Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025)

My 4th book Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine, originally published in 2012, has been been updated and reissued. The original publication was followed by my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015), which was based on my long term outreach work with asylum seekers, detainees and refugees in London (click the thumbnail on the right for more details or click here to purchase).

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine has been described as "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" by Andrew Kelly in The Observer. 

ORDER THE UPDATED BEYOND THE WALL: WRITING A PATH THROUGH PALESTINE HERE

In spring 2011 I was invited to tour the West Bank as a guest of Palfest. I knew about the ‘issue’ only from casual news watching, despite a longstanding professional involvement in international relations, political analysis, cultural diplomacy and human rights. I am not Muslim and have no Muslim heritage, no Palestinian heritage and no Arab or Middle Eastern heritage. I am not an activist.

I went on the tour and wrote down what I observed, nothing more or less, and these observations became Beyond the Wall. It’s a short, accessible narrative non-fiction piece about ordinary people and daily life, originally published by Seagull Books in 2012. Full details of the original publication, with links to further essays and reviews and a list of events from that time, can be read here if you scroll down to the 2nd half of that post.

In the book, I focused on character and conversation, setting and community, resilience and survival, atmosphere and daily existence, with the aim of writing something which any reader could engage with and enjoy. It is not a despairing book, but one full of ordinary voices, humour, detail and everyday life.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Over the last two years I haven’t mentioned Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine in any context. I dislike it when individuals push themselves to the front on a human rights ticket during an emergency. 

In late 2024 I asked Seagull if I could write a new foreword for Beyond The Wall. They kindly agreed and the essay is as current as we could make it while allowing for production time. It clearly expresses my feelings.

I will not be taking up any media slots to comment on this when there are so many direct reports and testimonies already. I’d like to thank Naveen Kishore and Bishan Samadder at Seagull and everyone at Palfest.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Me in the West Bank, spring 2011, photo by poet Nathalie Handal

Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London (2015)

This article was first published in 2015.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: The Hidden Voices of London (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which is the result of my outreach work with asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented people in the capital and includes their testimonies alongside my own account. The publisher's page is here and the Amazon UK page is here.

My latest essay on this issue is called Changing Tides and was published by Counterpoint Arts and English PEN. For Books' Sake have already given Asylum and Exile an attentive and very generous 5 star review which can be read here and there has also been some great press in Nose In A Book, a long interview in Asian Culture Vulture, another for The Festival of Ideas and another in The Heroine Collective. I've covered the project in a recent Guardian article headlined I want to give asylum seekers in Britain a chance to tell their own story; two essays for Wasafiri which can be read here and two essays for the Free Word's Briefing Notes series, called Psychogeography of trauma: inside a UK detention centre and The reality of asylum and refuge in modern Britain. I've also discussed the issues in my introduction to Big Writing for A Small World (Scribd copy of English PEN publication) and the articles Rape, refusal, denial, detention: refugees dancing at the edge of the world and Asylum: no woman should be missed out. English PEN have written up the debate at one of my events on this issue in a wonderful piece here and The Nation have written an article on my work called 'I came to you for help and you treated me like a prisoner'.

Asylum and Exile follows the publication, in May 2012, of my fourth book Beyond the Wall. An extensive selection of 2012 and 2013 interviews and press can be found here and a March 2014 interview by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore can be found here. 

press release

I see books like Asylum and Exile as evidence of a deep seated refusal to tolerate the divisive politics that extend right across the political divide. Well done for speaking up and bearing witness. We must never stop telling the stories of those we consign to the margins.

Maurice Wren, Chief Executive, The Refugee Council

It’s a little book, but in its pages it manages to be wide in scope yet intimate, funny, warm, sad and horrifying. ...Asylum and Exile is a 4 star read, with an additional star because it’s so fundamentally important. 

Jennie Gillions, For Books' Sake

The result of Bidisha’s outreach work with refugees and asylum seekers since 2012, Asylum and Exile goes behind the stereotypes and scare stories to reveal the humanity, tragedy and bravery – and frequently the humour – of the individuals who’ve left everything behind to seek sanctuary from violence.

The men and women Bidisha worked with were of all ages from 19 to their late 60s. All had fled war, persecution, extreme poverty and civil unrest in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Malawi, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone. Some had been in the UK for months, others for more than a decade. All spoke at least two languages. Among them were mathematicians and criminologists, soldiers, students and teachers: the man who had lectured in Persian music at Tehran university and now works in the freezer room of a sandwich factory; the woman who had been a teacher but was asked, when she arrived in England, if she knew how to turn on a light switch; the woman who became a manager in an English company only to be pulled out by police in front of her colleagues and imprisoned, who loves her red dancing shoes above all her other possessions.

In England, with no money, no access to public funds and no papers authorising them to work they labour illegally as cleaners, factory workers, dishwashers, care assistants and in other unstable, unseen, underpaid and gruelling roles. Many have bounced between prison and detention centres. Their London life is one of trying to survive on five pounds a day, of interminable bus journeys across the capital, appointments with legal aid workers and reliance on near strangers to get a foothold on life in the city with little or no support. Despite this, their unerring vivacity, talent and will to survive are a testament to the strength of the human spirit. 

Asylum and Exile comes out at a time when immigration is one of the most passionately debated issues around, with a rise in anti-immigration, anti-asylum rhetoric both in the UK and elsewhere, particularly in western Europe and Australia. Asylum seekers and refugees are being argued over, demonised, scapegoated and disbelieved – or patronised and advocated for in heart-wrenching yet generalised terms – but are almost never given a chance to speak in their own words about their own lives. Bidisha gives space to their testimonies, which are by turns shocking, moving and hilarious. She gained rare access and was met with such trust and frankness that Asylum and Exile stands as a unique document|: an accessible, uplifting and humane book whose stories are as buoyant, noisy, confrontational and diverse as Bidisha’s classroom itself.

Poster greeting arrivals at Praxis

The outreach sessions were co-ordinated by the literary and human rights charity English PEN with the Migrants Resource Centre in Victoria and Praxis in Bethnal Green. Asylum and Exile began in the unheated rooms of severely underfunded charities in London. Yet its narratives and characters cross the globe, reflecting the consequences of some of the world’s most violent conflicts and fragile states. Stereotypes and generalisations disintegrate and what emerge are the stoical spirits, vital personalities, inner strength and defiant intelligence of the individuals themselves. The book is not an academic tract or a fierce polemic but a humane account based on personal stories expressed in idiosyncratic voices, not clichés from a newspaper. Asylum and Exile is a tribute to the honesty of raw experience, the power of personal testimony and the ability of the spoken word of truth to transform both the teller and the listener.

UPDATED: Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025)

My 4th book Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine, originally published in 2012, has been been updated and reissued. The original publication was followed by my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, which was based on my outreach work with asylum seekers, detainees and refugees in London (click the thumbnail on the right for more details).

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine has been described as "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" by Andrew Kelly in The Observer. 

ORDER THE UPDATED BEYOND THE WALL: WRITING A PATH THROUGH PALESTINE HERE

In spring 2011 I was invited to tour the West Bank as a guest of Palfest. I knew about the ‘issue’ from casual news watching, despite a longstanding professional involvement in international relations, political analysis, cultural diplomacy and human rights. I am not Muslim and have no Muslim heritage, no Palestinian heritage and no Arab or Middle Eastern heritage. I am not an activist.

I went on the tour and wrote down what I observed, nothing more or less, and these observations became Beyond the Wall. It’s a short, accessible narrative non-fiction piece about ordinary people and daily life, originally published by Seagull Books in 2012. Full details of the original publication, with links to further essays and reviews and a list of events from that time, can be read directly below.

In the book, I focused on character and conversation, setting and community, resilience and survival, atmosphere and daily existence, with the aim of writing something which any reader could engage with.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Over the last twenty three months I haven’t mentioned Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine in any context. I dislike it when individuals push themselves to the front on a human rights ticket during an emergency. I've seen peers speak persuasively about ethics onstage while being egotistical or abusive offstage and witnessed terrible human beings put their signatures to the petitions and statements of the day, just to look good.

In late 2024 I asked Seagull if I could write a new foreword for Beyond The Wall. They kindly agreed and the essay is as current as we could make it while allowing for production time. It clearly expresses my feelings.

I will not be taking up any media slots to comment on this when there are so many direct reports and testimonies already. I’d like to thank Naveen Kishore and Bishan Samadder at Seagull and all at Palfest.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Photo of me taken in the West Bank, spring 2011, by poet Nathalie Handal

ORIGINAL 'BEYOND THE WALL' LAUNCH TEXT FROM 2012: 

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women, and another which I did for Time Out Beijing. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, Time Out Bejing, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, an interview in Ideas Tap, a long interview in The Asian Writer, Variety, a long interview in The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" (The Observer), seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

"It's very hard to be xenophobic when you can speak someone else's language." Historian Bettany Hughes on Istanbul past, present and future.

This is a longer version of an article originally published by BBC Arts in January 2017. The original piece is here.

As told by historian Bettany Hughes, the story of Istanbul – formerly Constantinople, formerly Byzantium – reads like a tumultuous epic. Hughes’ third book Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities depicts the Turkish city as a site of trade and luxury, radicalism and revolution, coups and takeovers, restless movement and rooted ambition, gorgeous aesthetics and terrible violence.

Fittingly, I meet Bettany Hughes at a crossing point of the past, present and future. We are in the Grade II listed English elegance of Somerset House where her new film, radio and TV company SandStone Global is shortly going to be based, beginning a new phase in her career, from writer and broadcaster to producer and power-player.

Hughes’ book is dedicated to “those who can no longer walk the streets of Istanbul.” It pays tribute to the citizens who have occupied the land since the 5^th century AD and were, as Hughes tells me, “forced off the streets by an early death.” The comment is all the more poignant given that the city’s conflicts are no less disturbing today; Hughes is telling a story which is far from over. In 2013 there were protests in Gezi Park against repressive President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s infringement of freedom of the press, expression and assembly and the increasing religious conservatism of everyday life, while in July 2016 a military coup against him was brutally quashed. Challenge hasn’t only come from within: a terrorist attack at Ataturk airport last year and another during the 2017 New Year’s celebrations at a city nightclub (the latter claimed by Isil) have left dozens dead and hundreds injured.

“The history kept on happening,” she says. “During the week of the attempted coup I was due to fly [to Istanbul] for my final stay. I went to my favourite baker, where you can buy a loaf of bread, pay for two, they make a cross on the blackboard outside and it means you’ve paid for a loaf for someone in need. He showed me the bullet holes all around his oven.”

With a historian’s long view, she reminds me that recent popular demonstrations against the government echo the Nika riots of 532AD, where jostling between rival charioteering teams escalated into protests over taxation and legal reforms.

Istanbul dissolves sharp distinctions between eras of the city’s past and also between the conflicting parties who sought dominance there: there is no stark latitudinal battle between broad-brush Christian Western and Muslim Eastern forces, which Hughes refers to sardonically as “the Ottoman peril that threatened Christian civilisation” in the minds of Victorians in “the parlours of the west.” Instead there are cameos from Vikings and Britons and an account of long in-fighting between Sunni and Shia Muslim forces across swathes of territory from North Africa to Azerbaijan – again, an ongoing story.

Istanbul was at the heart of a web of trade routes where horses, crystal, jade and silk came from the East; amber, honey and wax came from the North East; cotton and porphyry came from the South; oil, wine and fruit came from the South West; and linen and livestock came from the North. Meanwhile there were attacks and blockades from all points including Egypt, Russia and Britain and immigration from everywhere including Albania, Georgia and Ethiopia.

“There’s a tenacious characteristic of the city, beginning in the 5^th century AD,” says Hughes. “It’s always been a city of sanctuary. It’s very unusual in welcoming in and providing hospitality to refugees of any nationality.” She first visited Istanbul when she was eighteen and remarks, “In my study of the world I’ve never before come across any other city where you have the notion that you have a duty to accept refugees. In the Ottoman era you have dragomans coming in speaking nine or ten languages. It’s very hard to be xenophobic when you can speak someone else’s language.”

Instead of a sequential history, Istanbul offers the visitor a simultaneous history in which ancient pagan shrines are appropriated into churches and then into sanctuaries and temples. Coins from 1^st century BC show Hecate, protector of a pre-Roman “citylette” called Byzantion, whose symbol was the moon and star – “a design echoed in the Turkish flag today,” Hughes notes. The ancient scriptoria of the city itself preserved Greek plays, Roman philosophy, Christian texts and Muslim poetry.

At once thunderingly brisk and joyfully rich, the book is unerring in its straight shot from the past to the future and yet generous in its contingencies, exceptions and felicities. Hughes has looked into everything from the city’s priestesses to the poetry written about it by foreign visitors, picking out the lives of spectacular personalities like the Athenian general Alcibiades, “acting like quicksilver, twisting and turning.” “A city is the people who live in it, she tells me. “Architecture is a kind of macro-historical guide. But it’s the lived, breathed, hoped, feared lives of the people in it that stick with me.”

I ask why she’s telling the story of a city which has already been depicted and examined so many times. She concedes that a historian can only say something original if their work is based on “new evidence and fresh archive discoveries, manuscripts, the physical accumulation of documentary evidence.” She points to exciting material, much of it coming from former communist countries in eastern Europe – “literally, sealed boxes with a sign saying ‘old Turkish documents’” – which are now slowly being translated, along with fresh archaeological finds:  “there’s going to be a lot of stuff coming out of the ground.”

Istanbul joins Hughes’ two previous books The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life and Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess Whore. In the course of her research, she has had to adopt a panoply of different roles: linguist, archaeologist, sociologist, art historian, military analyst, travel adventurer, natural geographer and academic. The unique result, in all three cases, is history which is astonishingly alive, told with the rigour of a scholar and the vigour of a storyteller.

Hughes is also a prolific and magnetically erudite presenter on TV and radio. For the BBC alone she has examined the geniuses of the modern world (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud), those of the ancient world (Buddha, Socrates and Confucius); studied the hidden history of women in religion in Divine Women; explored the mythologies of Alexandria, Atlantis and Athens; and chronicled the Aryans, the Ancient Egyptians, the Minoans, the Spartans and the Moors. Her radio work has covered everything from playwright Shakespeare to poet Sappho.

Yet she goes red and says “I absolutely don’t feel prolific” when I tell her I admire her work. She is motivated not by relics from a dig but by “empathy and excitement with the characters, sharing the delight I feel in discovering new evidence: ‘Aha! I get it. That explains why that person did that thing and that moment.’”

Now she is launching her own production company. SandStone Global will produce international documentaries, working with fully diverse teams in front of and behind the camera. They are already well into filming the story of Aphrodite, “the goddess of love and war – not a soppy Venus,” working with Cypriot partners and “telling the story from the point of its origin rather than helicoptering in.”

Yet in following a story from its origins, one can’t help but notice the perennial quality of war and conflict. Istanbul takes us past the Crusades, the Crimean War, the two world wars and the fall of the Ottoman empire to eight months ago. And the headlines keep coming. Hughes admits, “I was expecting the pages [of my Istanbul book] to be full of people sitting listening to bees buzzing, having a sherbet at the hammam. The sad truth of history is that rage is so close to the surface. It’s a city where as well as the beauty, you feel anger crackling beneath the surface. The only thing that keeps it together is people’s desire to do so, and to find something to celebrate and respect.”

Nonetheless, Hughes asserts, “Whatever monoculture anyone tries to impose on it, the people will shrug it off. There have been so many rulers who tried to create the city in their own image. The city always fights back.”

Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes is out now.

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On lies, liberation and Liberty

Today, leading human rights group Liberty celebrates its 80^th birthday. It has invited over a hundred Writers at Liberty to each contribute a piece of new writing reflecting on the aims, values and actions of the organisation. This was mine. Visit the Liberty80 site to learn more.

"Renaissance Florence was an excellent place for collecting documents. Mainly because they didn’t trust each other.”

I am writing this essay while watching a documentary on Machiavelli. A historian’s walking us through the Florentine state archives, showing the presenter a Medici’s Most Wanted persecution list and pointing out that the individuals on it need not have done anything in particular to have attracted suspicion. The presenter visits the police station where Machiavelli was tortured despite there being no evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy he was accused of.

How wonderful that five hundred years on we live in such different times. These days it would be unthinkable that suspicious and secretive governments might follow, seize and physically brutalise innocent civilians based on little more than mere suspicion. What a relief that we now enjoy enlightened and mutually trustful societies in which authorities have integrity; leaders are honest and accountable; judges provide justice with moral consistency and without cultural bias; the heads of the media, police, politics and big business are not all friends with each other; public bodies are representative of the populace they serve; institutions of power have been washed clean of vested interests; and, as humble but proud citizens, we can truly say that what we see is what we get. How comforting to know that the written and spoken word are enjoined in the furtherance of freedom, truth, justice and progressive harmony instead of being deployed in subterfuge, falsified to justify abuse, misappropriated to bend meaning, exaggerated to support a warlike and crusading atmosphere, worked up to derail arguments or simply logged and aggregated to create a secret archive that can be trawled for incriminating details and useful trivia at any time without our knowledge or consent.

Oh. Aha. I see. And I hear the distant, mocking laughter of Machiavelli as he swigs spectral wine and schmoozes his fellow deceased in the afterlife.

To be fair if not approving, the exercise of power and the methods of that exercise have been employed by those at all points on the political scale for centuries. The Vatican, the Elizabethan court, trafficking rings, the CIA, drugs cartels, the current US Senate, the ancient Roman senate, Interpol, Hollywood studios, the music industry and the mafia all behave in exactly the same way. Their actions are justified by research, which is gained by information-gathering, which includes surveillance, spycraft, infiltration, entrapment, the truth obtained by deceitful means. Those who have power, whether it is legitimate or not, elected or not, formal or not, have always justified their deceitfulness by pointing to the ends, the consequences. Look, they say, we have prevented attacks you never knew about; we have stopped individuals before they committed crimes; we can pre-empt the future because of what we know. They argue that when it comes to the subtlety of government, equivocal definitions of what is right or wrong break down. They argue that it is naïve to talk about what is good and what is bad, which are academic concepts that would disintegrate when the strong light of reality hits them.

They would laugh in my face if I tried to assert that certain actions are simply wrong. Perhaps I should couch the argument in language that wrongdoers would understand: some actions result in no tangible gain, no increase in meaningful intelligence, no advance in strategic position and no overall improvement to justify massive costs in terms of logistics, economics, international standing and public trust. Torture is wrong and does not yield reliable or useful information. Detention without justification, without giving detainees any reason, without charge, without trial, without legal representation, without set duration, is wrong and creates trauma, instability and resentment. Following someone and keeping a record of everything they do, say, write or read is wrong and creates paranoia, alienation and hatred of government.

It is not naive to fight for human rights and civil liberties, it is imperative. Otherwise the future will be one of absolute and mutual mistrust in all directions, between and amongst citizens, countries and world communities. It is obscene that anyone who is a grassroots  activist or a cultural advocate in defence of human rights should be monitored, as many of us are, as though we are perpetrators, abusers or lawbreakers. It is contemptible that petty laws should be invented in order to deter us, vilify us or criminalise us. When accused of flouting human rights, powerful organisations behave in a way that demonstrates that they do indeed routinely and systematically flout the human rights of others while aggressively defending their own interests. Having authority does not mean that you can do anything you want, then close ranks when caught.

The authorities will say that life’s complicated and that we should simply go about our daily business being watched and followed and not bother our little heads about it. If we haven’t done anything wrong, like Google something, go on holiday, go on a march or demonstration, speak at a panel event, sign a petition or have a chat with someone, we won’t have anything to worry about.

Everyone knows that governing is complex and involves subtle negotiation between multiple parties with widely differing views. But when it comes to the fundamentals, some principles are inviolable. I would even go one further and say that there is no difference between the rights and freedoms I expect personally and within personal relationships and those I expect politically and within a public, cultural, legal and social context. They are one and the same. Every human being has the right to live free of physical violation, mental torture, domination, abuse, stalking, surveillance and control. Every human being has the right to live free of fear, acting from their own will and physical and mental self-determination, not because they have been threatened, coerced or blackmailed. Every human being’s sense of dignity is intimately connected with their sense of privacy and their positive assumption of freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of association and freedom of expression. These are not political values, subject to change according to who is in power. They are human values.

It is tempting to be blasé and say that the ruled have always been spied on by rulers, that it was ever thus and will always be thus. But it is not true that the present is exactly like the past only with different clothes, or that history is cyclical, or that you can’t stop Them and shouldn’t try to stand up to Them because They always get Their way in the end.

We have arrived at a unique time culturally and technologically. The authorities’ combination of deceit, control, watchfulness, duplicity and cruelty, masked with outward civility and outright lies, is now played out on a global scale, abetted by ever more efficient means of gathering, storing and sorting information. Many international governments’ covert political alliances and commercial deals for information sharing, the transportation and torture of suspected individuals, the sale of armaments, the levying of wars and exploitation of natural resources and emerging markets run counter to their publicly stated interests, values and allegiances.

This goes far beyond language, although I like a good political euphemism as much as anyone. Rendition means torture and extraordinary rendition means a lot of torture. Waterboarding – which sounds like a delightful low-impact sport that one might enjoy on Brighton’s seafront – is a euphemism for drowning someone. A resistance safe-zone is a rebel stronghold. A defence of privacy for privacy’s sake can be an admission of guilt inviting further investigation. The axis of evil is a mythical land where the US sacrificed soldiers for oil. Security means control. Arming in self defence is incitement to attack. A demonstration can be disorder, resistance can be rebellion, organising resistance means planning insurgency. Companies axing thousands of jobs say they are rationalising, harmonising or recalibrating. Swingeing cuts which put families below the poverty line are rebranded as thrifty, vintage-chic austerity measures. In the Big Society you do everything as before only for free and without state assistance. A ‘terrorist’ can be anything from a civil disrupter to a threat to national security and being accused of being one, even without a shred of proof, can justify any mistreatment whatsoever.

As the world becomes smaller, it is becoming more divided. Just when communication becomes more convenient, it is polluted by wariness and suspicion. Just when we have an opportunity to globalise in thought and intention as well as business, we take up a defensive stance and cling to divisive rhetoric, ignorant stereotypes and mistrustful attitudes.

What I seek is not just liberty but liberation.  Liberation from a mindset of mistrust and demonisation, the vilification of otherness and the paternalistic condoning of all surveillance, detention and physical abuse on the grounds of security. Liberation from the fear that someone is always following us or watching us. Liberation from our entrenchment in a cruel, self-justifying system of control which can be brought down on us at any moment, for any reason. And liberation from the aggressive, combative, violating machismo which argues disingenuously that violence is sometimes okay.

The only weapons ordinary citizens have against these trends are our actions and our words, although journalists are in a trickier position than ever. We are either violating the human rights of celebrities and relatives of murder victims or campaigning for truth and justice or accidentally leaving state secrets on the bus and being hauled up in front of political investigations committees or ethics boards or national security tribunals or international courts, depending on how our actions are interpreted and by whom. We are either peddling damaging lies or damaging truths. We are influential and dangerous, mistrusted because our behaviour is risky and independent. When we try to whistleblow we are accused of jeopardising structures that we could never possibly understand. When we try to investigate those structures and hit upon sensitive material we are scapegoated publicly as troublemakers.

Either way, the ferocity of the reaction to journalists’ endeavours indicates something about the impact of the word. UK and US governments are just as frightened of journalists as governments in Iran, Afghanistan, Russia and Mexico are. They fear the word because it’s powerful. Indeed they use that wordpower themselves, negatively, to stir up tactically useful prejudices, plant slanderous lies, maintain myths which work in their favour and gloss their own violence. Those of us on the other side use our position to create space for a truth denied, a suffering voiced, a protest lodged, a testimony revealed, a campaign launched. This is why I am a part of Writers at Liberty.

NOTES:

• Read more about the genesis of the project in this brief write-up in Five Dials magazine.
• If you would like to join Liberty and speak up for civil liberties and in defence of human rights, click here now.
• To find out more about the many events and initiatives surrounding Liberty's 80th anniversary, please click here.
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Hyeonseo Lee’s North Korean escape and rescue memoir gains six figure book deal

Hyeonseo Lee, whose memoir will
be published in Autumn 2014

Hyeonseo Lee escaped the North Korean regime. Later, she risked her life to return and rescue her mother and brother. Her memoir of these events has now been acquired by Arabella Pike, Publishing Director at William Collins UK, in a six-figure deal following a hotly contested auction among numerous publishing houses bidding for the rights. Arabella Pike says that the book “has electrified everyone here …and in our US office.” She describes it as “powerful, deeply emotional and important” and adds that Hyeonseo Lee “will be, I believe, the first eyewitness female writer to describe the terrifying fates of North Korean women escapees in China.”

The deal was brokered by Kelly Falconer of the Asia Literary Agency, based in Hong Kong. And that’s why Kelly’s my agent. She comments,

This is the story not only of Hyeonseo's escape - literally from the darkness into the light - but also of her coming of age, of her "re-education", of her ability to successfully rebuild her life not once but twice, first in China, then in South Korea, which proved to be the more difficult of the two. Thousands of refugees and escapees pour out of North Korea but thousands also struggle to adapt, and rarely do they thrive, as Hyeonseo Lee has.

The book is due to be published in Autumn 2014. Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish rights have been sold at various auctions by Pontas Literary Agency, acting on behalf of the Asia Literary Agency, with other offers currently under consideration.

Buzz about Hyeonseo Lee has been building for months following her TED talk, which detailed her escape from North Korea and has gathered over 2 million views online. It is viewable here:

As a child, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was ‘the best on the planet’. It wasn't until the devastating famine of the 1990s that she began to question what she had been taught. She escaped to China when she was 14 and began a life in hiding as an illegal alien. The book, as yet untitled, will describe her privileged childhood in North Korea, her life in China, her decision to settle eventually in South Korea and her journey back to North Korea to rescue her mother and brother. She is now at university in South Korea and is a human-rights advocate and spokesperson for the North Korean refugee community.

Selected further reading about North Korea

• Barbara Demick, Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
• North Korean defector, Kim Young Soon, reveals conditions inside state's concentration camps (Huffington Post)
• Out of a hidden place: two new books, one personal, one political, let daylight into the hidden kingdom of North Korea (Economist)
• North Korean memoir tests South's interest in refugee stories (Wall Street Journal)
• North Korean 'court poet' to publish memoir (Guardian)
• Four memoirs portraying the realities of modern day North Korea (Mapping Worlds)

Press release text (c) Flatcap Asia, with thanks to Kelly Falconer for exclusive quote. 

When free universal healthcare isn't free and isn't universal: a case study in TB treatment from Burkina Faso

As the term of  the current Millennium Development Goals reaches an end in 2015, healthcare workers and reporters worldwide are assessing the efficacy of different global health and development approaches over the last few years. The necessity of improving global health has been one of the highest priorities of development practitioners and activists, the touchstone being universal access and free access.

One project study, which aimed to provide free treatment for tuberculosis patients in Burkina Faso, caught my eye because it illustrates the subtle challenges and difficulties (as well as areas of success) which arise when it comes to the practicalities of delivering healthcare which is intended to be both free and universal. The findings of the research will be vital in shaping world healthcare policies when it comes to the treatment, control and prevention of TB after the timeframe of the current Development Goals.

Based on meticulous year-long research by Samia Laokri, Olivier Weil, K Maxime Drabo, S Mathurin Dembelé, Benoît Kafando & Bruno Dujardin, the study - an abstract is provided here by the World Health Organisation - demonstrates the flaws of a generalised or sweeping analysis, starting with the "theory [that] the removal of user fees puts health services within reach of everyone, including the very poor." They warn,

In the poorer countries of the world, where most people live on less than US$ 2 per day and expenditure on health care can plunge patients and their families into extreme poverty, the removal of user fees for health is seen as a matter of real urgency. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be enough to ensure truly universal coverage.

A full version of the report is here and I have provided my overview and analysis below. 

The study I'm focusing on, which is part of a larger project [see points seven and eight here], is based on the findings of rounds of interviews with 242 patients who tested positive for pulmonary tuberculosis across the six rural districts of Bousse, Koupela, Ouargaye, Zabre, Ziniare and Zorgho and who were enrolled in the national TB control programme. As the writers state,

The median direct costs associated with tuberculosis were estimated at 101 United States dollars (US$) per patient. These costs represented 23% of the mean annual income of a patient’s household. During the course of their care, three quarters of the interviewed patients apparently faced “catastrophic” health expenditure. 

Their analysis of the cause of this US$101 direct cost is interesting: around US$ 45 of the cost was not down to the inherent cost of the medicines or treatments themselves, but to failures in the broader health system and policies; the researchers cites access, medical consultations, out of pocket expenses, unofficial payments to medical professionals and lost wages from their day jobs for both diagnosis and treatment (or even redundancy due to repeated absence). While individual patients bore these costs by strategising. economising and accommodating within their households and negotiating or receiving community and extended-family support, this accommodation weakened their overall economic standing and jeopardised their position in the long term. There was a likelihood of established savings being used, of families being forced to decrease consumption to save money, being forced into the sale of goods or services to raise money or to take out loans to raise money. When this seemingly small monetary figure accounts for nearly a quarter of each household's income, given the generalised socio-economic context of poverty or near-poverty amongst the population studied, there are grave consequences in terms of increased social inequality and economic instability; the stigma of suffering from TB; the 'social debt' incurred by help received by family members and the wider community; and a greater improbability of proper treatment being sought, for all these reasons. The illness itself increased instability, with the researchers citing an average loss of 45 days of work lost by sufferers across the research year from 2007 to 2008. 

The 23% percentage figure of annual income cited for TB treatment costs is alarming as the threshold for a definition of "catastrophic" expenditure which represents an excessive burden on a patient or their household in the rural low-income communities in the study, is 10%. The study analysed all the types of expenses and costs, including non-medical and non-financial costs, which arose as a result of suffering, diagnosis and treatment and identified various failures and weaknesses in the system. They include necessary services that were not covered by the free treatment package (which include diagnosis by spit sample, anti TB drugs and repeat smears to determine treatment outcome) and services that were not necessary but where payment was required. The report states,

Only 2% of the patients interviewed...reported that they had received completely free tuberculosis care. 

The challenges above, as well as other failures in patient treatment (such as extended time periods required for diagnosis and repeat procedures) explain why the rates of TB detection and cure are lower than might be hoped given the MDG and the adoption of international recommendations for TB control. The researchers state that what are necessary are solutions which pull in all practitioners, "political decision-makers, managers of health programmes and health services" to develop meaningful responses and suggest a number of measures including the decentralisation of diagnosis and treatment so that patients do not have to travel, improving community care to enable early detection, help for the poorest households, supporting healthcare providers and also supporting patients not just financially but socially and psychologically through dialogue with former patients. They also call for a rigorous assessment of 'free' healthcare systems with a multilayered analysis of economic and social consequences aimed at fine-tuning policy, identifying and rectifying faults in the system, guaranteeing efficiency and helping (rather than exploiting or exacerbating the problems of) the most vulnerable.

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow for the International Reporting Project. She is reporting on issues of global health and development. 

The power of simplicity: reducing maternal mortality in districts in Sierra Leone and Burundi

Following my piece about maternal health in India, and in advance of the UCL symposium on community-based global maternal care next week, I wanted to focus on two smaller-scale success stories and examine what makes them work. Medecins Sans Frontieres has been working on two projects aimed at reducing women’s risk of death in childbirth in the Kabezi district in Burundi and the Bo district in Sierra Leone.

MSF has produced an analysis of the challenges and gains of its work in a report called Safe Delivery (link takes you to a short précis) which looks at their work in Kabezi since the 2006 start of the project, and in Bo since the MSF began running a hospital there in 2003.

Image taken for MSF by Sarah Elliott, showing a successful emergency
birth in Burundi - I love the woman's smile.

Both Sierra Leone and Burundi are at a disadvantage when it comes to maternal care as their health infrastructures – along with much else – have broken down during and in the aftermath of civil war. The long effect of such breakage is a deficit of human, educational and practical resources: so medical facilities are needed, as are qualified healthcare workers, as are the systems to employ them in a sustainable way and the educational infrastructures required to train them. This is before we tackle the important issue of patients’ own access to healthcare and the importance of antenatal and postpartum care. All this requires investment, establishment, organisation and management. According to MSF Burundi has a national average of 800 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, and Sierra Leone has a national average of 890 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. Sierra Leone has the third-highest rate of maternal death, after Chad and Somalia. The main causes of maternal death are haemorrhage (25%), sepsis (15%), unsafe abortion (13% - and the report states clearly that “abortions need to be performed by skilled medical workers in a safe and hygienic environment”), hypertensive disorders like eclampsia and pre-eclampsia; and obstructed labour.

As the report – which can be read in full here - states,

Every year, some 287,000 women die [globally] from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Most are young, active and healthy. And for every woman who dies, another 20 women suffer from chronic ill health or disability due to conditions such as obstetric fistula.* 

Across the world, in every country and every  population group, approximately 15 percent of  pregnant women develop complications that are potentially life-threatening. But the fate of a  pregnant woman is very much dictated by where  she gives birth in the world. In fact, 99% of  maternal deaths occur in poor countries, where – for many people – medical services are out of reach or simply unaffordable

Yet the local district projects  (serving a population of nearly 600,000 in Bo and just under 200,000 in Kabezi) have shown that when addressing this issue the implementation of basic – or rather, obvious – measures has steeply reduced rates of maternal death. The report stresses that the problem is not a lack of “state of the art facilities” and shows how the establishment of an ambulance system and the availability of emergency in-hospital emergency obstetric care, with trained staff and appropriate medical supplies, twenty-four hours a day, for free, have brought the Kabezi figures down to 74% less than the national level for Burundi and the Bo figures down to 61% less than the national level for Sierra Leone. In both cases the cost of providing such measures to the population for free is less than 2 Euros per head in Bo and a tiny bit over 3 Euros in Kabezi.

One of the UN Millennium Development Goals is to reduce maternal mortality (in comparison with figures from 1990) by 75% by 2015. Judging by the success of the projects I’ve described above, extreme change is possible through the implementation of simple but profoundly important measures. As the report states,

A common assumption is  that improving access to emergency obstetric care is too costly, but MSF’s experience shows that this need not be the case.

*Despite the triumphs of the two projects I’ve described, in February of this year MSF released a press alert announcing that Burundi’s only free provider of treatment for obstetric fistula, which is caused by complications during childbirth, is under threat of close due to a lack of trained medical staff. The Urumuri Center, in the city of Gitega, is run jointly by Burundi’s Ministry of Health and MSF and treatment is provided by foreign volunteer surgeons on short-time assignments.


Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow for the International Reporting Project. She is reporting on issues of global health and development. 

Help the mother, help the child, secure the future: maternal and child health in India

Photo (c) Children In Need India

Like many people ‘of colour’, I am occasionally subject to a random dousing of imprecise and pejorative cultural clichés by ignorant people with a superiority complex, just like a delicate lotus blossom caught in a balmy, allegorical, toxic monsoon shower.

Woman in publishing, at literary festival: “What do you do?”
Me: “At the moment I’m working with the Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins University, reporting on international development? No, before you ask, I haven’t met the Gates’s. The next thing I’m doing is on maternal health, I think. It’s really interesting.”
Woman in publishing: “Oh! That’s so interesting because the other day I was thinking to myself, I had trouble with my two pregnancies and if I’d been having my babies in the developing world, I wouldn’t have survived. Do you know [random British Asian woman in publishing PR]? Because you look like her and you remind me of her.”
Me: ???

I have no doubt that I in no way resemble the one other Asian person Publishing Woman has met in her working life. Poor PW, we met for 10 minutes out of nowhere and she couldn’t stop talking about race, refugees, poverty and the pathetic ills of the ‘developing world’ – it’s like she had racial Tourettes. And had I been able to recover from the speechlessness that afflicted me at the crucial moment, despite the fact that I talk for a living, I would have asked her which country exactly in ‘the developing world’ (which bigots usually take to mean everywhere or possibly anywhere from Senegal, across Libya, Somalia, Congo, down to Mozambique, then up through Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, definitely India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and then possibly through to rural China perhaps… and maybe Burma, or rural Indonesia…and maybe also acrossways to some countries in South and Latin America, oh and the Caribbean islands maybe too, and gosh even some parts of Greece?) she meant, and then which region in which country.

The whole thing – or rather, her gloating and ignorance – made me think of an article I wrote a long while back, about Children in Need India. I described ‘two Indias’: that of the extremely numerous privileged middle class, who have the finest education, prospects, family support, influence, connections and healthcare; and that of the poorest, who despite the general dynamism, ambition and industry of today’s India still suffer due to lack of access to healthcare, education, influence, rights and justice. So often, it is only the second India that the wider world sees. It pains me, as a British Indian, that the rest of the world is blind to the incredible humour, energy, intelligence, broadness and enlightenment I see everywhere in India. In many ways, as a woman I find Indian culture much more sisterly and infinitely less misogynistic, judgemental, brittle, sleazy, objectifying, ageist-sexist and dollybirdish than British culture – but that’s a subject for another article.

Still, when it comes to society’s least advantaged, there are certain issues which cannot be ignored. India has a population of around 1 billion people and poverty, hunger, illness, gender and class injustice, lack of access, lack of rights, abuse, exploitation and geographical isolation from sources of both power and assistance (such as healthcare) are disproportionately weighted against those with the least. In short, despite India’s great achievements and many distinguished citizens, there are still an awful lot of poor, disempowered, ill and hungry people.

Looking back through Children in Need India’s work since I wrote that first 'two Indias' article, it is clear that solving the most fundamental problems must start from birth. I was intrigued by CINI because it started up with just two clinics for deprived children in Kolkata, where my mother’s family are from, and has since grown into a much larger organisation operating in West Bengal.

They present some sobering statistics, from Unicef studies:

• Infant mortality is highest in India than anywhere else in the world. According to Unicef’s 2010 figures, the majority of the 6,000 children who die in India every day, the majority are from preventable causes.
• Almost a half of all children under the age of five in India are clinically malnourished (Unicef study, January 2012)
• According to Unicef’s 2005 figures women in India are 80 times more likely to die during childbirth than in the UK due to lack of access to basic healthcare and monitoring during pregnancy for poorer women, as well as malnutrition and anaemia, which are linked.

There are further statistics – all, sadly, predictable – relating to rates of child labour, the possible consequence of exploitation and abuse of children who labour, the young age of girls’ marriage in rural areas, relatively low rates of child education (education in India is now free for all but uniforms and books can be expensive) and the knock-on effect in terms of adult literacy and, of course, gender equality.

This month the Wilson Centre in America held an extremely wide-ranging conference on Maternal Health in India: Emerging Priorities. There is a brilliant sum-up and full footage of the conference here. Taking place across New Delhi, Boston and Washington, the speakers argued strongly for the issue of maternal health to be seen in the context of multiple underlying social, health and economic factors, pointing out the importance of various key factors. First, more attention must be paid to women's health after giving birth - focusing on morbidity, not just mortality - and ensuring that all of a woman's health needs, from family planning to sexual health, are met in the same (geographical) place by the same people or organisation. Second, there must be an understanding of he importance of family planning: fewer pregnancies, with longer gaps in between, are better for women's physical and mental health and the health of their babies. And third, the importance of post-partum health care and sustained treatment cannot be underestimated.

Underlying all of this are the effects of gender inequality on women's health: early marriages leading to early and numerous births; violence against women; the underprivileging of female family members when it comes to feeding/serving, leaving women with the worst and least food (leading to malnutrition and anaemia) and the most and hardest labour within the house and beyond it. Class is also a powerful influence on Indian women's access to healthcare: disenfranchisement due to caste or other low class status is serious and widespread.

When it comes to healthcare, the best work is done through direct outreach, local engagement and the creation of long term relationships and structures: in one film, CINI describes visiting people door to door, inviting local people to meetings, the setting up of ‘panchayat’ council meeting where citizens speak up about what they need and are also educated and informed of their rights. In this way, the fundamentals – health, education, nutrition – are slowly strengthened. One intriguing project, which kills two birds with one stone (so to speak… actually it gives life to two birds with one stone…) is the ‘Nutrimix’ nutritional project: this is a pre-mixed nutritional food supplement which benefits Under-5s, which is sold by women to their local communities at a low price, but with a  small profit. It incentivises the women to sell and benefits them financially, while also aiding child health.

Other solutions are more traditional, like drop-in clinics giving advice on prenatal care, nutrition, vaccinations (one doctor talks positively about the success of the polio vaccination project at her clinic – once mothers see how simple it is, they are bringing as many local children as they can), reproductive health and more. Still, the strong theme of gender inequality, sexual exploitation and hypocrisy cuts through all of these issues. The clinic deals with STI’s, among other things, and it is left tactfully open as to where the STIs come from (hint: it’s not the women). Many of the women having babies are under-nourished because, even in a generally poor family, the men and boys will be privileged and the mother will eat last. In the film, one doctor at a baby clinic gestures to a patient and points out that the woman (and by consequence her baby) is under-nourished and in frail health because, due to a lack of contraception and consideration from her husband, she has too many children, who she can’t feed and is visibly too exhausted to look after.

Still, it is these same women who are finding a voice. From the seemingly small act of seeking and receiving healthcare treatment they are empowered to take a stand not only in their local area – one example is of women going door-to-door and educating their neighbours about the importance of environmental health and sanitary local conditions, which help to prevent the spread of germs – but also speaking out against the marrying-off of girls at a young age and insisting on the right for all children, whether they are boys or girls, to be educated. They are also empowered to demand safe and adequate healthcare. As one woman says: “We also want all mothers to be able to give birth in a hospital, without the risks of a home birth.”

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow for the International Reporting Project. She is reporting on issues of global health and development. 

Indonesia is just one example: introducing the International Year of Water Co-Operation

Image (c) UN

World Water Day was just a few weeks ago, on 22^nd March, and this time around it’s part of 2013’s special International Year of Water Co-Operation. While I’ll write more about water, health and development in coming months, the poster below gives some impression of just how many individuals, informal groups, charities and organisations have been active in the fight to provide universal, accessible, clean and safe water for all the world’s population on World Water Day. 

Image (c) UN

At the same time, world leaders are meeting throughout the year to seek ways to co-operate and fund initiatives to make these goals a reality for everyone. On World Water Day itself there was a High Level Forum at the Hague and a High-Level Interactive Dialogue (love those crushingly literal antieuphemisms!) at the UN headquarters in New York and other summit meetings are planned in Stockholm, Tajikistan and Norway throughout the year.

To give some idea of the considerations and challenges which arise when looking at water and development I want to take USAID’s work in Indonesia as a case study, based on recently released details of their initiatives there as part of the $33 million, five-year IUWASH (Indonesia Urban Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) Project. In support of the country’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) regarding improvements in water provision and sanitation, IUWASH reaches out across more than 50 municipalities, helping up to 2 million people in urban areas access safe water and improving sanitation for many others

According to USAID,

• Around 40% of Indonesia’s urban households have access to clean water
• Just over 50% have basic sanitation
• In all, 75% do not have “adequate sanitation”
• Poorer families are disproportionately affected – so, as in so many places, there is a gap in privilege, resources, access, opportunities and advocacy (that is, the clout to be heard and make social changes) between the richest and poorest. 

The principal barrier to safe, piped water in urban areas in Indonesia is financial: the installation and connection charge of between $150 and $300 might be as much as three months’ an average earner’s salary – USAID cite a typical example of a vegetable seller and mother of two from Jiyu, earning $2-$3 a day which barely covers essentials as it is. For those without access to piped water, water must be collected and carried from the nearest river or reservoir, a task which is extremely arduous, time-consuming and inefficient. One person can only bring as much water as they can carry. This must be shared amongst the family and amongst cooking, bathing and clothes-washing requirements.

A further difficulty is that in the implementation of a piped water network, a number of processes, vested interests and various groups must be aligned. Strategy, goals, budgets, funding, decisions and policy come from the government, with or without the collaboration of other governments, agencies or funds internationally; geographical planning, irrigation, building and the establishment of utilities, sanitation and facilities will all be handled by private businesses and so on.

Photo (c) USAID Indonesia project

With access achieved, the next issue to tackle is sanitation. USAID estimates that in Indonesia

• only about 2% of urban households are connected to sewerage systems
• up to 18% of urban dwellers must defecate openly, without facilities for the removal of waste

Here, the solution is consciousness-raising about sanitation issues and good practice, people’s unity in improving conditions for everyone and the importance of local leadership in effecting change among multiple households, encouraging families to build improved sanitation facilities like latrines, practice good hygiene (which can be as simple, but effective, as hand-washing, medicated cleaning products and the separate of areas for different tasks). The swift and obvious success of these often-simple measures – such as a steep decrease in rates of diarrhoea and an increase in general health – often inspires communities to go further in terms of grassroots local development, towards recycling and composting.

This is achieved through all parties pulling their weight. IUWASH and similar initiatives must bring together all these different parties to ensure long-term planning and delivery and create a new, different, sustainable future.

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow for the International Reporting Project. She is reporting on issues of global health and development.