At an Oslo human rights festival, many models of protest are on show
By B.C. | OSLO
SOME people voice their feelings of indignation with noise and dramatic movements; others make their point in utter quietness. Both forms of protest were showcased this week at the latest Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF), an annual festival for human-rights defenders and advocates of more open societies.
As in all recent years, the forum brought together an extraordinary array of courageous people who have defied authority—be it political, ideological or religious or a combination—at a high personal cost. Many of the most impressive were young and female. They included Bangladeshi women who campaign against the forced marriage of teenage girls; Ti-Anna Wang, daughter of the jailed Chinese dissident Wang Bingzhang, for whose release she relentlessly campaigns, along with the relatives of other political prisoners; and Yeonmi Park, who grew up in North Korea and recalled how the mother of a friend had been executed for watching Western movies.
Many styles of non-violent protest were remembered, advocated and discussed. But the contrast between noise and silence was thrown into sharp relief by the forum's choice of recipients of a prize for "creative dissent" awarded in the name of the late Czech president, Vaclav Havel. One co-recipient is enduring a period of enforced silence: Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan film-maker who is serving a six-year prison sentence and was therefore honoured in his absence. The others were: Erdem Gunduz, a Turkish performance artist who attracted his compatriots' attention by standing still for many hours in Istanbul's Taksim Square in June 2013 while protests and brutal police action were in progress nearby; and the two Russian punk-rock artists from the group Pussy Riot (pictured above), who served 21 months in a Russian prison camp after a protest in a cathedral.
An accomplished dancer with an engaging personality, Mr Gunduz knows how to move, and talk. He is not an especially political animal but he knows what he doesn't like—the authoritarian Islamism which seems to be threatening Turkey's secular governance. "What am I supposed to think when a theologian says publicly that pregnant women should no longer show themselves?" he once asked. But on the day he became famous, he felt that staying silent and motionless was the most eloquent way to make his point.
The "noise" made by the Pussy Rioters—Nadezhda "Nadia" Tolokonnikova and Maria "Masha" Alekhina—was of brief duration, less than 40 seconds, but it was loud and cacophonous. On February 21st 2012, the group entered Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour wearing bright balaclavas and sang a lewd, satirical protest song—"Mother of God, Drive (Vladimir) Putin Out"—which excoriated both the Russian regime and its close ties with the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. The pair were given a two-year jail term for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" and finally released a little early by order of the president they despise.
The singers' trial—in which "feminist beliefs" were cited as proof of extremism—and the dreadful conditions of their imprisonment bore witness to many of the worst features of Mr Putin's Russia. These bright and brassy young women found themselves in a world where, as they recalled in Oslo, you had to "work 16 hours a day and wash once a week" under the hostile glare of guards who tried to humiliate prisoners by forcing them to harm or inform on one another. Many ordinary Orthodox Christians said they were offended by the protest but dismayed by the harshness of the singers' treatment.
The case certainly created an international headache for Mr Putin, with celebrities from Madonna to Sting speaking out in Pussy's defence, but domestically it seemed more like a gift to the president, who encourages his compatriots to think of themselves as upholders of tradition and moral virtue in a decadent, gender-bending world. One opinion poll suggested that only 5% of Russians sympathised with the singers. That is not because Russia is either a very religious society, or a place where life-styles are traditional; it is neither of those things. But Russians, as Mr Putin has found, are easily persuaded that country is under attack from alien, exotic and sinister forces. As Masha acknowledged in Oslo "Most people, especially outside Moscow think that we perform naked with chickens—so the first thing is to tell them there are no chickens."
Of course, activists who are really committed to counter-cultural protest do what they do in the knowledge that most people will not understand them, but in the hope that they may provoke at least a few people into questioning their own values. But of the two styles of protest, I still prefer silence to noise.
