These are trying times. We live in an age of autocracy when strongmen (they are almost always men) abuse their power to silence their critics, use brute force to stop people championing the vulnerable and rob people of their agency in the pursuit of power.
In a world flooded with triumphant nationalist statements and declarations of war, who speaks for the other side? Who is willing to risk solitary confinement and be torn from loved ones to speak for the voiceless?
We caught up with six dissidents, who have been been imprisoned for a total of 26 years and three months, to understand what it is like to speak out in the age of despots.
Biram Dah Abeid, Mauritania
“This is the worst it has ever been,” says Biram Dah Abeid, a tireless campaigner for victims of modern-day slavery, “because those who were supposed to defend and advocate for human rights were the free world, the western world, but now they are too weak … [as] the extreme right continues to rise.”
To make things worse, he believes, in the Muslim world governments are behaving like the militant groups Boko Haram or Islamic State. “They aren’t accountable to anyone. Freedom, democracy, equality, these values are not important to them. They say they are against [militant groups], but really they act like them.”
A descendent of a slave, Dah Abeid has dedicated himself to freeing and reintegrating the hundreds of thousands of people estimated to be trapped in slavery in Mauritania.
The founder of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), which has picked up thousands of supporters, has pitted himself directly against the authorities. The campaigner has served three stretches in prison, his house and supporters have been attacked and, while he plans to return home this April, he knows his safety is not guaranteed.
Dalal Khario, Iraq
Dalal Khario, a young Yazidi woman from northern Iraq, can shed light on what it is like to live under one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups.
When she was 17, her village was razed to the ground by Isis and she was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery for nine brutal months, during which she was married off to nine terrorists.
Khario was presented with the international women’s rights award at the Human Rights Summit in Geneva on Tuesday, but described the moment as bittersweet because her mother and sister were not there to congratulate her. They have yet to escape Isis.
Khario’s experiences were published in a memoir under the pseudonym Shirin last year. She starts to cry when she talks about failed attempts by the international community to rescue the estimated thousands being held by the militants.
“To the women and children being enslaved and raped: don’t be afraid because society will welcome you with open arms on your return, [even] the young and indoctrinated … I will fight for your rights, and myself,” she says.
Can Dündar, Turkey
Khario is not the only dissident at the summit separated from loved ones against her will. The Turkish newspaper editor Can Dündar had to flee his country after surviving an attempt on his life and a three-month stretch in prison for “revealing state secrets”. His wife, who tackled his assailant, remains trapped in Istanbul.
Dündar says people power can still prevail if it is undaunted. He believes the passion that led to the spontaneous eruption of protest at Gezi Park in 2013 has not disappeared despite the subsequent crackdown. “Those people [who stood against the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] are still there and make me optimistic about the future.”
Taghi Rahmani, Iran
The Iranian journalist Taghi Rahmani has twin 10-year-old boys who only know life with one parent. After spending more than a third of his life in jail for his writing and political activities, he fled to Paris with his sons in 2012. His wife, Narges Mohammadi, also a journalist, is now serving a 16-year prison sentence in Iran.
“My family is never united. My children don’t understand why they can’t live together [and are] always afraid that I’ll be arrested,” says Rahmani.
Rahmani, like Dündar, was subject to solitary confinement, a punishment he regards as particularly cruel for freedom campaigners.
The summit was held to put the dissidents in the spotlight a week before the UN Human Rights Council is due to convene for its 18th annual meeting, but many there were happy to admit the international body is flawed.
Saudi Arabia, a country accused of indiscriminately bombing Yemen, and which bans women from driving, has a seat on the council.
Danilo ‘El Sexto’ Maldonado, Cuba
So does Cuba, a country that released Danilo “El Sexto” Maldonado from jail only four weeks ago.
Fresh out of prison, the artist describes the environment we live in as “medieval, with dictators who create distrust, without explaining why”. He has spent a total of four years behind bars for painting resistance art on the streets of Cuba, and says he was threatened with execution and had his food poisoned with sleeping pills.
Maldonado calls for people to make a lot of noise to champion people like him. “Dictators take advantage when people don’t know what’s happening,” he says, which is “why some of the most cruel dictatorships don’t have the internet, like Cuba and North Korea”.
Mohamed Nasheed, Maldives
Mohamed Nasheed, who was the Maldives’ first democratically elected president before he was overthrown by a coup, also calls on people to keep speaking for dissidents and for tourists to think twice about their holiday destinations.
The politician, who has refugee status in the UK, says there are 1,700 opposition voices “at risk” on the small island paradise from a government currently “hellbent on reversing progress on democracy”. Nasheed spent a total of five years in prison, where he was tortured – a fate his father and grandfather also suffered.
Nasheed, however, does not believe the world is going “downhill completely” and encourages his fellow dissidents to “never give up. You might fall today; you might be tortured; you might be arrested. Keep yourself together and keep calm.”
Dündar and Rahmani agree. While Rahmani describes Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani as “barriers” to progress, he maintains that thinking on human rights has never been more advanced.
Dündar also sees the road ahead as bright: “There is another face of the world, a bigger family than the aggressors. If we come together in solidarity, we can push them back.”
