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International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists

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CRNI is a proud member of the IFEX network of organisations working in defence of freedom of expression.

On the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists we join with them in calling for the equitable treatment of all press and media workers who seek to speak truth to power and moreover guarantees for their safety and justice for those who have suffered at the hands of extremist groups and authoritarian regimes. IFEX Executive Director Annie Game has written an op ed about the latest such cases, not least of which the late Jamal Khashoggi.

We pay tribute to the cartoonists who have died for their work such as Akram Raslan in Syria or the victims at the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France. We recall the sacrifices of those who have been to prison for having the temerity to criticise the state, just as Atena Farghedani did in Iran and Ramón Nsé Esono Ebalé in Equatorial Guinea.

And we remember the cartoonists who are currently working in highly dangerous situations such as Pedro X Molina in Nicaragua or Mohammad Saba’aneh in Palestine as well as those who have had their careers effectively ended, like Musa Kart in Turkey, now retired as he faces a prison sentence.

Lastly we think about the many cartoonists who endure constant threats and harassment online, often hand in hand with misogynist attacks. Kanika Mishra, Majda Shaheen, Doaa Eladl and many other female cartoonists have to persist despite a level of abuse most of their male counterparts cannot imagine.

Please join in November 2nd and post a message as part of the #NoImpunity campaign.

 To Report a Cartoonist in Danger  Email Cartoonists Rights Network

CRNI at first Cartooning Global Forum

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The inaugural États Généraux du Dessin de Presse / Cartooning Global Forum took place at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris on October 3rd.

A new initiative to bring the world’s cartoonists and the organisations that support them together for a focused day of work each year, the first meeting took place under the gracious auspices of the Délégation Permanente de la France aupres de l’UNESCO and His Excellency M. Laurent Stefanini.

Invaluable support was provided by sponsors Fondation Varennes, la Ville de Montreuil, the Ocean Tree Group, Culture Papier and la Mairie de Paris.

The steering committee for the event were:

  • Nicolas Jacquette (director, Studio Irresistible)
  • Jérôme Liniger (director, Studio Irresistible)
  • Gérard Vandenbroucke (honorary  president, Centre Permanent du Dessin de Presse,  Saint-Just-le-Martel)
  • Corinne Villegier (director, Centre Permanent et Salon International de la Caricature du Dessin de Presse et d’Humour, Saint-Just-le-Martel)
  • Chloé Verlhac-Tignous (director of publishing, Editions Les Petites Teignes)
  • Patric Pinter (cartoonist for l’Orient le Jour)
  • Terry Anderson (deputy executive director, CRNI)

Discussion was broken into two roundtables, taking “Cartooning as Tool for Peace and Justice” and “Pedagogy, Field Actions & Education Policies” as the themes, drawn from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 2030. Mr. Anderson moderated the morning discussion, saying in his opening remarks:

“We’ve heard much in recent years about cartoonists as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ and how our problems are early indicators of a wider, insidious and worsening chilling of freedom of expression. I’ve used the metaphor myself in the past but increasingly I dislike it as it implies a degree of fragility and dispensability. We are not victims or victims in waiting. We are essential to the health of press and media and therefore crucial to democracy.”

Among the participants were delegates from IFEX, of which we are a member, as well as our partner organisations the PCO and Africartoons and friends from CartonClub, United Sketches, Index on Censorship, CPJ and many others. Free to travel intentionally once again, our past Courage in Cartooning Award winner Zunar was also present.  In total some two dozen nations had representation in the forum.

  

Recommendations from the first États Généraux du Dessin de Presse will be refined in the coming months and published ahead of World Press Freedom Day, May 3rd 2019 and the next meeting will take in Paris the following October.

CRNI are very pleased to be part of this ongoing conversation and look forward to an even larger, broader forum next year.

Thanks to The Surreal McCoy of PCO for this picture of Terry and Zunar.

 

Statement: Mark Knight

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CRNI responds to a week of heated debate about portrayals of race in editorial cartooning.

CRNI has been in touch with Mark Knight, the Melbourne Herald Sun‘s cartoonist whose drawing of tennis player Serena Williams has been the subject of intense speculation, controversy and criticism this week. After threats were received via social media accounts belonging to Mark and his family he has withdrawn from public discourse for the time being. CRNI utterly condemns the actions of anyone who steps beyond the bounds of passionate debate and enters the realm of harassment, bullying and criminality. No cartoon, regardless of its content, warrants harm to its creator or indeed innocent people who happen to be connected to that creator.

Mark himself is safe, well and in good spirits.

We note that colleagues around the world are divided over the cartoon itself. Some think it was too redolent of racial stereotypes confined to the past, others question how cartoonists can be expected to caricature people of all kinds without potential vulnerability to accusations of prejudice when their subjects are of ethnicities or genders other than their own.

This is a conversation with merit and is the only process by which social mores can be changed for the better. “Dog-piling” achieves little and more often than not entrenches positions, allowing the freedom of speech agenda to be highjacked by bad actors. This surely is the worst possible outcome for all concerned.

 To Report a Cartoonist in Danger  Email Cartoonists Rights Network

Algeria: international cartoon festival “sabotaged”

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Cartoonist reports cancellation of international exhibition, contends he is victim of a conspiracy.

Our attention has been drawn to the cancellation of the inaugural Salon international de la caricature, du dessin de presse et d’humour d’Oran, Algeria which had been set to take place in May.

The organizer, cartoonist Nour El Yakine Ferhaoui was forced to change plans and rather than have a physical show put on a “Salon virtuelle” in co-operation with Le Matin newspaper.

In an interview with the Algerian edition of Le Matin Ferhaoui names his guarantors as Kouider Bouziane, the current Director of Culture of the city of Oran and Boucif Belhachemi, the regional director of the National Office of Copyright and Neighboring Law of Oran (ONDA) before the entire project was “derailed”.

Further he accuses an unnamed Algerian cartoonist closely associated with FIBDA (the International Comics Festival of Algiers) of harrassment and making statements to the effect that he “sabotaged” the event in Oran. Ferhaoui tells us he has been rendered “persona non grata” in Algeria.

CRNI’s regional representative in Canada, cartoonist Guy “Bado” Badeaux covered the Salon on his blog earlier this year. Ferhaoui had attracted participation from dozens of cartoonists in twelve nations as well as across Algeria and made arrangement for visas for six foreign visitors during his event.

Professional jealousy comes with the territory in the creative sector but the suggestion that cartoonists would stymie each others’ endeavours in a country like Algeria where colleagues have been actively silenced by the authorities on more than one occasion is especially troubling.

Ferhaoui will attend the 37th Salon international de la caricature, du dessin de presse et d’humour in Saint-Just-le-Martel, France later this year and provide a fuller account of the incident at the annual meeting of France-Cartoons.

 To Report a Cartoonist in Danger  Email Cartoonists Rights Network

Cartoonist Pedro Molina’s View on the Violence and Political Crackdown in Nicaragua

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Cartoonists often complain that politicians are unfair competition because they can be crazier than our cartoons. This is particularly true in Nicaragua, where I live and work as a cartoonist.

We have a government formed by a married couple: President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo. The only time they venture out of “El Carmen,” their private housing complex, is for ceremonial events that are covered by most television and radio media in the country, which, by the way, they own.

Despite calling themselves “socialist revolutionaries,” the Ortega family are actually multimillionaires (thanks to Venezuela’s oil business) with a special taste for things like Mercedes Benz cars, Rolex watches and caviar. Our first lady, Murillo, the most extravagant of the duo, has filled the country with huge ridiculous metal “trees” she calls “Trees of Life” at the price of $ 25,000 each; we have hundreds of them! In the second poorest country in Latin America!

As you can imagine, Nicaragua was a cartooning paradise, with lots of potentially funny material for political cartoonists like me … until April 18 of this year.

After several years of suffering electoral frauds, curtailment of rights, selective repression, attempts to censor the internet and mismanagement of environmental disasters, the last straw was the enactment of the country’s social security law that curtails the rights of current and future pensioners.

Protests began timidly in a country where protests, however small, are crushed by mobs like the JS-19 (a paramilitary arm of the government) and the police. This time, the killing of college students made peaceful protests spread like a wildfire. Dozens were killed while Ortega’s wife, in the style of George Orwell’s Big Brother, referred to war as “peace” and violence as “love.”

Protests and killings continued. May 30 is national Mother’s Day in Nicaragua. People took to the streets to honor the mothers of all the victims of the repression since last April (numbering 86 dead at that time). The Mother’s Day march became the biggest public demonstration against this government, ending when the paramilitary and police forces of Ortega and Murillo opened fire against the crowd. It was a massacre.

At the time I write this, the number of protesters killed by the regime since April 18 is over 146. It is clear that Ortega and his wife, after 11 years in power, will not resign by their own will.

There are brutal regimes around that world, why should Americans care about Nicaragua?

In early June, Nicaraguans were expecting the General Assembly of the Organization of American States to deliver an energetic condemnation about the massacre conducted by Ortega’s goons. Surprisingly, we learned that the Ortega regime and the Trump administration made some type of agreement on a softer statement, avoiding the stronger condemnation that was needed and expected.

The question is why. Why is president Trump doing favors for a thug like Ortega? Is this another favor from Trump to Ortega’s comrade, Vladimir Putin? Is it because Trump identifies with an egomaniac that clings to power no matter what? Is it in exchange for support from Ortega against Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela?

There are many questions, but few answers.

I hope these questions find a way into Americans’ hearts and minds. Why is Trump aligned with a genocidal leader like Ortega? Congress is discussing Nicaragua now, and readers can take action to help us stop the killings. Please call your representatives in Congress and urge them to care about Nicaragua. Why? Because of our shared humanity; or perhaps because instability in Central America could mean many more immigrants trying to get into the USA soon. Please call your congressman and spread the word that what is happening in Nicaragua is NOT a war; this is an armed state murdering unarmed citizens.

 

– Pedro Molina, editorial cartoonist, Nicaragua

This was originally posted at http://caglecartoons.com/column.asp?columnID=%7B5E7703E1-B85A-441F-ABBE-D82CD03CCB65

Joel Pett interviews the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Rob Rogers and asks why he objects to having his cartoons “pre-filtered through the sensibilities of humorless corporate lickspittles whose livings depend on not rocking the boat…or the ship of state.”

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A cartoonist is jailed. Another is charged with treason. A cartoonist disappears. Another is threatened by government goons. Throngs march against a perceived cartoon’s slight.

That’s how it goes among CRNI clients around the world, but not here. In corporate America, cartoonists merely lose their livelihoods. I’m not comparing unemployment to incarceration, but with those livelihoods go the paychecks, the health care, the secure retirements, the legal protections, and a lot more.

Strident, no-holds-barred newspaper editorial cartooning, spiraling into inexorable death throes for at least two decades, bleaches into a pile of bones on a changing media landscape, all due to uncertain advertising economics, right?

But what if it’s worse? What if losing our jobs is more than a lamentable byproduct of the well-documented industry convulsions that have also sidelined armies of shoe-leather reporters, photographers, copy editors, art critics, columnists, and on and on?

What if editorial cartoonists were not just victims of economic hard times, but unabashedly discarded for challenging the country’s leadership and direction? And what if this happened to mainstream cartoonists, at big-city dailies, during an administration which has expressed admiration for thug regimes around the globe and promoted policies akin to tin-pot dictatorships?

It just happened to Rob Rogers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. CRNI board chair Joel Pett spoke to him about it.

Pett: Hey Rob, anything new?

Rogers: (laughs) Nothing much.

P: So, I need to interview you for CRNI, but haven’t the patience or training for transcription, so suppose you just share your thoughts and I’ll back-load questions to which they make reasonable answers?

R: (chortles) That sounds fine.

P: You’re familiar with CRNI, and have been a generous supporter. How much of a stretch is it to put you somewhere on the spectrum of persecuted cartoonists?

R: Well, I got the news from corporate HR drones, not jackbooted brutes. So there’s that. And I’ve been trying to explain to some of my friends and supporters that this isn’t exactly censorship.

P: Because you can still say what you want, just not in the pages of the Post-Gazette?

R: Right. I can post them on bulletin boards and staple them to telephone poles!

P: Sure, or the internet equivalents. But you see why your followers find it heavy-handed?

R: Of course, and I appreciate their backing.

P: I saw that the mayor of Pittsburgh publicly supported you, that there were protests at the paper, and, of course, the cartoonists are righteously outraged.

R: Well, according to John Robinson Block, outrage isn’t an attribute you want in a cartoonist.

P: Block is the publisher who fired you?

R: Yeah.

P: Would you like to publicly excoriate him in some deeply personal and expletive-littered manner right now?

R: (chuckles) No, but there were sure aspects of this that he deserves to be ashamed of.

P: Like?

R: Well, for a start there were those widely-scorned racist editorials. I knew then that this wouldn’t end well.

P: They offered you a freelance arrangement right?

R: A truly terrible one. Paid virtually nothing and required me to hatch ideas in concert with management.

P: You know, creatives do their best work when it’s pre-filtered through the sensibilities of humorless corporate lickspittles whose livings depend on not rocking the boat. Or the ship of state.

R: Ha! Right!

P: So, now what?

R: Well, I’ll still draw for my syndicate clients and I’ve had some encouraging freelance offers. It’ll work out.

P: I saw the Sunday New York Times ran a piece you wrote about all this. Since they don’t print editorial cartoons at all, but somehow just managed to garner the Pulitzer for cartooning, maybe they could use you?

R: (snickers) I’d work for half of what Tom Friedman gets.

P: You’d work for a quarter of it. Thanks for taking time. I’ll call you in a few days, when the media blitz has died down and you’re on the verge of despair.

R: Thanks.

UPDATE: an equally wry cartoon strip penned by Rob about his recent and much-publicized change in circumstances is available at The Nib.

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