights
19:05 – Tonight is our big night in Edinburgh with our Stand Up for Freedom comedy gig featuring the best of comedians the festival has to offer. We’ll be live blogging and tweeting at http://twitter.com/amnestyuk all night long.
This show isn’t being recorded, there will be no video, there will be no audio and all the tickets have sold out. So this is the only place to find out what’s happening.
If the Taleban were a product PR companies would be studying their tactics. Because they’ve certainly got massive “brand awareness”.
Aside from al-Qaida (and maybe not even them), they’re surely the most talked about armed group in the world.
Are the Taleban savvy marketeers? Well, not least because they’ve been responsible for 15 years of human rights violations in Afghanistan and Pakistan yes, they’ve certainly achieved notoriety and massive media attention. In press and publicity terms, their tactics have been crude. Killing large numbers of people nearly always gets you noticed (from Derrick Bird the Cumbrian killer, right through to dictators).
But is there also a more subtle side to their modus operandi? Because their reported offer to take part in a joint commission of inquiry with the UN and Nato into civilian deaths in Afghanistan suggests they’re certainly aware of basic PR issues. Recent UN data on Afghan civilian casualties has been used as “propaganda by the western media”, they say. They want to redress the balance.
But how serious is this? The Taleban may not like the way that reporters and politicians have taken up the fact that the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has found them and other anti-government forces responsible for three quarters of Afghan civilian deaths (nearly 1,000) so far this year, but then they wouldn’t would they?
But if the Taleban to be involved in any inquiry into civilian deaths in Afghanistan they should accept that it will often be their people who could end up being investigated with a view to putting them on trial for war crimes.
Coming just a day or so after the Taleban stoned to death a 20-year-old woman and 28-year-old man for the “crime” of adultery, I think we’d have to say the Taleban are their own worst enemies when it comes to publicity. This was a grotesque and sickening crime and ought to blacken the Taleban’s name for years to come. Analysts believe that something like this happened – at least temporarily – after a video surfaced showing a Taleb in Pakistan publicly flogging a 17-year-old girl woman for a “moral” crime last year. Public opinion in Pakistan was revolted by their behaviour. Similarly, who on earth in the Taleban believes that killing aid workers (or claiming responsibility for killing aid workers) is either justified or good for their image?
In the Observer at the weekend James Fergusson reckoned the Taleban speak for a wide constituency in Afghanistan, but I wonder if the truth isn’t simply that the Taleban are better at instilling fear than anyone else in the country. (Fergusson also says UK troops shouldn’t die for Afghan women’s rights, yet it’s not why they’re there. Meanwhile, it’s surely right nevertheless that the international community supports the human rights of Afghan women where it can).
When it comes right down to it, the Taleban are more skilled in butchering people than in burnishing their image. Put simply: if groups don’t want bad publicity then they shouldn’t blow up civilians and stone to death young couples. (The same goes for Iran and the Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani case: stop all stoning and your reputation might actually improve).
On balance, if I were a brand expert I’d be saying to Mullah Omar: yes, take part in an Afghan civilian deaths inquiry but don’t expect your image to improve very much.
Great day today as the comedians vanquished their opponents at Amnesty’s “comedians vs critics football match” today at Edinburgh’s Meadowbank stadium. What’s more it was SUNNY in SCOTLAND, a rare occurrence. I am even sunburned!
The final scoreline was 3-2 to the comedians and both teams played their hearts out for jailed Burmese comedian Zarganar.
Sensational goals from comedians Simon Brodkin, Danny McLaughlin and Doc Brown catapulted the comedians into an early lead. But a second half comeback from the critics, with goals from the List’s Peter Geoghegan and Nick Eardley from Fest magazine, teed it up for a nail-biting finish. Another ten minutes and they could have pulled level. Special mention to Eric Lampert who not only played in the comedians’ goal wearing sunglasses and cowboy boots, but also made at least three spectacular saves.
In a game billed as “such a grudge match they had to get Amnesty International to referee”, most players showed respect for each others’ human rights. The Amnesty International referee Gianmaria Bandiera rarely had to blow his whistle and has offered to cook us all dinner tonight.
Amnesty refused to confirm reports that comedian Keith Farnam could be referred to the International Criminal Court for a challenge on one of the critics.
Comedians captain Rob Rouse accepted a trophy from Amnesty International Scotland Director John Watson and duly showered his team-mates in cheap champagne. He said:
“Playing to help Amnesty’s campaign for Zarganar gave the comedians’ side that extra bit of fighting spirit to hold on to our lead. At the end of the day the result was never in doubt except for quite a large wobble in the last ten minutes.
“Everyone gave 110 per cent, Brian, and I’m proud of the way the boys conducted themselves today. I’d also like to give credit to our opponents but the game really was played in the spirit of true sportsmen and the style of under-14’s netball.
“Football really was the winner today.”
Both sides proudly wore the name of Zarganar on their shirts to highlight our campaign to secure his release from prison in Burma. Zarganar, one of Burma’s most famous comedians, was jailed for 35 years in 2008 after he criticised the government. Take action at www.amnesty.org.uk/zarganar.
The Guardian sent its video team to the game, so look out for their match report on guardian.co.uk tomorrow, as well as the next Amnesty podcast on Tuesday.
Big thanks to co-organisers Fest for providing fizzy wine and a fabulour trophy, and to our army of volunteers who ensured the whole event went off smoothly. The Amnesty Edinburgh Festival team are now sunburned, exhausted and excited about this Thursday’s Stand Up For Freedom gig at the EICC – should be a corker.
Throughout July we’ve had some significant news in a number of our ongoing cases: Some has been very exciting, with a number of people being released from prison. Unfortunately there’s been some bad news too, which highlights how important it is for us to continue supporting these individuals as they face grave human rights abuses and are unable to defend themselves.
Some good news from Burma
U Win Htein, a senior assistant to Aung San Suu Kyi was released from prison in Burma on 15 July. His son, Hsan Win Htein, wrote to Amnesty immediately following his father’s release. Here’s what he had to say:
‘Thank you for your concern and all your tireless effort on pressing for my father’s release’
U Win Htein was just one of over 2,200 political prisoners being held in Burma so as we approach the first elections in the country for 20 years we’re asking people in the UK to stand in solidarity with those still wrongly imprisoned for their peaceful political activity. Get involved now by adding your photo to our collection.
More releases
Photo by www.rsf.org
Pablo Pacheco Avila, a Cuban journalist was released from prison and transferred to Spain on 13 July. Amnesty supporters have been campaigning for Pablo’s release for the last 5 years and in this time the international pressure on Cuba to release him has grown and grown. Thank you to everyone who took part in this campaign.
Earlier in the month in Indonesia Yusak Pakage a peaceful protester was released from prison on 7 July, meanwhile Filep Karma, who was arrested at the same time as Yusak has also received the urgent medical treatment he needed.
The campaign continues
On 23 July 2010, the Azerbaijani government contested a European Court of Human Rights judgment that ordered Eynulla Fatullayev to be freed. Eynulla, a 33-year-old newspaper editor, has been beaten, received death threats and faced libel suits because of his work. Our campaign for his release continues with a new urgency: Send a letter now.
We also recently issued an urgent appeal for Johan Teterissa who is being denied medical treatment in an Indonesian prison. He’s currently serving a 15 year sentence for being involved in a peaceful protest and we are concerned about reports of his deteriorating health.Please call on the Indonesian prison authorities to provide him with the urgent medical attention he needs.
Finally, to mark Patrick Okoroafor’s 30th birthday on 11 July, Amnesty youth groups sent hundreds of cards to him in prison. Many also joined a demonstration outside the Nigerian High Commission in London.
Photo by Marie-Anne Ventura
Patrick’s brother Henry was in London to attend the demonstration and read out a personal statement from Patrick to those present. The message thanked Amnesty supporters for their letters of solidarity to both him and his mother and appealed for people to ‘not give up’.
‘Thank you very much for the thousands of letters and petitions you signed and sent to the Nigerian authorities asking them to release me. Your efforts have not been in vain, it has yielded positive results.’
We should be proud of our efforts in helping to secure the release of U Win Htein, Pablo Pacheco and Yusak Pakage in such a short space of time, but for individuals such as Eynulla Fatullayev, Johan Teterissa and Patrick Okoroafor, the campaign for justice goes on.
I’ve been here at the Edinburgh Festival for three days so far and it’s fantastic. It’s been sunny for starters, something of a first for me here. There’s a wider array of ‘amnesty stuff’ going on than ever before, so It’s already feeling really buzzy. And I’ve already seen some great shows: Kevin Eldon at the Stand and Arj Barker at the Assembly were both hilarious.
There’s been some talk already this year of the Fringe losing it’s heart, that the commercial drive to get big TV names to fill big venues means the space for small performers to get their first break has shrunk to the size of the sweaty basement in which most of those gigs are staged. In a way I had a taste of both at the weekend.
Daytime was spent in the C Venues SoCo urban garden, where six of scotland’s top graffiti artists were producing, amidst a crowd of increasingly merry and sunburned revellers, a live artwork inspired by the jailed “88 generation” protesters from Burma. I was there with Waihnin Pwint-Thon, a Burmese activist whose father is one of those jailed protesters. The artwork looked amazing and felt like a real celebration of free expression. There’s film of the event going up soon on this site & the artworks will be there throughout the festival.
From the sublime to the utterly ridiculous, we then went to see Tim Vine at the Pleasance, delivering roughly 300 one-liners in the space of an hour to a packed house. A 150-seat venue packed full of punters who know him off the telly and paying £16 a ticket. That said, you get more jokes per pound than any act outside the Free Fringe.
The evening was rounded off with music, poems and stories from Lach, New York music legend whose underground club nights gave birth to the “Anti-folk” scene in the US. His late night open mike slot “The “Anti Hoot” at the Gilded Balloon is enough to restore the faith of any cynic who feels the fringe has lost its way. Anyone can perform which means a couple acts were, frankly, howlers. But there were some real gems: music from a guy called Burton and a band called Holden and stand up from Glaswegian Davey See. Apparently by leaving at 2.30am I missed a German electro band that brought the house down. Plus Lach’s charm and passion for live performance per se underscored the whole night.
The Edinburgh Festival remains a true celebration of freedom of expression. Yes, it is doubtless more commercial now than it once was. Sadly everything seems to be. But when you walk up the royal mile and see the performers promoting their shows, or you bump into Julius Caesar in full robes coming out of a kebab shop as I did on saturday night, you still get a sense of something very alive and genuine, that the accountants have no grasp of nor interest in.
I bumped into comedian Josie Long on Saturday, who’d been recording an interview for the Amnesty International Comedy Podcast (out today!). She told me how inspired she’d been by a gig she did for Amnesty’s local Islington group, where two Burmese campaigners came along to tell their story. She’s now supporting our campaign for Zarganar, Burma’s top comedian, who’s serving 35 years in prison for criticising the government. Mark Watson, Rob Rouse and other comics are also backing the campaign. Defending and supporting the right to freedom of expression, by giving space to new voices in Edinburgh or championing those being silenced in Burma, is the spirit of the Fringe. It is far from dead.
Update 9/8: Our comedy podcast’s now on iTunes, so it’s super-easy to subscribe. What are you waiting for?
So, you’ve heard about our hilarious new comedy podcast we’re producing for the Edinburgh Festival with The Guardian.
But you don’t want to listen to it sat at your computer. Even if you do sit at a computer all day, and even if your IT team hasn’t seen fit to install a stupid web filter and even if you do happen to have some headphones with you. The giggling will definitely give you away.
Unless your boss has gone to France for the month, it’s a no goer. What you want to do is download it to your iTunes so you can listen to it anytime, anywhere and never miss an episode. But you’ve had a look on iTunes and you can’t find it anywhere.
Well, we are working on that. But in the meantime we’ve got a nice solution. Open up iTunes and click on ‘Advanced’ (aren’t we all!) and then Subscribe to Podcast
Then just paste this link into the box and click OK – http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/series/amnesty-international-comedy-podcast/podcast.xml
Job done, and now you’ll never miss an episode. Happy listening!
Protesters outside the Vedanta AGM
I’ve stood outside a few AGMs in my time. I’ve handed out leaflets on the impacts of tar sands extraction on indigenous communities at the BP AGM, and protested against ongoing pollution and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta at the Shell AGM. But this was the first time that I’d joined the shareholding classes. A friend of mine Simon Chambers, who made an excellent documentary Cowboys in India about Vedanta’s impacts in Orissa, had made out one of his shares in my name so that I could go along and see for myself what went on inside the AGM.
Apart from being generally concerned about the human rights abuses, lack of community consultation, poor safety record and water and crop pollution that Vedanta are responsible for, I am also interested in the company in particular because of the fact that they have been financed by the Royal Bank of Scotland. In my day job, I work for an organisation called PLATFORM that tries to put pressure on RBS to adopt more stringent environmental and human rights criteria for the type of companies that they give money to. Especially since they have such an appalling record in financing fossil fuel projects around the world, and especially since they are 83% owned by the UK public and therefore should be more accountable than ‘normal’ commercial banks. On the morning of the AGM, I had a letter published in the Guardian that outlined these concerns around Vedanta.
Avatar-style protesters
So, with my share in hand, I made my way past the Avatar-inspired protesters who making a righteous racket outside the building, and made my way into the very swanky surroundings of the Institute for Civil Engineers. We were all given a small handheld console so that we could vote on the various resolutions, making it feel a bit like “Who wants to be a millionaire’ although Anil Agarwal, the billionaire chair of the board, is the 51% owner of the company, so it was no surprise that all the various resolutions got passed through as a matter of course.
It was all a lot rowdier than I had expected. It seemed quite ritualised – the board had to make a display of being accountable to their shareholders, and have a legal responsibility to hear the questions that were being put to them. But most of the time, when being questioned repeatedly about issues of pollution, displacement, safety, lack of Free Prior and Informed Consent and so on, the board members often didn’t even bother replying to the questions, just using very stock phrases that glibly avoided any responsibility or even making out as though what they were doing in the area was actually a huge boon to the impoverished tribes-people.
Martin Horwood MP, who is involved in parliamentary committees dealing with both corporate social responsibility and tribal peoples opened the questions asking the board where they had made shareholders aware that the UK OECD contact person had upheld a complaint by Survival International that the indigenous community had not been consulted properly. Needless to say, an answer wasn’t forthcoming, and the board also evaded the request to appear in Parliament to answer questions from the relevant committees. Shortly after, Bianca Jagger made an impassioned intervention on the basis of her fact-finding mission to the area and her firsthand account of the impacts of Vedanta on local communities, before handing over a box of the 30,000 plus signatures that had been collected through Amnesty International.
As the questions continued, as the answers got more and more evasive or dismissive, people in the crowd started heckling the board – pointing out inconsistencies in their answers or asking them to answer the question when they were being evasive. A number of people held up placards with ‘rubbish’ written on it when the board were being particularly, well, rubbish.
So what changed as a result of all the protests outside, and the heckling and the difficult questions inside? There were some very critical articles about Vedanta in newspapers internationally that used the ‘hook’ of the noisy protests. The Independent even ran with a headline asking if Vedanta is “the most hated company in the world?’ But headlines alone don’t make positive changes, so it’s great that there are many different groups who are monitoring the company and continuing to apply pressure, from the folks at Amnesty and Survival trying all manner of political channels, the many people signing petitions and writing to their MPs, the grassroots efforts of people who turned up to make a noise outside and of course the many acts of resistance, big and small, of the communities in India who are determined to stand firm in the face of corporate pressure.
More on Vedanta
Watch the Amnesty film which captured reactions before and after the AGM:
Please continue to take action by emailing the Indian Minister for the Environment and Forestry
So, this week we’ve been racking our brains to think of a way to make Fridays even better and we think we’ve cracked it.
To celebrate our new partnership with fairsharemusic.com we’ve got a great little competition for you to win some free tunes.
Fairsharemusic has over eight and a half million tracks including the hottest new releases starting at only 79p. Just like every other music download site right? Wrong.
The difference with fairsharemusic is that for every track you download, fairsharemusic donates half the profits to us. You don’t have to do anything. Just sit back and feel good.
And what’s more, the first time you visit the deal gets even sweeter. Download an album and they will donate an extra 10% to us. Spend over £10 and we get an extra 20%, and if you spend over £20 they will donate an amazing 50% more.
We’re pretty excited about it and to mark the occasion we’ve got 30 free tracks to give away.
All you have to do is pick your top three tracks from fairsharemusic’s library of eight and a half million songs and tell us about them in the comments below. It is that easy.
We’re giving away 10 tracks as the top prize and 20 other lucky winners will each receive one track each. And when we say ‘track’, we mean you can choose any song you like from fairsharemusic’s library of millions!
Get going and we will announce the winners at 4pm next Friday, 6 August.
Full competition terms and conditions
UPDATE: 6 AUGUST 2010
We have just done the draw and the lucky winner of our top prize of 10 tracks is Sophie Count. Thanks everyone for taking part and don’t be too disheartened, you’ve all won a track! We’ll be in touch shortly. Have a good weekend.
A month ago we launched an appeal asking you to help us buy radios for Burma. The initiative is aimed at harnessing the power of radio already being used to break through media censorship in the country.
An amazing 2,327 of you responded to our appeal. Because of your incredible generosity we have surpassed our target and will be able to distribute thousands of radios throughout Burma. Some of you were even able to dig deep enough to buy the more expensive satellite phone and walkie-talkie kits, providing vital communication tools to people on the ground.
If you didn’t get a chance to buy a radio, but would still like to support our work in Burma you can donate now:
A massive thank you is due to everybody that bought a radio for Burma, helped spread the word and supported the appeal. Once the equipment begins to be distributed, we will keep you updated with photo and video reports from inside Burma to show you how these vital tools are benefiting the communities they reach. Getting such footage out of Burma can be difficult, but as soon as we receive anything, those of you that donated will be the first to know.
Update 12 July: We have reached our target! A great big thank you to everybody that donated and helped spread the word.
Three weeks ago we appealed to you to help fund our Radios for Burma project. Thanks to your overwhelming generosity, we are now able to provide over 4,500 radios to the people of Burma.
Due to this incredible response, we have extended the deadline for funding the first wave of distribution into the country because we believe we can still achieve the target of 5,000 radios for Burma.
If 250 people reading this blog get two people they know to buy a radio, we’ll be there in no time. Spread the word and help break through the wall of censorship.
Our aim is to amplify independent media so we can empower more people, especially in rural and information starved parts of the country to access their rights and learn about issues relevant to their daily lives.
If you haven’t already, please buy a radio for Burma and help break the silence.
If we exceed our target then your donations will go towards achieving our wider campaign objectives which are consistent with the Radios for Burma project
The importance of Radios for Burma was underlined again last week when the exiled media organisation, the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), reported that the government have introduced a wave of new censorship rules. Journalists feel they will soon lose all independence as unprecedented levels of censorship become standardised across all publications.
Many thanks to all of you who donated to the campaign and helped spread the word. We really appreciate it. You have made a difference.
Organisations like the DVB beat the blackout by using the radio – they broadcast freely into Burma from outside the country and as radios are not banned this is the most effective way to reach the population. With the new laws limiting printed publications and the elections coming up later this year, this service is now more vital than ever.
Here’s a reminder of why it is so important:
Read more about the background to the campaign and join the discussion