Starting Points: freedom of expression

Showing posts with label freedom of expression. Show all posts

Jun 4, 2010

Letter From Karachi

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?"

May 21, 2010

China Aims to Stifle Tibet’s Photocopiers

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Published: May 20, 2010

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

BEIJING — The authorities have identified a new threat to political stability in the restive region of Tibet: photocopiers. Fearful that Tibetans might mass-copy incendiary material, public security officials intend to more tightly control printing and photocopying shops, according to reports from the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

A regulation now in the works will require the operators of printing and photocopying shops to obtain a new permit from the government, the Lhasa Evening News reported this month. They will also be required to take down identifying information about their clients and the specific documents printed or copied, the newspaper said.

A public security official in Lhasa, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the regulation “is being implemented right now,” but on a preliminary basis. The official hung up the phone without providing further details.

Tibetan activists said the new controls were part of a broader effort to constrain Tibetan intellectuals after a March 2008 uprising that led to scores of deaths. Since the riots, more than 30 Tibetan writers, artists and other intellectuals have been detained for song lyrics, essays, telephone conversations and e-mail messages deemed to pose a threat to Chinese rule, according to a report issued this week by the International Campaign for Tibet, a human rights group based in Washington.

“Basically, the main purpose is to instill fear into people’s hearts,” said Woeser, an activist who, like many Tibetans, goes by one name. “In the past, the authorities tried to control ordinary people at the grass-roots level. But they have gradually changed their target to intellectuals in order to try to control thought.”

Ms. Woeser said she was also a target of the authorities for her views. She lost her job in Lhasa after her book “Notes on Tibet” was banned in 2003. She now lives in Beijing, but she said she was carefully watched by the authorities.

China’s leaders contend that their only goal is to guarantee stability, ethnic unity and better living standards for Tibetans. Officials say that as long as separatist leaders are kept firmly in check, continued economic development will win Tibetans over to Chinese rule.

But the International Campaign for Tibet’s report contends that the authorities are not merely punishing separatists, but also dissidents of all stripes who dare to criticize the government and defend Tibetans’ cultural and religious identity. A 47-year-old writer named Tragyal was arrested in April after he published a book calling on Tibetans to defend their rights through peaceful demonstrations, the report states. His current whereabouts is unknown, it said.

A popular Tibetan singer, Tashi Dhondup, was sentenced to 15 months at a labor camp in January after he released a new CD with a song calling for the return of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, according to the report. He had been arrested on suspicion of “incitement to split the nation,” the report states.

The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against the Chinese authorities. He says he supports greater autonomy for Tibet but not secession. China says the Dalai Lama’s goal is an independent Tibet.

The authorities in Tibet apparently see printing and photocopying shops as potential channels through which unrest can spread. One Chinese print shop operator in Lhasa, who is of the majority Han ethnicity rather than Tibetan, said that her husband had been summoned to a meeting last week on the new requirements.

“You know sometimes people print documents in the Tibetan language, which we don’t understand,” said the woman, who gave her last name as Wu. “These might be illegal pamphlets.”

Tanzen Lhundup, a research fellow at the government-backed China Tibetology Research Center, which typically follows the government line on Tibet, said in an interview that “the regulation itself is not wrong.” But he said that it should have been put before the public before it was put in place.

“They have never issued such a regulation before,” he said. “On what grounds do they want to issue it? I think citizens should be consulted first.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Feb 27, 2010

Malaysia: Banning of Books Alarms Freedom Advocates

Posted: 2010-02-24

By Baradan Kuppusamy

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 24 (Asia Media Forum) — The confiscation and banning of books by Malaysian authorities is sending alarm bells ringing among activists, who want the repeal of laws that the government is using to suppress freedom of expression.

Home Ministry officials last week continued to raid numerous bookstores to confiscate books and publications by ‘Malaysiakini’, an independent news website that has been critical of government policies.

The ministry says it needs to “study and review” these books for content deemed to be against national security. But for ‘Malaysiakini’ chief editor Steven Gan, the action amounts to harassment of writers and booksellers.

Two publications by Malaysiakini, ‘1Funny Malaysia’ and ‘Where is Justice’, have virtually been banned because bookstores are afraid to sell them and people are afraid to buy because of official harassment, he said. Thus far, a dozen bookstores across this South-east Asian country have had their stocks of the two publications seized for “study and review.”

“According to Home Ministry officials, the books were suspected to cause harm to public order, morality, public safety and international relations,” Gan told IPS. “The books are not banned, but they want to seize the books for review purposes.”

“They can get the books from us,” he said. “There is no need to harass the bookstores.”

This follows the banning by the publication division of the Home Ministry of books that include works written by human rights activists and Muslim feminist academics.

Even the use of particular phrases like the word Allah, the Arabic word for God, is banned in some publications, with officials arguing that these words are exclusive to Islam.

“These works (Malaysiakini publications) are about current issues and written to arouse critical thinking and encourage healthy debates,” said political humourist Zunar, author of ‘1Funny Malaysia’, a collection of his best-known political cartoons that lambast the ruling power elites.

The title is a pun on the ‘1Malaysia campaign’ by Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is hoping to recoup political losses by convincing the public that the government is for all of them and not just for the ruling elite.

“It is a violation of press freedom, freedom of expression and the principles of democracy,” Zunar told IPS.
The spate of raids and confiscations is being done under the Printing Presses and Publications Act, a law enacted to defeat a communist insurrection in the late 1940s.

While it remains in the books, opposition lawmaker Murugesan Kulasegaran said: “The law is outdated. It has no place in a liberal and progressive county. It should be repealed entirely.”

The mere possession of a banned book can lead to a jail term and fine of 5,000 Malaysian ringgit (1,470 U.S. dollars).

Meantime, the judiciary, which media and civil society hope to turn to for redress, has given mixed signals on the issue.

While some judges have ordered the government to lift the ban on books, others have supported the home minister in their judgements, arguing that the minister knows better and has the power to use his discretion to preserve “public safety and national security”.

In two conflicting judgements in the first two months of 2010, one judge lifted a ban on the book ‘Muslim Women and the Challenges of Islamic Extremism’ by Muslim feminist academic Noraini Othman and another confirmed a ban on ‘March 8’, a book by lawyer K Arumugam about the origins of a 2001 riot between Hindus and Muslims in the city.

Deputy Home Minister Fu Ah Kiow justified the ban as “just ordinary procedure”.
“We have to act to because some books are unfavourable for the public, cause ill feelings among the races,” the English-language daily ‘The Star’ quoted him as saying.

Discussions of race and ethnicity are sensitive in this country, where racial tensions have simmered under its multi-ethnic surface since independence in 1957 and where laws discourage inflammatory statements and publications.

Some 55 percent of Malaysia’s more than 28 million people are Malay, most of them Muslim, while 25 percent are Chinese, 12 percent indigenous peoples, and nearly 8 percent Indians.

Records in the past two decades show that some 7,000 books have been banned, the bulk of them from abroad. “Most of these books never enter the bookstores because they are vetted first on arrival,” said a senior manager of a leading publishing company, requesting anonymity. “We simply follow the Home Ministry orders.”

The current crackdown on books and publications comes after a lull during the 2003-2008 tenure of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi. During that time, there was greater tolerance for dissent, arbitrary arrests were suspended and media enjoyed greater freedom although none of the repressive laws that curb free speech and assembly were repealed.

The Kuala-Lumpur based Centre for Independent Journalism says the government is abusing the Printing Presses and Publication Act to harass the legitimate political opposition.

“Publications that challenge views propagated by the government are targeted. Writers whose books are banned are often not informed,” said the centre’s executive director Gayathry Venkiteswaran. “Publishers are vulnerable and the public and civil society are kept in the dark over what can be read and what is banned. This law needs to be repealed entirely.”

But the government has no plans to repeal the law and is in fact tightening its clauses administratively, political analysts said.

“Free speech and freedom of expression are under attack,” Kulasegaran said, adding that the government is more insecure following the massive losses that the ruling party Barisan Nasional suffered in the 2008 polls. “They are shaken and hope to recover political losses by curbing free speech. Intolerance is on the rise and they want everyone to toe the line. Alternative views that can undermine their status are strongly discouraged,” he said.

Often, books stay in limbo for months or even years and are officially classified as “being evaluated” by the Home Ministry until it is no longer economical to place them in bookstores.

One such book under ‘evaluation’ is ‘Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times’, written by Australian journalist Barry Wain.

The book arrived at the customs’ warehouse on Dec. 24, 2009 and is still “under evaluation”, even though former prime minister Mahathir himself has appealed to the authorities to release it. He has said he is not “afraid” of anything in the book, which accuses him of mismanagement on a grand scale during his 22 years as prime minister.

Mahathir’s own book, the controversial ‘The Malay Dilemma’, was banned in 1968. The ban was only lifted years later, after he became prime minister.