China

Poet Liu Xia is the widow of Liu Xiaobo, human rights hero and winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. She has been under house arrest in Beijing since her husband’s death almost a year ago. And for what? For what crime is she condemned to a confinement that, she has just been told, will last for as long as she lives? For this: for fear on the part of the authorities that if she were allowed to leave China and go into exile she would keep alive the memory of her husband, defend him against the shameless lies that pour from the regime’s propaganda machine, and make his name a living reproach, a weapon in the hands of believers in democracy. According to the few eyewitnesses who have been able to visit her, she is at the end of her rope. Walled in; near despair; resigned to follow her husband into death. One thinks of Antigone at the end of Sophocles’ play, before she is entombed: “I am not among the living or the dead.” One thinks of Antigone’s “crime”—wanting to spare slain Polynices the second death that would have been the denial of an honorable burial, withheld to prevent him from being remembered. And one suspects that it is Creon who, behind the congenial Silk Road smiles, has indeed won in China.

Turkey

Salih Muslim is a 61-year-old Kurd, born in Kobani. Until recently, he was one of the leaders of the PYD, the Syrian Kurdish party that shared with the Peshmerga of Iraqi Kurdistan the distinction of having defeated the Islamic State. From his new home in Finland, he goes to Prague to attend a conference. There he is arrested by Czech police enforcing an extradition request from Turkey, which considers Salih Muslim to be linked to the PKK and thus a member of a terrorist organization. For two days he is kept in custody under heavy guard. He spends several weeks trying to extricate himself from a Kafkaesque proceeding in which the real prosecutors are obviously Turkish agents. After which a sword of Damocles is left hanging over his head. More blackmail from Erdogan? Yesterday, refugees; today, dissidents? And a Europe that once again agrees to knuckle under? Let’s not try to compare the incomparable. But to this man hunted down in the heart of the West, which he helped to save but that became a trap, I dedicate this line from Lohenstein quoted by Walter Benjamin at the end of his own persecution: “And when the Most High comes to empty the cemeteries, my skull and crossbones will have the face of an angel.”

Iran

Another Kurd whose name I want to mention is Ramin Hossein Panahi, age 22. He was arrested almost a year ago in Sanandaj, his native city and the capital of Iranian Kurdistan, under the pretext, probably false, of belonging to Komala, a Kurdish party banned for having once been Marxist. Panahi was thrown in prison. Held incommunicado. Tortured. After a parody of a trial during which he was afforded neither the luxury of defending himself nor a lawyer to defend him, he was sentenced to die. Only at the last moment, as the result of an opinion campaign launched by Amnesty International to which I did my best to contribute, was his execution suspended—and I mean suspended, no doubt only until the furor dies down and the forgetful democracies turn their attention to something else. What leads a country like Iran, in the midst of a fight to the death with the rest of the world and battling not only to survive but also to reconstitute its former empire, to go after a lone man lacking in collective importance and strategically insignificant? An absurd mystery, the Soviet dissidents would have said. But a sure sign, as those expendable souls, also would have said, of a true totalitarian regime.

Saudi Arabia

Returning to Riyadh, silence on the fate of Raif Badawi, a blogger sentenced six years ago to ten years in prison and a thousand lashes, of which so far only the first fifty have been administered. Same question as posed above à propos of Panahi. Same mystery. Same strange obstinacy of the Saudi “reformers” to torment a man—now a symbol—for advocating in his blogs the freedom of conscience, the rejection of corruption (and the corrupt), and equality of the sexes—all of which are supposedly at the top of their own agenda. And, for a student of La Boétie, for someone who, like me, has always thought that the “one” of Against One, better known outside France as the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, is found simultaneously at the very top and the very bottom, I propose this test: We will begin to believe in the possible sincerity of MBS—we will begin to see something other than window dressing in his decisions to allow women to drive and to view movies in the country of Mecca and Medina, and to cease financing terrorism—if this week, on the eve of Ramadan, he deigns to add Badawi’s name to the list of those pardoned.

Russia

Vladimir Putin also has a pesky blogger causing him trouble. Since Boris Nemtsov’s assassination on the steps of the Kremlin, that pest has even become his number one opponent. His name is Alexei Navalny, a man of steel who rails against corruption, against “the party of thieves and swindlers,” and against the violence done by the regime to its “140 million victims.” And the coincidence of this decidedly singular week is that he, too, along with a good thousand others, was tossed into prison after a massive demonstration held under the banner “Not Our Czar!” two days ahead of Putin’s (latest) inauguration. Putin has had him released. But for how long? A trial is set for May 11, four days after the inauguration that Putin wanted to be a sober and incident-free affair. It’s a safe bet that, once the ceremony is past, Putin’s leniency will have waned as well.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is the author, most recently, of The Empire and the Five Kings, published in French in January and forthcoming in English from Henry Holt later this year. The book tracks the retreat of the American empire and the reawakening of five former empires and rising powers: China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. This column was translated by Steven B. Kennedy.