Freemuse Press Release: Musicians unite in defence of artistic freedom

Music Freedom Day is March 3, 2016 

  Musicians unite in defence of artistic freedom Music Freedom Day 2016 1 March 2016, Copenhagen  |  Artists will perform live in Pakistan, Hungary, Senegal, Sweden, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway on Music Freedom Day, 3 March 2016, in defence of artistic freedom.

Starting in Peshawar, one of the most dangerous places in the world for musicians, Music Freedom Day activities will be marked in many countries with concerts, seminars, film screenings, radio programmes and newspaper articles on the subject of freedom of expression for musicians.

Established by Freemuse in 2007, the annual Music Freedom Day is a powerful, united manifestation to support persecuted, prosecuted and imprisoned musicians, many of whose only crime has been to have spoken up against authorities and insist on the right to express themselves through their music.

There are many reasons to focus on the right to freedom of musical expression. As an example, just this week, on 29 February 2016, three Iranian artists were each sentenced to three years in prison, three years of probation and a hefty fine for the production and promotion of underground music.

“Music Freedom Day is dedicated to freedom of musical expression, which is not only a right for musicians to create and perform, but also a right for audiences to attend and enjoy concerts. Iran is violating these rights,” says Ole Reitov, Freemuse Executive Director.

Attacks on music affect entire societies. Musicians and songwriters are being killed, persecuted and imprisoned more than any other artists. In 2015 Freemuse documented 309 cases of censorship and attacks on music and musicians. Audiences who want to experience live music are also more at risk.
“This year, Music Freedom Day especially commemorates the victims of the attack at the Bataclan Club in Paris in November 2015,” Reitov said.

The horrible attacks in Paris are a harsh reminder that groups inspired by religious fundamentalism are willing to make use of the most brutal violence to stop music. The Taleban made a total ban on music in Afghanistan in the 1990’s, the jihadist group MUJAO copied this in Mali in 2012 and several websites promote ideas of music being “haram” or the “tool of the devil”.

In the lead-up to Music Freedom Day, Freemuse has compiled a playlist of banned songs on Spotify and presents a music video for a unique track with a group of today’s most powerful Arab and Iranian revolutionary artists joining together to cover Fela Kuti’s most powerful political song: ‘Zombie’. Several of the artists featured in the video will perform live during Music Freedom Day in Harstad, Norway.

A special audio track featuring Mali’s Songhoy Blues with special guests is available to broadcasters worldwide upon request. Recorded by Mark LeVine, the group has made a new version of one of Fela Kuti’s most famous grooves ‘Shakara’, with new lyrics written by the band riffing off the original’s condemnation of the rich Nigerians who showed off their wealth as so many suffered in grinding poverty. Songhoy Blues’ version of ‘Shakara’ takes Fela’s Afrobeat in a new, Malian-driven direction.

Songhoy Blues is also featured in the documentary ‘They Will Have To Kill Us First – Malian Music in Exile’, which will be released in the USA as part of Music Freedom Day.

Original link: http://freemuse.org/archives/11825

2013 Democracy Award Panel & Ceremony

 NED honors young leaders from Zimbabwe, Russia,Pakistan, and Cuba

Glanis Changachirere,Vera Kichanova,Gulalai Ismail, Rosa María Payá (for Harold Cepero)
Photo taken from a tweet by Vera Kichanova

4:00 p.m.
Panel Discussion
"Our Democratic Future: the role of youth in advancing democracy"

5:30 p.m.
Reception and Award Presentation
Caucus Room 345, Cannon House Office Building


The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)’s 2013 Democracy Award will highlight the important role that youth are playing in advancing democracy in the world today.  In this, its 30th anniversary year, NED will honor three outstanding young people who are working in extraordinarily challenging environments to create a democratic future in their respective countries.  The Endowment will also make a posthumous award to a fourth young democrat whose life was cut short in the midst of his struggle.

The 2013 Democracy Award honorees are:

Gulalai Ismail, 26

Ismail is founder and chairperson of Aware Girls, a young women-led organization that seeks to provide a leadership platform to young women and girls of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in northwest Pakistan.  She has more than 10 years of experience working on leadership development for girls and young women; addressing gender based violence; encouraging peace and pluralism; promoting and protecting human rights; and striving to bring women in to the political mainstream.

Vera Kichanova, 22

Kichanova was elected in March 2012 as a municipal deputy in Moscow’s Yuzhnoye Tushino district. As a member of the municipal council she fights for more transparency on the part of the local authorities. Kichanova is an avid journalist and civic activist who has been arrested for her outspoken defense of democratic principles.

Glanis Changachirere, 30

Changachirere is the founding director of the Institute for Young Women Development (IYWD), which encourages marginalized young women in farming, mining, and rural communities to participate in Zimbabwean politics. IYWD has played an important role in calling for peaceful, democratic elections, and the need to guarantee space for the participation of all Zimbabweans in the political system, including the prevention of gender based violence.

Harold Cepero, (1980-2012)

Cepero was the leader of the youth wing of Cuba’s Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), the group that organized the Varela project -- a citizen petition movement that called for a popular referendum to establish the foundation for a democratic system in Cuba. With more than 25,000 Cubans publicly signing the petition, the Varela Project became one of the most creative challenges to the country’s totalitarian rulers. On July 22, 2012, Cepero was killed in a suspicious car crash along with Cuba’s most prominent democratic activist and founder of the MCL, Oswaldo Payá.
Rosa María Payá Acevedo, another young leader of the MCL and the daughter of Oswaldo Payá, will accept the award on behalf of Cepero and the Christian Liberation Movement.



http://www.ned.org/events/democracy-award/2013-democracy-award

5th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy: Closing Statement

The 5th Annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy today is an opportunity for reflection. Unfortunately, the human rights situation around the world has not improved over the past five years and in many instances worsened.  The question is why?

Cuban democratic opposition activist, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, when awarded the Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought on December 17, 2002 observed that “The cause of human rights is a single cause, just as the people of the world are a single people. The talk today is of globalization, but we must state that unless there is global solidarity, not only human rights but also the right to remain human will be jeopardized.” The past decade has demonstrated that he was right.

Freedom House in its 2013 report “Freedom in the World” documents the seventh consecutive year in which there have been more declines than gains in freedom worldwide. Worse still the report demonstrates that there is “a stepped-up campaign of persecution by dictators that specifically targeted civil society organizations and independent media.”

These have been years of challenge for human rights and democracy activists around the world. Listening to the testimony today, in 2013, from journalists, human rights activists and victims of rights violations in Cuba, Iran, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Mauritania, Morocco, North Korea, Russia, Sudan, Syria, and Tibet should shock the conscience of any reasonable person.

Elie Wiesel’s aphorism: "For the dead and the living we must bear witness" has been put into practice over the course of these five summits and especially today: genocide, slavery, concentration camps, extrajudicial killings, brutalization of women, rape as a military weapon, and the silencing of dissenting voices.

At the same time, despite the horrors there is cause for hope. During the first session this morning “Women’s Rights: The Struggle for Human Dignity” Marina Nemat , a former prisoner of conscience in Iran who had been repeatedly tortured and raped made an observation that went to the heart of the challenge for human rights when she remarked that “Victim-hood is not a perpetual state. A victim can become a torturer and a torturer can become a victim. The tables can be turned. They will turn for me. One day they will place the cable in my hand and I will put it down. Justice and revenge are two very different concepts.”

Too many believe that immoral and unjust means can lead to moral and just ends.  This is the key idea that combined with the impulse for revenge can lead a victim to become a torturer in a cycle that generates greater levels of barbarism and inhumanity.

Breaking the cycle of bloodshed and revenge involves pursuing justice and accountability, in other words ending impunity.  To do this the right for victims and their loved ones to know the truth is a fundamental concern to end impunity.  This is a theme that has been heard throughout the day and especially from Marina Nemat, Colette Braeckman, and Mukesh Kapila.

Mukhtar Mai, the first speaker this morning outlined her harrowing account overcoming great horrors including being sentenced to gang rape and managed to build a school to educate hundreds of women; and she continues her struggle for justice, not revenge, stating “If a woman’s life is in danger, we can help them out. I want to make a change, and this will happen with education.”

This is part of what activists for nonviolence call a constructive program. The other common point heard throughout the day is that “military solutions are not real solutions.” Syrian activist Randa Kassis explained that in Syria: “a military solution is not a real solution. There is only one real solution and that is a political solution.” Marina Nemat repeated several times that the primary problem in Iran was not the nuclear program but the systematic violation of human rights and that she was against military action in Iran. Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Regis Iglesias explained that he did not hate the dictatorship in Cuba but at the same time he did not fear it and was seeking change using nonviolent means.

Rosa Maria Payá, whose father, Oswaldo Paya Sardiñas, died under suspicious circumstances along with Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012, recognized the commonality between the different activists who had spoken earlier in the day in favor of nonviolent change. During her presentation she quoted her father from his Strasbourg Address to the European Parliament in December of 2002, “The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together.”

Another theme during the Summit is the importance of citizenry to be active and vigilant. Marina Nemat explained the importance of holding politicians accountable, “If you don't maintain democracy it is going to die. It is up to every single one of us to pressure politicians to do the right thing.” Dicky Chhoyang of the Central Tibetan Administration called on free peoples to “Have the courage to stand and be the change we want to see happen.”

This leads inevitably to the need for freedom of expression and critical voices to expose injustice and hold the politicians accountable. The Moroccan blogger Kacem El Ghazzali outlined the importance freedom of expression and of religion within the Islamic world and the challenges still faced in Morocco.  Pyotr Verzilov, the husband of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova one of the jailed pussy riot musicians also spoke about the madness of Putin’s Russia, the absence of freedom of expression, and the linkage between the Russian Orthodox Church and the authoritarian regime in Russia. Lukpan Akhmedyarov has offered a vivid example of the denial of freedom of expression in Kazakhstan and the consequences of authoritarianism.

Marina Nemet is right; silence is a weapon of mass destruction as is indifference to injustice. However the opposite is also true making noise and denouncing injustice using nonviolent means and not succumbing to hate is a weapon of mass construction.

However, throughout the day we have heard from speakers of different parts of the world and of different religious traditions or even non-religious traditions that injustice and human rights violations need to be confronted by nonviolent means without succumbing to hating one’s adversary.

Therefore Regis, Rosa and I invite you to sign a petition demanding an independent and transparent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Oswaldo Paya Sardiñas and Harold Cepero Escalante on July 22, 2012. The document is available in draft form for your signature.

Thank you very much.

The Muslim Gandhi: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

"I am going to give you such a weapon that the police and the army will not be able to stand against it. It is the weapon of the Prophet, but you are not aware of it. That weapon is patience and righteousness. No power on earth can stand against it." -Abdul Ghaffar Khan

"I had to go to prison many a time in the days of the Britishers. Although we were at loggerheads with them, yet their treatment was to some extent tolerant and polite. But the treatment which was meted out to me in this Islamic state of ours was such that I would not even like to mention it to you." -Abdul Ghaffar Khan



Born in 1890 Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan would live until January 20, 1988 and be remembered as the man who offered the path not taken by Pakistan and Afghanistan. The path of nonviolence. A disciple of Mohandas Gandhi he was a a practitioner and teacher of nonviolence, a fierce opponent both of British Colonialism and the partition from India spending many years behind bars first under the British and later under the national government of Pakistan. The British feared his nonviolence more than the rifles of the frontiersman.

He was a Pashtun political and spiritual leader known for his non-violent opposition to British Rule in India. A lifelong pacifist, a devout Muslim, and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, he was also known as Badshah Khan (also Bacha Khan, Urdu, Pashto: lit., "King Khan"), and Sarhaddi Gandhi (Urdu, Hindi lit., "Frontier Gandhi").

He was initially encouraged by his family to join the British Indian Army; however the treatment of a British Raj officer towards a native offended him, and a family decision for him to study in England was put off after his mother's intervention.

Having witnessed the repeated failure of revolts against the British Raj, he decided social activism and reform would be more beneficial for Pashtuns. This ultimately led to the formation of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement (Servants of God). The movement's success triggered a harsh crackdown against him and his supporters and he was sent into exile. It was at this stage in the late 1920's that he formed an alliance with Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. This alliance was to last till the 1947 partition of India.

After partition, Ghaffar Khan was frequently arrested by the Pakistani government in part because of his association with India and his opposition to authoritarian moves by the government. He spent much of the 1960's and 1970's either in jail or in exile.

In 1985 he was nominated for the Nobel peace prize. In 1987 he became the first person not holding the citizenship of India to be awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award. In 1988 on his passing, he was buried in Jalalabad, despite the heavy fighting at the time, both sides in the Afghan war declared a ceasefire to allow his burial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Abdul_Ghaffar_Khan

Links

Nonviolence in Islam : The case of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/khan.htm

Legacy of the Partition
http://peaceinsouthasia.com/pb/wp_1122df51/wp_1122df51.html

PAKISTAN: The Frontier Gandhi
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,819405,00.html