THE 25th anniversary edition of the magazine Index On Censorship is really celebrating a failure. After a quarter of a century of publication there is still a need for a magazine that highlights censorship and the persecution of writers, journalists and publishers.
It does this, it must he said, with a large dollop of style and with some great writing and reporting. The paradox of its survival is not lost on its editor, Ursula Owen, who said in the editorial of the latest issue: "Thank God, alas, we are still in business."
Index began monitoring censorship in a very different world back in 1972. It was started in response to an open letter from two Soviet dissidents: Pavel Litvinov, who is now a member of the council of Index and lives in New York, and Larisa Bogoraz Daniel. They wrote a letter to the London Times protesting against political show trials in Moscow. A group of western writers and musicians - Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, W. H. Auden and Igor Stravinsky - sent a telegram in reply offering their support and letting them know how much they admired their stance. The outcome was Index.
The magazine more or less avoided falling into the trap of assuming that censorship was a phenomenon of the Soviet Union or Eastern European countries alone. The first issue listed countries where writers, artists, scholars and journalists were being persecuted for expressing opinions unpopular with those in authority. They included Portugal, the Soviet Union, Brazil, Spain, South Africa, Greece, China and Indonesia.
That first issue included the index of censorship, a chronicle of the suppression of free expression from around the world. It also covered the murder trial of Angela Davis, the US communist who was an early victim of Reaganism, when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California.
The magazine remains a source of information on freedom of expression issues around the world.
Today it features places such as Algeria, where journalists are in constant danger, or emerging countries which were a formerly part of the USSR.
Unfortunately, but hardly surprisingly, Ireland has featured in Index. In the first year it published an article on television coverage of Northern Ireland. In 1973 there was apiece on the sacking of the RTE Authority by the Fianna Fail government the previous November for broadcasting an interview with the then chief of staff of the IRA, Sean MacStiofain. The dismissal was, according to the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, "an exercise in democracy".
Since then Ireland's censorship laws, its banning of books, cutting of films, its Sinn Fein/ IRA broadcasting ban and its obsession with sex and family planning have all featured in Index. More recently it covered the new Freedom of Information legislation.
Ursula Owen is the magazine's sixth editor. She is a former cultural adviser to the British Labour Party and a cofounder of Virago Press. Like previous editors, she has brought her own style to the magazine, revamping it in book format, with a colour cover and photographs. She has widened its appeal and increased its circulation. Index is now also available on the World Wide Web.
Ms Owen talked to me in her office in Islington, north London. The early issues were much more concerned with literature and poetry, especially Samizdat literature, she says. It had a special quality, it was European and was censored Nowadays things are very different. Governments are more "sussed" about censorship, they have picked up "human rights speak" and have learnt how to censor without appearing to censor, she says.
With the end of the polar capitalist/ communist world a form of debate also went, the defence of the freedom of speech of Eastern Europe's writers. Today, amid the clam our of voices and of ethnic conflict, there is a new culture in which people are "silenced" rather than censored. The silenced are not always European, not necessarily intellectual and not always as attractive as a bearded, intellectual Eastern European novelist in need of championing.
To be editor of Index in the 1990s is far more complex than in the 1970s. In the early 1970s there was freedom of expression and there was censorship. Now there is a shortage of certainties. Those struggling for freedom of expression have to come to terms with hate speech. It is increasingly difficult to say: "I might hate what you ate saying but will fight for your right to say it", when what is said may lead to death and destruction. In former Yugoslavia it was the media that made the unthinkable possible, the civil war. Then there was the media in Rwanda, which fomented the hatred that led to genocide.
Ursula Owen says she is no absolutist when it comes to free speech because she knows that words can kill. Others writing in Index believe differently, but that is what debate is ally about.
The Index of today must look at media ownership, diversity and access to the media. It must deal with the dangers of censorship as well as the joys of freedom of expression. Those of us who have contributed to its pages have found ourselves surrounded by some of the best writers and thinkers in the modern world. The 25th anniversary edition has Umberto Eco, Nadime Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, as well as Ariel Dorfman, Aung San Suu Kyi, J.G. Ballard and Noam Chomsky.
Journalists everywhere should read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's piece, "The Best Job in the World". Newsrooms, he says, "have become aseptic laboratories for solitary travellers, where it seems easier to communicate with extraterrestrial phenomena than with readers' hearts. The dehumanisation is galloping".