Activism

One Year Ago: A Public Torture

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Raymond Johansen allowed himself to be tortured one year ago today, August 16, 2015, in solidarity with Saudi writer Raif Badawi.

Johansen was hit 50 times by a friend, Tony Clenaghan, with a thin cane, a switch, in Trafalgar Square, where corporal punishments once upon a time were held in public and frequently, but not since the 1830s. Johansen had difficulty walking afterward and even expressed confusion as to where he was upon speaking with a reporter. (Video below.)

When a caning is administered it sometimes does not look as severe as one thinks a beating would look; even one of the words we employ minimizes the severity: “lashes.” In writing about the Saudi Arabian writer Raif Badawi, who was sentenced by Saudi Arabia in 2014 to 1000 lashes and 10 years in prison, I have run into the shallow poverty of available analogies. All language is analogy, metaphor, and I have wanted the words to be sufficient to convey the pain of judicial corporal punishment, but they do not. They can not. Raymond Johansen’s action last year pumped life into the analogies, however.
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Shawkan: Trapped in a Cage

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a court hearing in Cairo, Egypt, earlier today,the trial of the photojournalist Mahmoud Abu Zeid (“Shawkan”) and the 738 other defendants was delayed again, this time until September 6.

Daily News Egypt reported that two defendants leveled accusations of torture against Egypt’s deputy interior minister, Hassan El-Sohagy, and demanded investigations.
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Is Dawit Isaak Still Alive?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In a rare interview in June with France’s RFI (Radio France Internationale), Eritrea’s Foreign Minister, Osman Saleh, spoke with RFI’s Anthony Lattier about Eritrea’s “political prisoners,” and he specifically revealed that one who has been in prison since 2001, the journalist Dawit Isaak, is still alive.

It was the first official Eritrean acknowledgement of Isaak’s existence since 2009, when the nation’s president, Isaias Afwerki, ominously told a Swedish journalist that Eritrea “knows what to do with” Isaak. Osman Saleh told Lattier that Isaak “is alive, he’s alive” and that all of the nation’s “political prisoners” are alive and well. He rebuffed any suggestion that any independent agency verify this as a fact, however.
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