John Legend Rejects Calls to Cancel Bahrain Show Over Rights Abuses
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Version 0 of 1. Bahraini rights activists expressed dismay on Friday that John Legend, the American singer known for his outspoken advocacy of civil rights and racial equality in the United States, plans to perform in Bahrain next week, despite the country’s brutal crackdown on dissent. Faced with calls to cancel his appearance on Monday at Bahrain’s state-sponsored Spring of Culture festival, Mr. Legend said in a statement sent to The Independent in London that he was aware of “documented human rights abuses by the government of Bahrain,” but preferred to “engage with the people of the country” by visiting there. Bahrain’s ruling monarchy has jailed dissidents and restricted free speech since protesters took to the streets in 2011, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. In his statement, Mr. Legend said that he had “spent quite a bit of time thinking about human rights, civil rights and other issues of justice, both in the United States and abroad. The solution to every human rights concern is not always to boycott.” The singer added that part of his “mission in life is to spread love and joy to people all over the world,” and he hoped that touring widely would allow him to “meet the many people who are peacefully struggling for freedom, justice and accountability, regardless of what country they live in, and tell them directly that I stand with them.” His response failed to convince critics of Bahrain’s government. Maryam Alkhawaja, a rights activist whose father and sister have been sentenced to long jail terms for engaging in peaceful protest, said in an email that she was disappointed that Mr. Legend intended to play at the festival, because his performance “will be used by the regime to whitewash ongoing violations.” Reacting to his statement about his hope to meet and encourage dissidents in Bahrain, Ms. Alkhawaja said, “‘Freedom fighters’ couldn’t attend even if they wanted to.” Mr. Legend, she said, “should not drown out the cries of people being attacked only 10 minutes away from where he is performing with his music.” Earlier this week, Mr. Legend had offered words of encouragement to protesters as he accepted an Oscar for “Glory,” the theme song for the film “Selma,” about the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. After his co-writer, Common, mentioned recent protests in France and Hong Kong, Mr. Legend told viewers of the Academy Awards telecast, “We say that ‘Selma is now’ because the struggle for justice is right now.” Americans, the singer added, “live in the most incarcerated country in the world. There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you.” Ala’a Shehabi, a British-Bahraini activist, criticized Mr. Legend for not extending his concern with incarceration in the United States to political prisoners in Bahrain, an American ally that is home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet. Ms. Shehabi said in an interview that she had tried to contact Mr. Legend through his agent, “to see how he wants to ‘engage,’ ” but that the singer had not yet taken up her offer “to start a ‘conversation’ ” about the repression in Bahrain, which drove her and other dissidents into exile in Britain. While activists tried to reach Mr. Legend, it seems possible that he could be getting a very different impression of Bahrain from people closer to him. A similar campaign in 2012 failed to dissuade one of Mr. Legend’s friends, Kim Kardashian, from visiting Bahrain for the grand opening of a milkshake shop at a mall in the kingdom. Mr. Legend and Ms. Kardashian recently shared a photograph of themselves with their spouses on a double date. Marc Lynch, the director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, addressed an open letter to Mr. Legend on the subject, urging him to “apply your strong political convictions at home to a very similar set of problems abroad, and reconsider this performance, or speak out about what you see.” Mr. Lynch, who identified himself as a fan, noted that Mr. Legend had also equated the story of “Selma” with the protests in Ferguson last year, writing in an op-ed article that he had screened the final version of the film “with the backdrop of the streets of many of our major cities filled with protesters, crying out for justice after yet another unarmed black person’s life was taken by the police with impunity.” Mr. Lynch argued in his letter: “Bahraini lives have been taken by the police with impunity as well, and Bahraini lives do matter. I hope that you will think deeply about the implications of performing in a country like today’s Bahrain, where the violence of an unaccountable police against peaceful protesters mirrors everything against which you have spoken out at home. If you do decide to perform, perhaps you could speak out about the situation there as you have so gracefully done here in America.” As Ms. Alkhawaja noted last summer, three years before the American protesters mentioned in the song “Glory” confronted police officers in Ferguson, Mo., with the chant, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” demonstrators in Bahrain were gunned down by the security forces as they marched with raised hands, repeating the Arabic word for “peaceful” — “selmiya” — again and again. |