Blogs are an alternative source of independence news in Burma as all other media such as newspapers, radio, and TV are controlled by the military regime.
The bloggers gained international attention during the ‘Saffron Revolution’ against the government lead by the countries monks in 2007. Bloggers were the main source of news and uploaded video and images of the protest.
As our reporter Banyar Kong Janoi found out, the blogs are an important source of election news for young people inside Burma.
He spent two days with a renowned blogger inYangon.
An internet shop in Yangon is full of customers.
Most of them are young.
All though there is still no date for the election, there are many online forums with open heated debate about the poll.
University student, Mi Sike Ka-mar Chan, says she has learned a lot about the election online.
“2010 election is a heated issue in every blogs. On their discussion page, some people comment the election is good for people while others criticize. Some criticize the National League for Democracy Party not joining the election while others support them for boycotting it. There are a lot of blogs about Burma. We just read the ones that interest us. The blog suits Burmese people because they have a low bandwidth so we can open them easily.”
Another university student, Moe Kyaw, says blogs are his only source of information.
“I learnt from the blog about the 2010 election especially from the blogs which focus on politics. They post how to vote and they post the regulation of the election. By reading those posts we know the answers and we can say why we don’t agree with the election.”
The freeforcountry.tayzartay.com blogger is based in Rangoon.
He is calling for radical changes to the election process.
“We want to see an election of international standard. The government must change. We want a government who is truly elected by the people. We have lived under a military dictatorship since birth. Because of these we have to struggle to live. Compared to other countries we are behind because of the military leaders. That’s why we must follow other countries and lift the living standard of the people. We are fighting with our pen to explain to people from our blog.”
His blog became popular among young people inside Burma and gained an international audience after the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in 2007 when monks staged large street protests against the military regime in Burma.
The bloggers played a critical role by uploading images and telling the true story. In response the government cut internet access to the entire country.
A ‘Force for Country’ blogger explains how they avoid the government censorship.
“We need software, proxy numbers to pass through a banned server to login our blogs. The free proxy can be expired. So we share among our peers and we found new tech and proxy numbers that can pass the server to upload posts. We upload it in different internet cafés because if we upload at a permanent shop and post with a single IP, the authorities would know; they would come and arrest us. Typing in the house, we just upload the post in the shop within a minute. As soon as we have uploaded we leave.”
Shop owners are required to report customers who are looking at banned websites or sites that criticise the government.
They have been ordered by the government to check each user’s screen every 15 minutes to monitor their online activities.
On all the PCs in this internet café is a sign that reads: “You are not allowed to see political and pornography websites.”
Youtube, Google mail and Yahoo mail are blocked.
However many users are smart enough to surf banned websites through proxy servers.
But bloggers working inside the country do so at great risk.
28-year-old blogger, Nay Phone Latt, was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2008 for posting a cartoon of the military leader, Than Shwe.
‘Free for country’ bloggers says security is very important.
“We can’t just look at the screen; we always have to look around us and see who is looking at us. When we are uploading, we do not use a full screen. We use the “restore down” function- half screen. While we are uploading the post we pretend to be surfing other websites so people don’t pay attention to us.”
He says he takes the risks because it’s his responsibility as a citizen of Burma.
“I don’t get any support in the way of funds to operate this blog. I just save from my pocket money to use the Internet for uploading posts. I get technical help from my friends who are better with computers. We can present the true story. It’s incredible when we go on a field trip; we can upload pictures which tell the true current story. When people understand the situation and learn from our blog, we are happier than if we got paid for our work. I feel this job is important so I do it.”
He says he is very honest in his work.
“I am very concerned with accuracy. I go into the field to collect information. Although there is not a lot of news on my blog it’s more of a watchdog. I monitor the work of civil servants and government officials. If I get a new’s tip, I will investigate further before posting it and I will take photos.”
Back in the Rangoon internet café university student, Nai Rot Khine, says bloggers are a lifeline for her generation.
“As for me, reading blogs is very important. We can read different kinds of issues. We can read open discussion about the current politics so we can make ourselves rich in knowledge.”
MuslinWhat the Facebook Ban Says About Pakistan's Judiciary
Kathryn Allawala KATHRYN ALLAWALA works at Foreign Affairs.
On May 19, news spread that Pakistan was blocking many open-content Web sites -- including Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr -- after users complained about a Facebook page that was holding a competition encouraging users to draw caricatures of Muhammad. Before the ban, supporters used Facebook status updates to declare their intent to boycott the site. Many of those who were opposed updated their pages with messages that they would not be visiting the Web site until their government changed its mind. On the streets, the mood was darker. On one side, activists marched in favor of the move and called for even wider restrictions. On the other, another group demonstrated for the ban's immediate reversal.
In one sense, these events can be read as a sign of Pakistan's growing Islamization and the government's fear of social unrest. Acting at the behest of a group of lawyers called the Islamic Lawyers Movement, the Lahore High Court, the highest court of Pakistan's most populous region, argued that the courts had a responsibility to act against such a blasphemous offense. The government, which had favored blocking only the Facebook page in question, was apparently driven less by religious concern than by the desire to avoid a replay of the violent riots that shook the country following the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy.
Beyond the issues of religion and freedom of speech, however, lies a deeper story -- that of Pakistan's changing power structure and the shifting roles of the country's three institutional pillars: the government, the judiciary, and the military. Rather than simply a sign of creeping Islamism, the Facebook ban is an outgrowth of the power struggle that has consumed the judiciary and the government since 2007, when Pervez Musharraf's military dictatorship crumbled. Should these struggles persist, the third pillar might very well make a comeback.
Previous battles among Pakistan's three institutional pillars are evident in the nation's much-amended constitution, and the revisions to this document set the scene for the recent Lahore High Court ruling. As Humayun Akhtar Khan, secretary-general of the Pakistan Muslim League, recently wrote in Dawn, Pakistan's leading English-language newspaper, "Since Pakistan came into existence there has been a tussle between the politicians and the generals. When they assume power, the generals seek legitimacy and the politicians more power. Together, they shred the constitution to pieces." For the past 40 years, while the civilian government and the military have sabotaged the constitution, the country, and each other, the judiciary has stood quite helpless between them. But now its power is growing.
The institutional roles of Pakistan's three pillars solidified during the tenure of Pakistan's first popularly elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power in 1971. During his seven-year rule, he used his constitutionally unrestrained power to ban opposition parties and centralize control over the provinces. In the meantime, he amended the country's constitution to set a fixed term for judges and gave himself the authority to transfer them between courts. The upshot was obvious: he could pack the high courts with whatever allies he wanted.
When his Pakistan People's Party (PPP) claimed 75 percent of the vote in the 1977 general election, it was a bridge too far and violent riots swept across the country. It was then that General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan's most notorious military dictator, stepped in to restore order and abolished the overly powerful role of prime minister. Shortly thereafter, he amended the constitution to shorten the tenure of the chief justice of Pakistan, who was forced to retire immediately. By the fall of 1977, a pliant Supreme Court had officially validated his coup, and he became president. The court's action set a dangerous precedent: the civilian government would amass power and become corrupt, the military would intervene, and the courts would provide it with legal cover.
Over the next few years, Zia further weakened the courts. He forced judges to take oaths of allegiance to him and set up the Federal Shariat Court, an Islamic court independent from the federal courts with judges beholden to him. By the mid-1980s, Zia turned his attention from reforming Pakistan's judiciary to reforming its civilian government. He reinstated the post of prime minister and pushed an amendment through parliament that gave the president the ability to dismiss the prime minister and the National Assembly. Not only did the move further legitimize his dismissal of Bhutto it also put him at the center of Pakistan's political system and ensured that no one in government could cross him -- and no one did.
In fact, it wasn't until popularly elected civilian politicians returned to power after Zia's death, in 1988, that the amendment was ever invoked. And in the decade that followed, no democratically elected prime minister finished his or her term: Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was dismissed by the president twice, in 1990 and 1996; and in between, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was dismissed once, in 1993. The presidents cited incompetence, corruption, and nepotism in each case.
After Bhutto was ousted in 1996, Sharif was again elected to office. He was determined to reform the constitution and put an end to the government's clashes over power -- mostly by vesting all of it in himself. In addition to revoking the amendment that gave the president the power to dismiss him, he passed another to give party leaders (namely, him) the power to dismiss any legislator who failed to vote with the party head. In 1997, when the Supreme Court attempted to invalidate some judicial appointments Sharif had tried to make, he had party members storm the court and forcibly banish the chief justice and the president.
Sharif's unchecked rule spurred violent protests across the country, cueing Pakistan's military to intervene. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf seized power. The coup was widely popular, and the Supreme Court quickly and unanimously validated it. To restore functioning governance, Musharraf, now president, amended the constitution to once again empower the president to dismiss the prime minister. This completed Pakistan's second tour through the cycle of civilian corruption and military intervention followed by a judiciary rubber stamp on the process.
In 2007, however, something surprising happened: a burgeoning civil society, a more professionalized class of young lawyers, and widespread fatigue after eight years of Musharraf's increasingly unpopular rule invigorated the judiciary. With elections looming, Musharraf needed the Supreme Court to renew an earlier ruling that he could remain head of the military and still run for president. The court refused to do so, and Musharraf attempted to dismiss its chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. In reaction, a peaceful movement of lawyers for the reinstatement Chaudhry and the ouster of Musharraf swept the country. The political parties were able to capitalize on the movement, and the PPP won the 2008 elections. Shortly thereafter, Musharraf left the country.
For the first time in Pakistan's history, it appeared that the government and judiciary would be empowered at the expense of the military, putting an end to the country's political problems. A more powerful judiciary, people hoped, would temper the worst of the civilian politicians' inclinations to amass power. And in turn, the government would be less vulnerable to military intervention because the military had historically only stepped in when the politicians' corruption led to political breakdown and popular unrest.
Now it appears that many battles between the judiciary and government loom on the horizon. Early this year, the government decided to amend Pakistan's constitution, proclaiming that it was strengthening the country's democratic institutions. The new amendment, the constitution's 18th, which passed the National Assembly in April, yet again revokes the main presidential power -- the right to dissolve the National Assembly and dismiss the prime minister. The PPP has argued that the amendment replaces the imbalanced, quasi-presidential system (which they see as a legacy of Pakistan's military dictators) with a more democratic, fully parliamentary, and stronger one. Even though the bill renders President Asif Ali Zardari little more than a figurehead, he nonetheless claimed at the signing ceremony: "I do not find myself powerless because my power is democracy and people of the country."
Certainly, the amendment restores the balance of power to Pakistan's National Assembly and strips some remaining vestiges of the military dictatorships from the constitution: it nullifies Zia's and Musharraf's major constitutional amendments, and even removes every mention of Zia's name. And safe from being sacked by the president at whim, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani might be able to lead the National Assembly to take up matters -- such as the country's economic problems and ongoing energy crisis -- that Zardari had neglected or over which he had been deadlocked with the main opposition party, the Pakistani Muslim League (PML).
But troublingly, the amendment removes from the constitution a clause that mandated regular intraparty elections, and it does nothing to address the power of party heads to remove rogue legislators. This means that Sharif -- who remains head of the PML but has been barred from holding elected office because of criminal charges against him (until the 18th Amendment changed this rule in order to get the PML vote) -- could dismiss parliamentarians of his party who do not vote as he directs on a range of issues. Although Zardari has been divested of much of his official power, he and his 22-year-old son, Bilawal Bhutto, remain co-chairmen of the PPP. It is unlikely that Gillani, now technically the most powerful PPP member in parliament, will take up legislative matters that Zardari doesn't approve. Nor will the PML cross Sharif. Without internal democracy, the major parties will remain conduits for personal power and new ideas will be crowded out. Progress on Pakistan's most pressing problems will remain stalled, as Zardari and Sharif continue to clash. Unfortunately, this sets the government up for a collapse and military similar to those of 1977 and 1999.
The wild card this time is the judiciary. Already the Supreme Court has decried the amendment as unconstitutional, arguing that these measures undermine democracy as laid out in Pakistan's 1973 constitution. It has also taken issue with the new commission to appoint judges, which will include representatives from the National Assembly, that the 18th Amendment mandates. At the same time, it has begun hearings on whether Zardari is legally able to hold the posts of president and PPP party head at once, and has started corruption cases against many leading politicians.
The by-product of the judiciary's increasing power will be plenty more cases such as these and the Facebook ruling, where the court system tests its limits and tries to eke out further control. Tellingly, the government did not speak out publicly against the ban when it was enforced, even though it had been opposed to shutting down pages and Web site other than the Facebook page with the "Draw Muhammad" contest. Indeed, this ban was a well-selected bit of judicial activism; since Islamic morality is such a divisive topic in Pakistan, the government would not be able to condemn the Lahore High Court without inciting a potentially violent response. Although the Supreme Court has now rolled back the ban, it has left open the possibility for the courts to censor offensive material in the future.
Given Pakistan's weak constitution and poorly institutionalized government, there is no guarantee that total judicial independence from elected politicians (even the terribly corrupt, power-hungry ones) will be a good thing. For all the professional and moderate lawyers and judges, there are plenty who are corrupt, are carrying out personal vendettas, are in the pockets of those who appointed them, or are beholden to religious groups such as the Islamic Lawyers Movement. If these kinds of rulings monopolize the judiciary's agenda, distracting it from the more pressing task of moderating a government that looks to be repeating the same mistakes as civilian governments past, Pakistan's empowered second pillar may end up being yet another problem. As always, the country's third pillar waits in the wings, ready to step in if the situation should get out of hand.
The Facebook Fiasco and the Future of Free Speech in Pakistan
Madiha R. Tahir MADIHA R. TAHIR is a freelance journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The National, Global Post, and Columbia Journalism Review.
More than 30 people have been murdered across Karachi this week in politically motivated violence between Mohajirs and Pashtuns, but it is Facebook -- or rather the controversy raging over its ban in Pakistan -- that draws a crowd. When Facebook hosted a page encouraging users to submit cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in mid-May, many Pakistanis reacted by denouncing the Web site as blasphemous on the grounds that Islam prohibits images of Muhammad as part of a wider edict against idolatry. Some have taken to the streets.
On May 20, my rickshaw puttered alongside a large rally organized by the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami. Hundreds of young male protesters moved in knots behind an overstuffed bus adorned with a banner reading: "To protect our Prophet against blasphemy, we will even sacrifice our lives!" In other times, these young men might have protested the countrywide ban on Facebook, which lasted from May 19 to 31, but last week they were marching resolutely in support of blocking the site. For them, Facebook had insulted their religion and community; for the country's leaders,the ban was political currency. Even as five bomb blasts shook Lahoreand U.S. drones attacked the Federally Administered Tribal Areas last week, Pakistan's Islamist organizations pressed ahead with demonstrations against Facebook.
The Jamaat-e-Islami rally came to a halt outside the gates of the Karachi Press Club. Inside, a press conference was getting rowdy. "Contempt of court!" shouted a rotund reporter interrupting Awab Alvi, a dentist known in the Pakistani blogosphere as Teeth Maestro. Alvi was one of four speakers attempting to reframe the debate about the ban as a question of free speech rather than of blasphemy, but the reporters shouted him down.
At first, the Pakistani journalists who fought mightily during Pervez Musharraf's presidency against curtailments of press freedom seemed the likeliest group to reject the Facebook ban. In late 2007, they had marched in the streets and were physically beaten; many of those who reject the Facebook ban today marched with them. But late this month, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced its support for the ban, leaving its former allies feeling betrayed. "Freedom of speech doesn't give anyone a right to play with religious and sacred feelings of others, or to play with the societal norms," PFUJ declared in its press statement.
The journalists assembled at the Karachi Press Club on May 20 did not seem to mind that there had been irregularities in the legal process, such as petitioners misleading the judge to believe that Facebook, rather than its users, had created the competition and that other Muslim countries had also blocked the Web site. They were much more concerned with what they perceived as Facebook's insult to the Muslim community. "Pakistani sentiments are involved, and you're saying that you're siding with them!" bellowed one in Urdu. Alvi's arguments about free speech seemed to confirm what they already believed: anti-ban activists are elitists who care more about poking their friends on Facebook than protecting the honor of their fellow Pakistani Muslims.
Although only a fraction of Pakistan's 170 million people have regular access to the Internet, the ban -- which was repealed here on May 31 -- has exposed the broader battle over how to define the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship in Pakistan. It is a fight that the defenders of individual rights are losing.
The Facebook controversy is no longer a laughing matter, but it actually began as a joke. For its milestone 200th episode on April 14, 2010, Comedy Central's South Park depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a cartoon character. A few days later, the New York-based group Revolution Muslim -- which was founded by an American Jew who converted to Islam after attending rabbinical school in Israel -- published threats against South Park's creators on its Web site. In response, Comedy Central quickly removed all Muhammad references in the sequel. The Seattle artist Molly Norris reacted to the network's move by drawing a Muhammad cartoon dedicated to the co-creators of South Park and declaring May 20 "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." Following her announcement, Facebook user Jon Wellington created a fan page where users began submitting content.
On May 19, the Lahore High Court instituted a blanket ban on Facebook until the end of the month. Government telecommunications regulators took the ban further, widening the censorship to include other social networking sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Youtube; even Gmail and Google suffered sporadic blocks. Nearly one thousand sites were banned throughout Pakistan until yesterday, when Judge Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry, who was responsible for ordering the ban, asked authorities to lift it. Yet, at the same time, Chaudhry urged the government to institute a "mechanism" for banning blasphemous material in the future, effectively lending further legal cover to government censorship. Mudassir Hussain, the director of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, reportedly volunteered to continue blocking links to blasphemous content associated with the "Draw Muhammad Day" contest.
The issue has pitted those who speak the language of individual rights against those who use religious rhetoric to air community grievances. Pakistan's largest demographic -- the young, urban middle class born during the Islamization campaigns of former General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's U.S.-backed dictatorship -- has in recent years adopted the second narrative. They are bound together by a sense of membership in an aggrieved Muslim community that they feel is under attack from both the West (in the form of drone strikes, the broader U.S. war on terror, and Washington's efforts to influence Pakistani political and military decision-making) and from the militant Islamists who regularly bomb their fellow Pakistanis.
These frustrated youth are not Taliban-style Islamists who want to do battle with the state. They are nationalists with grandiose visions of Pakistan as a potential leader among Muslim nations if it could only be saved from the extreme forces trying to destroy it. This national narrative has found eager supporters, from celebrities such as the televangelist Zaid Hamid to the fashion designer Maria B., who imagine the Pakistani nation not as a community of individuals with inalienable rights and autonomous choices but one that is based on an ideal: Islam. As in France, which banned the burka in the name of French secular republican values, Pakistani critics of Facebook sought to block the site in the name of defending community ideals.
Meanwhile, those who speak about individual rights find themselves dismissed as unpatriotic Pakistanis. It does not help their message that the most prominent faces in the anti-ban camp belong to the largely English-speaking, upper class that appears to be more culturally tied to the West than the Pakistani masses. As one exasperated journalist exclaimed at the May 20 press conference, "We are a roomful of intelligent people, and you can't even explain to us what you mean! How will you explain it to the court?"
The prevalence of a communal narrative that privileges Muslim identity and anti-ban activists' inability to clearly articulate their case in an idiom that the average Pakistani understands explains why none of the usual groups one might expect to reject the ban -- students, journalists, and lawyers -- actually opposes it.
In fact, it was a lawyers group that first invoked the notion of an aggrieved community to demand the ban in court, asserting that Facebook was "insult[ing] the emotions and feelings of Muslims." Shifting between religious justifications and constitutional reasoning, the Islamic Lawyers Movement petition protested "unlawful activities towards the constitution and Islamic injunctions and values."
The Islamic Lawyers' ambiguity is partly the legacy of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secularist who nevertheless rewrote the constitution in 1973 to appease Islamists. As in Israel, the only other country intended as a secular homeland for a religious group, it is unclear in Pakistan whether the state acts in the name of its citizens or the global Muslim community. The Islamic Lawyers' petition refers repeatedly to "Muslims of the world," on whose behalf they claim to act. "The role of religion in the state and the relationship of Islam with law has never been debated in this country," says the lawyer and newspaper columnist Babar Sattar. "Consequently, the only people speaking in the name of religion are those belonging to the religious right."
And the religious right has been speaking the language of the masses: Urdu. Although opinion in the English-language press has decried the incendiary nature of the "Draw Muhammad" campaign, it opposed the ban for its violation of individual rights. Comments in the Urdu press -- which outstrips English circulation by about seven to one -- have reinforced the idea of an Islamic community expressed in terms of kinship. Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a former minister of religious affairs, a televangelist, and a columnist for the largest Urdu daily, Jang, has employed familial analogies to argue for the ban. If children are expected to make sacrifices on behalf of their parents, he asked in a column, then how can Pakistanis as a community "be unwilling to give up Facebook for our beloved Prophet who taught us how important family is in the first place?" Ban supporters such as Hussain have deftly painted those arguing against censorship as hopelessly self-interested and a threat to the larger Muslim "family."
For their part, political parties have either steered clear of the controversy or openly supported the ban. The secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which governs Karachi, faulted the Web site but remained silent about the ban; the party of the former cricket superstar Imran Khan, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which tends to attract younger idealists, supported it; and President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's Party has allowed government regulators to widen censorship beyond the court order. This suggests that the government is interested in tamping down social networking sites, which have been effective organizing tools in the past.
On May 31, the court provided further legal cover to do just that. Even as it struck down the ban, Judge Chaudhry declared that telecommunications authorities could be charged with contempt of court if they do not block blasphemous material in the future, a handy excuse for overeager regulators who have already interpreted the Facebook ban in broad terms. Chaudhry did not institute any judicial oversight or procedural safeguards to govern such censorship, and he legitimized his stance in the name of public opinion. "It is the government's job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets," the judge said. "They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet." Chaudrhy's statement is essentially a bow to the religious right -- the group that has been on the streets in droves -- and consequently, an endorsement of their view that the honor of their imagined Muslim community comes before individual freedoms.
And the legal battle is not over: a second petition has now been filed in court demanding Internet censorship based on Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The Lahore High Court is expected to hear the case on June 15.
The anti-censorship movement has an uphill struggle in Pakistan, and those in the West who claim to believe in individual rights and free speech are not helping. The "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" Facebook page was set up in defense of "freedom of speech," but it misconstrued a concept that refers to government curtailments, not to the actions of private corporations such as Comedy Central, which constantly make editorial judgments for various reasons. The page also quickly became a forum for extremist comments. "There was a lot of calling Muslims 'vermin' and 'savages,'" says Arsalan Khan, a doctoral candidate, who debated with commenters on the site. After attracting more than 85,000 users and precipitating an actual free speech battle in Pakistan, the page was voluntarily shut down by its administrators. Facebook, which, according to one of the page's own administrators had received complaints "like 100,000 times" from users across the globe, did nothing.
Another "Draw Muhammad" page has since surfaced with even more derogatory content; some of its users have cautioned commenters to keep the page clean, "[u]nless of course we want this page to disappear and give Islam another victory?" Like the defenders of the ban in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community. Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the West's reactions to that community. All of this -- combined with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan -- has led many young Pakistanis to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.
"If we do something they don't like, they kill us. Look what they did in Iraq, look at Pakistani deaths," said a shy teenager who had joined the May 20 Jamaat-e-Islami rally outside the Karachi Press Club. "And you're saying we can't ban them?"
By Thomas Erdbrink Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 29, 2010; A10
TEHRAN -- Nearly a year after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed election victory led to wide-scale protests and a fierce government crackdown, members of Iran's thriving and internationally acclaimed cultural scene have emerged as a driving force for the opposition.
Filmmakers, singers and rappers are, in their own way, pushing for social and political changes, and many are paying the price of speaking out against a government that brooks little dissent. In response to films, songs and paintings inspired by the largest grass-roots opposition movement the country has seen since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the government has arrested artists and markedly increased censorship.
Although some artists have left the country to escape restrictions, others remain in Iran and have turned their work into tools of activism. But the protest message has to be subtle or indirect, and even then the work is often produced secretly, using legal loopholes or underground distribution networks to evade the notice of authorities.
When world-renowned director Jafar Panahi decided to make a film about a family caught in the turmoil after last June's election, he did not ask for permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Instead, the filmmaker turned his apartment into a film studio, with his wife cooking for the crew and friends playing the leading characters.
In March, security forces raided the home and arrested Panahi, the cast and his family.
"According to the law, nobody needs permits to film in their own house," he said in an interview. "But the government does not obey its own rules." Panahi was held for nearly three months; top directors such as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami called for his release. State media reported that he had been making an "illegal movie."
On Tuesday, Panahi was released on $200,000 bail, pending the start of his trial.
"They arrest individuals to set an example to others," Panahi said Wednesday as his apartment slowly filled with guests, including actors and writers who gave him a hero's welcome. "My interrogators accused me of working for foreign intelligence agencies and said I was trying to make a movie highlighting problems in Iran. But I believe the rights and demands of millions who demonstrated have been ignored. I want to give them a voice."
He isn't the only one. The latest song by popular underground rapper Hich Kas, "Nobody," has become an instant hit, often blasting from cars on Tehran's busy streets. Hich Kas sings:
Good days will come when we do not kill each other
Do not look badly upon each other
A day we are friends and hug each other like in our school days
The song might sound conciliatory, but it ends with sounds of strife from the protests. Hich Kas, whose real name is Soroush Lashkari, left Iran before the song was distributed through the Internet and street peddlers. He is now touring in Dubai and Malaysia, where many Iranians live.
Within Iran, the opposition movement has lost steam in recent months as the government has used increasingly forceful methods, including executions, to discourage protesters from taking to the streets. Government supporters now confidently proclaim that the opposition movement is dead. But there are still signs of discontent from those who believe Ahmadinejad's supporters rigged an election that should have been won by opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.
On Tuesday evening, 3,500 fans cheered, clapped and gave victory signs -- a popular opposition symbol -- when pop singer Alireza Assar sang a famous tune about corruption and dishonesty.
"People shouted 'Mousavi,' and almost everybody gave the 'V' sign," a witness said. "There would be immense cheering when the lyrics discussed corruption. Everybody interpreted the song as being against the government."
In a recent interview with Australian television, Iran's top performer of traditional songs, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, criticized Ahmadinejad for referring to the anti-government demonstrators as "dust and weeds."
"I announce that I am the voice of these dust and weeds," Shajarian said. "This voice always was and is for dust and weeds, and I do not let your radio and TV broadcast my voice."
His comments were widely repeated by foreign-based Farsi-language stations. Shajarian has said he will return to Iran within days.
Music, books, poetry and films filled with metaphors and irony played a significant role in the collapse of the Western-backed shah's government during the 1979 revolution. Books by the author Sadegh Hedayat were banned then because of their political content; during the annual Tehran book fair this month, his books and those of six other popular writers and poets -- some of whom died long ago -- were declared illegal by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.
Government officials say censorship efforts will continue. "I promise that within a couple of years, our cinema will be mostly making appropriate films. We will try to enforce restrictions so that we can get rid of problematic films in the future," said Mohammad Javad Shamaghdari, the deputy minister, according to the semiofficial Web site Khabaronline.ir.
But filmmakers such as Panahi say they don't intend to bend to the government's will. "In the end, they want artists like me to leave, but I will never go," Panahi said. "This is my land. I will remain here and make independent movies and support what is just."
BEIJING — Full Internet service was restored to the vast western Chinese region of Xinjiang on Friday, 10 months after it was blocked following deadly ethnic rioting that convulsed the regional capital, Urumqi. The blockage was the longest and most widespread in China since the Internet became readily available throughout the country a decade ago.
The announcement was made in the morning, and many residents in cities across Xinjiang took the day off from school or work to rush to Internet cafes, where they pored through months of unread e-mail messages or chatted via instant messaging. Some also dived back into online gaming, one of China’s most popular pastimes (“World of Warcraft” imitators being the most played).
In the violence in Urumqi on July 5, 2009, ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people that is the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, rampaged through the streets after security forces tried to break up a protest over social injustices. The government says at least 197 people were killed and 1,600 injured, most of them ethnic Han, the majority in China. Many Uighurs resent discrimination by the Han, who are migrating in large numbers to Xinjiang and hold the top positions of power.
The Chinese government blamed overseas Uighur groups for using the Internet to stir up hostilities, and in particular they pointed at Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur exile living in the Washington area. Ms. Kadeer has denied the accusations. After the initial rioting, the government cut off Internet service and cellphone text messaging across Xinjiang, which makes up one-sixth of China’s territory.
On Friday, the regional government Web site carried a brief statement on the restoration of service: “For the stability, economic development and the needs of people from all ethnic backgrounds of the autonomous region, the Communist Party and the government of Xinjiang decided to fully resume Internet services beginning May 14.”
The restoration of Internet service comes before a major central government meeting this month that is aimed at setting new policy in Xinjiang. In late April, the government announced it was replacing the most powerful official in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, who had been regional party secretary for 15 years. A hard-liner on ethnic issues, he has been widely blamed by Uighurs and Han for creating a poisonous atmosphere.
Mr. Wang’s replacement, Zhang Chunxian, party secretary of Hunan Province, is nicknamed the “Internet secretary” for his use of online tools to communicate with people.
One travel agent in Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis town, said he came into his office Friday morning to find all his co-workers on Yahoo.
“Yes, I am excited, but I have already forgotten all my passwords,” the travel agent, Kasim, said in a telephone interview.
He said he knew people who had moved out of Kashgar — even as far away as Guangdong Province in southeastern China — to ensure they had Internet access. This was especially true of those who needed to use e-mail for their jobs or businesses, Kasim said.
“I’m happy to know that I can recover my old friends, I can finally write to all my friends,” he said.
Late last year, the Xinjiang government slightly relaxed the ban on the Internet, first allowing access to some propaganda-heavy news sites created for the region’s residents. After that, some Chinese e-mail services were reopened. Last month, the government began allowing limited text messaging.
The Internet in Xinjiang, however, is still subject to China’s complicated censorship apparatus, nicknamed the Great Firewall, which blocks social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as a vast number of Web pages devoted to delicate subjects (the Dalai Lama, Falun Gong or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre).
The Chinese government has taken a hard line against Internet freedom in the last year. This spring, Beijing created a new department, Bureau Nine, to help police social networking sites and other user-driven forums.
Two and a half years ago, we outlined our approach to removing content from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop censoring search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.
Censorship of the web is a growing problem. According to the Open Net Initiative, the number of governments that censor has grown from about four in 2002 to over 40 today. In fact, some governments are now blocking content before it even reaches their citizens. Even benign intentions can result in the specter of real censorship. Repressive regimes are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent online -- dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules.
Increased government censorship of the web is undoubtedly driven by the fact that record numbers of people now have access to the Internet, and that they are creating more content than ever before. For example, over 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. This creates big challenges for governments used to controlling traditional print and broadcast media. While everyone agrees that there are limits to what information should be available online -- for example child pornography -- many of the new government restrictions we are seeing today not only strike at the heart of an open Internet but also violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
We see these attempts at control in many ways. China is the most polarizing example, but it is not the only one. Google products -- from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs -- have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties. When we receive those requests, we examine them to closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad, we attempt to narrow them down. Where possible, we are also transparent with our users about what content we have been required to block or remove so they understand that they may not be getting the full picture.
On our own services, we deal with controversial content in different ways, depending on the product. As a starting point, we distinguish between search (where we are simply linking to other web pages), the content we host, and ads. In a nutshell, here is our approach:
Search is the least restrictive of all our services, because search results are a reflection of the content of the web. We do not remove content from search globally except in narrow circumstances, like child pornography, certain links to copyrighted material, spam, malware, and results that contain sensitive personal information like credit card numbers. Specifically, we don’t want to engage in political censorship. This is especially true in countries like China and Vietnam that do not have democratic processes through which citizens can challenge censorship mandates. We carefully evaluate whether or not to establish a physical presence in countries where political censorship is likely to happen.
Some democratically-elected governments in Europe and elsewhere do have national laws that prohibit certain types of content. Our policy is to comply with the laws of these democratic governments -- for example, those that make pro-Nazi material illegal in Germany and France -- and remove search results from only our local search engine (for example, www.google.de in Germany). We also comply with youth protection laws in countries like Germany by removing links to certain material that is deemed inappropriate for children or by enabling Safe Search by default, as we do in Korea. Whenever we do remove content, we display a message for our users that X number of results have been removed to comply with local law and we also report those removals to chillingeffects.org, a project run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which tracks online restrictions on speech.
Platforms that host content like Blogger, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums have content policies that outline what is, and is not, permissible on those sites. A good example of content we do not allow is hate speech. Our enforcement of these policies results in the removal of more content from our hosted content platforms than we remove from Google Search. Blogger, as a pure platform for expression, is among the most open of our services, allowing for example legal pornography, as long as it complies with the Blogger Content Policy. YouTube, as a community intended to permit sharing, comments, and other user-to-user interactions, has its Community Guidelines that define its own rules of the road. For example, pornography is absolutely not allowed on YouTube.
We try to make it as easy as possible for users to flag content that violates our policies. Here’s a video explaining how flagging works on YouTube. We review flagged content across all our products 24 hours a day, seven days a week to remove offending content from our sites. And if there are local laws where we do business that prohibit content that would otherwise be allowed, we restrict access to that content only in the country that prohibits it. For example, in Turkey, videos that insult the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Ataturk, are illegal. Two years ago, we were notified of such content on YouTube and blocked those videos in Turkey that violated local law. A Turkish court subsequently demanded that we block them globally, which we refused to do, arguing that Turkish law cannot apply outside Turkey. As a result YouTube has been blocked there.
Finally, our ads products have the most restrictive policies, because they are commercial products intended to generate revenue.
These policies are always evolving. Decisions to allow, restrict or remove content from our services and products often require difficult judgment calls. We have spirited debates about the right course of action, whether it’s about our own content policies or the extent to which we resist a government request. In the end, we rely on the principles that sit at the heart of everything we do.
We’ve said them before, but in these particularly challenging times, they bear repeating: We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.
Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs
BEIJING — China has quietly formed a new bureau expected to help to police social networking sites and other user-driven forums on the Internet, which are proving harder for the government to monitor and control than ordinary news portals.
The new bureau marks the latest outgrowth to a morass of agencies tasked with regulating online business and communications in China. People informed of the expansion say the authorities are retooling their media apparatus to deepen their leverage over the Web, and regulators are jostling for the growing power and privilege at stake.
The new agency, officially called the Internet news coordination bureau, is part of this effort to better monitor the communications of Chinese Web users, who total nearly 400 million by official estimates.
Chinese officials consider tools like social networking, microblogging and video-sharing sites a major vulnerability. In the past year, they have been forced to block access in China of overseas video and networking giants like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and suspend several upstart Chinese look-alikes, over information they deem subversive.
In turn, China has promoted the use of local alternatives on sites like Sina.com, QQ.com, and the Web site of the Communist Partynewspaper People’s Daily, which are more cooperative with official mandates to filter the Web. Both the new and pre-existing bureaus are under the auspices of the State Council Information Office, which acts as a leading daily enforcer over news-related content on the Web.
For weeks, the head of the newly established bureau has represented it in meetings with foreign diplomats and in official propaganda conferences and training sessions.
But public acknowledgment of the addition only came last week, after The New York Times submitted a question about the overhaul. The next day, the Information Office altered a page on its Web site to reflect the new Internet bureau. It also unveiled another new bureau, devoted to regulating foreign news and information outlets that conduct business in China.
This week, in a faxed response, the Information Office said the Internet news coordination bureau, which it also refers to as bureau nine, “is mainly responsible for ‘guidance, coordination and other work related to the construction and management of Web culture.’ ” It gave no further details.
China already employs a sprawling bureaucracy of government, party, and industry bodies, and local affiliates down to the neighborhood level, to screen, filter, and steer public opinion online and regulate various facets of the industry.
But in response to a series of events the past two years, particularly ethnic riots in Tibet and Xinjiang, the release of the democracy manifesto known as Charter 08, and opposition protests in Iran — all of which were seen as proliferating via mobile and Internet communications — the Communist Party leadership has taken stronger steps. It has unleashed a propaganda buildup of multimedia arms acquiescent to the government, and a policy clampdown on more unruly foreign and private firms.
Previously, the Information Office operated a single Bureau of Internet Affairs, referred to as bureau five. It supervises sites that publish news in China and operates in close contact with many of their top executives and editors. That bureau traditionally worked on circulating official information and censorship guidelines, but with the evolution of the Web, it has become more occupied with monitoring public sentiment over news developments on user-generated services.
Now two bureaus will divide the labor. The older one will retain a focus on promoting the official line to domestic sites and international media, while the newer one will be devoted more to enforcement over news-related content on interactive forums, say scholars, diplomats and editors familiar with the reshuffle.
“So just from the viewpoint of personnel, you can see that the government is putting more and more emphasis on managing the Internet,” said an editor at an official media organization, who requested anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject.
Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting and Li Bibo contributed research.
The rulers had sued for defamation 16 years ago, saying a Herald Tribune Op-Ed column had implied that they got their jobs through nepotism. The paper wound up paying $678,000 and promising not to do it again. But in February, it named Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister, and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, the prime minister now, in an Op-Ed article about Asian political dynasties.
After the Lees objected, the paper said its language “may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended.” The Herald Tribune, wholly owned by The New York Times Company, apologized for “any distress or embarrassment” suffered by the Lees. The statement was published in the paper and on the Web site it shares with The Times.
Some readers were astonished that a news organization with a long history of standing up for First Amendment values would appear to bow obsequiously to an authoritarian regime that makes no secret of its determination to cow critics, including Western news organizations, through aggressive libel actions. Singapore’s leaders use a local court system in which, according to Stuart Karle, a former general counsel of The Wall Street Journal, they have never lost a libel suit.
The notion that it could be defamatory to call a political family a dynasty seems ludicrous in the United States, where The Times has routinely applied the label to the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. But Singapore is a different story.
Lee Kuan Yew once testified, according to The Times, that he designed the draconian press laws to make sure that “journalists will not appear to be all-wise, all-powerful, omnipotent figures.” Four years ago, The Times quoted his son as saying, “If you don’t have the law of defamation, you would be like America, where people say terrible things about the president and it can’t be proved.”
Steven Brostoff of Arlington, Va., wondered whether The Times had other agreements like the one with the Lees, and asked, “What conclusions should we draw about how news coverage from these countries is slanted?” Zeb Raft of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, asked if The Times was admitting that certain world leaders “deserve to be treated with deference. This is the implication of the apology.”
George Freeman, a Times Company lawyer, said the 1994 agreement was the only one he knew about and that it applied only to The Herald Tribune. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said, “Nobody in this company has ever told me what our reporters can write — or not write — about Singapore.” He said the Times newsroom has no agreements with any government about what can be reported. “We don’t work that way.”
Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said, “If we have something that needs to be said on the editorial or Op-Ed pages, on any subject, we will say it, clearly and honestly.”
That is what the late William Safire did on the Op-Ed page in 2002, when he criticizedBloomberg News for “kowtowing to the Lee family” by apologizing for an article about the elevation of the younger Lee’s wife to run a state-owned investment company. Bloomberg, he said, had “just demeaned itself and undermined the cause of a free online press.”
Safire wrote that he took “loud exception” in 1994 when The Herald Tribune, then owned jointly by the Times Company and The Washington Post Company, “cravenly caved” over an article by Philip Bowring — the same Hong Kong-based columnist who sparked last month’s dust-up. “I doubt such a sellout of principle will happen again.”
Richard Simmons was the president of The Herald Tribune in 1994 and authorized the agreement that was broken last month — an “undertaking” by the company’s lawyers to prevent a repetition of the language that offended the Lees. “We had, in my view, no choice,” he said. “What the American media absolutely refuse to recognize is Singapore operates on a different set of legal rules than does the United States.” He said Western news organizations can accept the legal system there or leave.
For The Herald Tribune and all the other news organizations that have paid damages to Singapore’s rulers (The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg) or had their circulation limited there (Time, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Economist), the choice has been to stay.
Singapore is tiny, with a population of around five million, but it has outsized economic power as a financial hub, making it an important source of news. For The Herald Tribune, the economic stakes are large: more than 10 percent of its Asian circulation is in Singapore. It prints papers there that are distributed throughout the region. It sells advertising to companies throughout Asia that want to reach readers in Singapore.
“If you want to be a global paper, it has lots of banks, lots of commerce, a highly educated, English-speaking population,” said Karle. “It’s hard to turn your back on that.”
Faced with this predicament when the Lees objected to the article last month, The Herald Tribune apologized and paid up — $114,000 — before it was even sued. Karle said the paper could have spent a million dollars for a worse result in court: forced to pay higher damages and make a more humiliating apology.
But settling the way it did has its own price. Roby Alampay, the executive director of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, told Agence France-Presse, “This continuing line of major media organizations too quick to offer contrition and money is a sad sight and a persisting insult on legitimate journalism, fair commentary, free speech and the rights that Singaporeans deserve.”
Safire toldThe American Journalism Review in 1995 that the world’s free press should unite and pull out of Singapore in the face of any new libel action. I think that is what should happen too, but it never has.
That leaves the Times Company with its own choice if another challenge arises. “Singapore is an important market for The International Herald Tribune,” the company told me in a statement. “There are more than 12,000 I.H.T. readers who shouldn’t be deprived of the right to read the paper in print or online. In addition, getting kicked out of Singapore would also make it more difficult for others in the region to get the I.H.T. since we print in Singapore for distribution there and in the neighboring areas.”
Google faced a similar painful dilemma in China. With potentially billions of dollars at risk, it stuck to its principles, and The Times applauded editorially. I think Google set an example for everyone who believes in the free flow of information.
China has the world's biggest online population: more than 380m users
China has tightened controls on internet use, requiring anyone who wants to set up a website to meet regulators and produce ID documents.
The technology ministry said the measures were designed to tackle online pornography, but internet activists see it as increased government censorship.
A number of websites are now being registered overseas in an attempt to avoid controls.
China has the world's biggest online population: more than 380m users.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Tuesday lifted a freeze introduced in December on registration for new individual websites.
Extensive censorship
But the technology ministry said would-be website operators would now have to submit identity cards and photos of themselves, as well as meeting regulators before their sites could be registered.
The freeze had been imposed by the state-sanctioned group which registers domain names, after complaints by state media that not enough was being done to screen websites for pornography.
The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Beijing says that despite extensive censorship, the internet remains a surprisingly vibrant and critical environment in China.
Internet users have used it to highlight cases of injustice or to embarrass corrupt officials.
China's web users often manage to stay one step ahead of government controls, says our correspondent.
The Chinese authorities have launched a number of campaigns against online pornography, with the government saying thousands of people were detained last year alone.
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