This poem reflects the uncertainties of our times

prisons of stone and time

When we walk through our times
we cannot escape from the realities and ideologies
of death.
Where are the humanitarians promised
by the gods of the new era?
It is the era of the disappeared, we live surrounded by tombs
and ghosts,
it is dangerous to look, feel, walk, ask.
Yes, to ask
why there are disappeared people.
It is dangerous that the questions
might mean to find
the disappeared and the dead in the desert of Atlas.
Looking through the windows of history
the guardians of Mars are there
planting Cerberus in our streets
looking for meanings
under umbrellas. Behind every word
there are invisible masks.
Prisons of stone and time, white palaces
and machines of fear
censoring
the words of other histories, the disappeared history.

© Carlos Reyes-Manzo
Translated by Valeria Baker

Este poema refleja las incertidumbres de nuestros tiempos

prisiones de piedra y tiempo

Cuando caminamos por nuestros tiempos
no podemos escaparnos de las realidades y las ideologías
de la muerte.
Donde están los humanitarios prometidos
por los dioses de la nueva era?
Es la era de los desaparecidos, vivimos rodeados de tumbas
y fantasmas,
es peligroso mirar, sentir, caminar, preguntar.
Si, preguntar
porque hay personas desaparecidas.
Es peligroso que las preguntas
signifiquen encontrar
a los desaparecidos y los muertos en el desierto de Atlas.
Al observar por las ventanas de historia
ahí están los guardianes de Marte
estacionando cancerberos en nuestras calles
buscando significados
debajo de los paraguas. Detrás de cada palabra
hay mascaras invisibles.
Prisiones de piedra y tiempo, palacios blancos
y maquinas del miedo
amordazando
las palabras de las otras historias, la historia desaparecida.

Londres 8 de octubre 2011

© Carlos Reyes-Manzo

With our sell-out Edinburgh gig Stand Up For Freedom over for another year, our time at the Edinburgh festival is almost at a close. If you’re enjoying the festival there’s still time to take in one of our Imprisoned Writers readings, and we’ll be announcing who will win our Freedom of Expression award on Thursday 25th August.

If you missed Stand Up For Freedom, don’t worry. Our quick round-up just below will make you feel like you’ve sat in the green room alongside Ed Bryne, Roisin Conarty and Mark Watson. And we’ve got exclusive footage from the gig, and others at the Festival, in the next episode of Amnesty TV.

A brillant, sunny day on The Meadows – not your usual backdrop for something at the Edinburgh Festival but boy was it perfect for our annual Critics vs Comedians football match – the grudge match so bad Amnesty International have to referee!

At last year’s game, the comedians won 3-2 with a nail-biting finish. With cheap fizzy wine, chocolate medals and of course a cheap trophy at stake this year, would they be able to keep their title?

The critics were off fast with 2 goals from the Edinburgh Evening Post’s Gary Flockhart, but as the comedians got into their stride Humphrey Ker pulled a goal back for the comics. But the second half saw an amazing run of goals for the critics, with another for Gary Flockhart, two from the Sun’s Tommy Holgate and 2 more from Edd McCracken and Ben Judge. The comedians fought back hard with a ‘wonder goal’ from Chris Martin and another from Daniel Sloss, but it just wasn’t enough to save the day and keep the trophy.

Mark Watson, the comedians’ captain, said “Losing to the critics is a bitter blow, to be honest. We thought our flair would carry us through. But we’ll be back stronger next year and maybe we’ll have to try bribing the ref with a donation to Amnesty.”

The critics were just as gracious, captain Peter Geoghegan said “We were always the better side on the day. My boys had trained harder, ran faster, kicked it further, and we’d put something in their half-time Lucozade. Credit to the comedians – they played a good game. But we won and we can now lord it over them for a whole year.

The one thing everyone could agree on was what name to put on their shirts, with ‘Free the UAE 5′ visible above every player’s number! The UAE 5 have been arrested and imprisoned for exercising their freedom of speech, something sadly restricted in the United Arab Emirates. You can take action and join our petition to free them.

Mark Watson’s also on at Stand Up For Freedom this wednesday. It’s sold out, but you can still enter our competition to win 2 tickets, and we’ll be live tweeting and blogging throughout the gig.

Photos © Claudine Quinn

Our Stand Up For Freedom gig – the highlight of every Edinburgh Fringe – has almost sold out! That’s right, if you want to see Russell Kane, Mark Watson, Roisin Conarty, Ed Bryne, Holly Walsh, Kristen Schaal & Kurt Braunohler plus a good few others all on the same bill, you’ve missed the boat.

But don’t despair, we’re giving away two tickets on Monday and all you need to do is send a tweet. A freedom of expression tweet, of course.

If you could say anything to anyone, what would it be? Tweet us your answer to win

Include in your tweet the URL http://amn.st/SUFFComp and the hashtags #edfringe and #speakfree – otherwise we won’t spot your answer! We’ll pick our favourite at 5pm Monday and announce the winner on @ArtsFromAmnesty.

Here’s some examples to get you going…

I’d tell the 3 pigs to invest in a proper builder! #speakfree to win #edfringe tickets: http://amn.st/SUFFComp

I’d tell JFK “duck when you go past the grassy knoll”. #edfringe #speakfree http://amn.st/SUFFComp

And while you’re here, take action…

Whilst we’re at the Fringe we’re campaigning to free the UAE 5, five activists jailed simply for criticising the authorities. Join our petition and call for their release.

Mark Watson caught mid... something at Stand Up for Freedom 2010.

I love the Edinburgh Festival. I went for the first time last year and immediately fell in love with the sheer range of events in theatres, pubs, back rooms. Want to watch a show about death in the university medical school’s anatomy department? No problem. How about a one-man comedy show that includes a whisky tasting? Go on then.

The festival is a celebration of freedom of expression in all its glory and its shame: from the acts that make you laugh, cry or ponder the mysteries of the universe, to those who just make you wonder whether they’ve given up their day job.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. While protestors continue to be arrested, shot at and beaten up just for saying what they believe, we’ve still have a job to do.

So Amnesty will be back in Edinburgh this August showcasing some of the best in freedom of expression – with our Imprisoned Writers events, Book Festival annual lecture, and of course our comedy gig Stand Up For Freedom. We’ve a soft spot for using comedy to get across our message (just have a quick look at Amnesty TV), and this year won’t be any different, with Ed Byrne, Holly Walsh and Russell Kane just some of the comics giving their comedy a human rights edge for us.

Whilst we’re in Edinburgh we won’t miss an opportunity for some campaigning, of course. We’re highlighting the case of the UAE 5 – five activists who have been locked up in the United Arab Emirates simply for expressing their opinions online. They’re charged with “insulting officials” after they called for democracy and questioned how the country is run. That could mean five years in jail. So much for freedom of expression.

Join us now by signing the petition for the UAE 5’s release. And if you’re in Edinburgh, join us at our comedy or book festival events to get your own taste of freedom of expression. And hopefully an insult or two without the risk of imprisonment.

Earlier today, our main International site – the bit of Amnesty that does the majority of our research – was blocked by the Saudi authorities following our criticism of a proposed anti-terror law. The proposed law would allow authorities to class even small acts of dissent as terrorism – you can read our original news release here.

The main reason they’ve blocked it is because we’ve got full copies of the proposed law – here’s the draft law in Arabic. And here’s the Security Committee report, also in Arabic.

Although the Saudi authorities have blocked our main international site, they haven’t yet blocked any Amnesty UK site, as far as we know. So we’re hosting the Arabic version of the release for all to see. Pass it on!

Two years ago at the Amnesty UK Media Awards, we honoured Azerbaijani newspaper editor Eynulla Fatullayev with the AIUK Special Award for Journalism Under Threat. Eynulla is an outspoken journalist who has been imprisoned since 2007 on a series of trumped up charges, including defamation, terrorism and incitement to ethnic hatred.

Even though the European Court of Human Rights have quashed some of the charges and called for his release, he remains under lock and key on a more recent conviction for drugs possession brought to dodge the ECHR ruling. We firmly believe that all the charges against Eynulla have been fabricated to silence his critical reporting of the Azerbaijani government, and that Eynulla is a prisoner of conscience.

As we prepare for the 2011 Media Awards, we’re renewing our calls to free Eynulla Fatullayev with a twitter action led by Channel 4’s Jon Snow. Journalists will be taking the action at tonight’s awards – we need you to join them.

Take our twitter photo action – Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad Et!

What to do:

1. Download and print our Amnesty placard (on white, or on black), or get creative with the message “Eynulla Fatullayevi Azad Et!”, which is  “Free Eynulla Fatullayev!” in Azeri.
2. Take a photo of yourself with our placard or your own version
3. Tweet your picture with the following message:
   I’m calling on @presidentaz to free wrongly imprisoned journalist #Eynulla Fatullayev in #Azerbaijan [link to your pic]
   Please keep both of the hashtags so we can find your image and so the message reaches people interested in Azerbaijan.
4. Send a second message encouraging your followers to take part:
   Join me and send your own message urging the release of Eynulla Fatullayev – find out how at http://amn.st/eynulla
5. If you don’t want to take a photo, please join in and send a tweet to @presidentaz – remember to add both hashtags so we can see it!

Have a look at the pictures being tweeted to @presidentaz in our lovely twitter widget:

UPDATE, 25th May: What an amazing response! We’ve seen well over 600 tweets so far, and an unexpected response from Azerbaijan – check our new blog post for details.

It’s an important day for us as we publish our latest annual report – The State of the World’s Human Rights Today.

And it’s not just important for us here. It’s a big day for any of us who, possibly for the first time, felt we could truly get involved as events such as the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa or the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. As social media went fully mainstream, images and videos that would hardly have been visible to an international audience before were suddenly available to anyone searching minutes after they were uploaded.

We didn’t just have to watch. We were able to show our support on Facebook, Twitter and on our own blogs. As internet outages started in Egypt, Twitter users and bloggers were able to help spread ways the protesters could circumvent blocks on social media sites.  The level of interest and visibility across the world meant web giants like Google and Twitter felt they had a mandate to act – creating services such as ‘Speak2Tweet’ as internet outages become full-on blockages.  It’s not surprising that Egyptian protester Wael Ghonim called the Egyptian protests “an Internet Revolution” in the Wall Street Journal.

As our report says, we’re standing on the threshold of change as a new generation comes of age and says ‘enough’ to repression and corruption. Social media isn’t leading the protests, but it is being used to outflank and expose governments whilst their leaders are still coming to terms with the power such sites give individuals.

But it is just the threshold of change. In China, artist Ai Weiwei continues to be held by the authorities, who are scared of their own ‘jasmine revolution’. And in Syria, we’ve had reports of over 580 people killed since protests started in mid-March, with army tanks in cities like Dera’a shelling residential areas.

You’ve never been more important in helping change happen. So don’t stop now! We need to keep the pressure up on governments like Syria.

Take action and sign our petition demanding an end to the bloodshed in Syria

Woman holding a sign which says 'Egyptians Creating Their Future', Al-abidin, Cairo, Feb 2011.

The media caravan has moved on and Egypt is yesterday’s news. Which is precisely why it’s so important to focus on what’s actually happening now that former president Hosni Mubarak and others are under arrest and the country has supposedly turned a corner once and for all.

How have things actually changed?

Well, if you ask some of the people who are still turning out in Tahrir Square you might get the answer: they haven’t.

Certainly the army has been cracking down on small demonstrations there with alarming violence. For example on 9 April soldiers used live ammunition, rubber bullets, tear gas, electric batons and sticks to break up a peaceful demonstration in the square. Two people were killed, many more were injured and at least 21 people were detained. A month earlier the army also violently cleared Tahrir Square of demonstrators and women protesters told Amnesty that they were beaten, subjected to electric shocks, strip-searched and forced to submit to “virginity checks” and threatened with prostitution charges.

These appalling incidents don’t fit an Egypt “narrative” which many observers have come to accept as almost inevitable – Mubarak repression > Arab Spring revolution > post-revolutionary move to democracy and human rights.

But this was never going to be a smooth ride. On the one hand the human cost of the Egyptian uprising has been huge and truly terrible: 840 people were killed by the security forces and nearly 6,500 (6,467) were injured, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Health. On the other, as Eric Margolis makes clear, Egypt has a kind of “deep state” run by a very powerful military-industrial complex awash with US military aid money.

Amnesty UK director Kate Allen (currently in Cairo assessing how things are changing, especially in terms of women’s rights) told me earlier this week that in Tahrir Square there are still banners up declaring “The army and the people are one”. The painful irony of this if you’ve just been beaten up by a bunch of soldiers in the square hardly needs spelling out.

Meanwhile, if the army is Egypt’s deep state you could say that administrative detention is the country’s deep form of repression. Under Emergency Law powers in force since 1981, the authorities have been imprisoning political opponents, human rights activists, alleged terrorists, Islamists and others without going through all the bother of putting them on trial. In the final years of Mubarak’s ill-starred rule a staggering 10,000 people were thought to have be held in administrative detention, some for as long as 20 years. Some – probably many – of these were also tortured. The human misery caused by this deep repression has been colossal. There need to be thorough investigations into who did the torturing and who ignored court orders for prisoner releases (another issue is Egypt’s role as a “go-to torturer” in the “war on terror”: this also needs thoroughly unearthing).

For more detail, see Amnesty’s new report on administrative detention here.

Nothing is inevitable in Egypt, neither the growth of a human rights culture nor a backward swing to repression and an army-police state run with an iron first. Recent moves by the interim rulers in the Egyptian Cabinet certainly don’t inspire confidence (especially proposals for a law that will criminalise protests and strikes) but a strong turnout and reformist vote in a recent referendum (albeit a flawed one) augers somewhat better.

For me though things are looking worrying. There’s a danger that things are already slipping backwards in Egypt and with the media caravan parked elsewhere there are few journalist to report the slow rewind to repression and dashed hopes. To pillage Gil Scott-Heron’s famous song title one more time – in Egypt the fear is that the post-revolution will not be televised.