STOP knocking the Festival, insists John Watson. At least you’re not in prison. . .
IT’S a roadworks-ridden mess. You can’t be sure you’ll get your tickets on time. You might have to go to the toilet in a Portaloo if you want to hear some music. The credit crunch has hit hard and no-one’s got the money for tickets anyway.
Is it
so bad? I don’t think so.
First, let’s get things into perspective. The Edinburgh Festival is the world’s biggest arts festival. It’s huge – thousands of shows, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of tickets. Of course it’s going to experience problems.
Remember what the Festival is all about though. It’s a glorious/inglorious coming together of a teeming mass of people and a cacophony of voices. Half-baked ideamongerers are jostling with full-blown geniuses. The wannabies, the already famous, the agents, the professional critics, the bloggers, the bemused tourists – they’re all here. Or will be soon. And why? Because, beneath the hard-headed commerce that goes with any modern arts festival there is a compelling core value to the Edinburgh Festival. It’s freedom of expression.
This is the second and most important point. Within the limits of the law, you can come to Edinburgh and put on virtually any show you like. If you’re a critic you can just as readily pan a performance as praise it to the heights of Arthur’s Seat.
While there may be a few other considerations – the over-generous reviewer bigging up his mates’ show, a theatre production packing it all in because of poor ticket sales – that’s still basically it. It’s a free-for-all. Rampant – some might say a little over-excitable – free expression.
So what? Well, it happens that the world’s biggest arts festival coincides this year with the world’s biggest sports festival – the Olympic Games. Later this week you might be torn between catching Ed Byrne’s delicious stand-up at the Assembly Hall and the latest Olympics highlights on TV. It could be Lucy Porter versus the men’s 400 metres.
There’s probably a comedy routine in this somewhere, but my point is a completely serious one: China has muzzled and imprisoned its critics and restricted access to the internet (to both the world’s biggest web-user population and to foreign reporters covering the Games). In short, China has completely failed to live up to the promise it made when bidding for the Games in 2001 – that it would improve its human rights record.
This is categorically not a question of human rights organisations “politicising” the Games. Seven years ago China’s vice president of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games bid committee himself said that “by allowing Beijing to host the Games you will help the development of human rights”. At Amnesty we’ve tried to take the Chinese authorities at their word.
We’ve never opposed the Games being staged there and have concentrated on seeking concrete improvements to a dire situation. We’ve asked for an end to imprisonment without trial (including so-called “re-education through labour” camps), torture, the massive use of the death penalty, the widespread censoring of the internet, and the jailing of internet users.
Instead of reform, things have got worse. China’s response has been to either reject all criticism, including a recent Amnesty report, or to make token gestures. Last month it announced it would allow carefully controlled demonstrations in designated “protest pens” in a limited number of parks during the Games. Official permission would still have to be sought and it’s doubtful any meaningful protest would ever be tolerated even in the sedate surroundings of a Beijing park. It’s a bit like Edinburgh’s authorities saying that you can give out flyers for Fringe shows, but only in Holyrood Park.
The world will be watching a festival of sport carried out in accordance with the Olympic Charter of “human dignity” in a country where the dignity of human beings is regularly undermined by the country’s own authorities.
Earlier this year the prominent Chinese activist Hu Jia was jailed for three and half years after a one-day trial, while the Olympic countdown was under way. His crime? Publicly criticising China’s human rights record. His 35th birthday fell the week before last and his wife, mother and sister were all prevented from visiting him even though he has a serious liver disease and may not be getting the medication he needs. Foreign media teams have also been barred at the entrance to the family’s flat by an eight-person security detail. Even his family is gagged.
To cap it all, Hu Jia is being made to sing “reform songs” in prison as part of his compulsory “rehabilitation” regime. If his case doesn’t highlight the gap between Beijing ’08 and the 61st year of the Festival, then I don’t know what does.
So, while the Festival may have its faults, the police aren’t arresting people in the Royal Mile. I say: let’s stop moaning and let’s start enjoying our freedom.
John Watson is director of Amnesty International Scotland. Amnesty is highlighting Hu Jia’s case throughout the Festival. You can call for the Chinese authorities to release him by going to www.amnesty.org.uk/edinburghfestivals. 