Tag Archives: censorship

The Perils of Being a Journalist

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Two more Moroccan journalists were fined today for reporting false information on the health of the King, Mohammed VI.  According to Agence France Presse

The editor of the daily al-Jarida al-Oula, Ali Anouzla, was handed a one year suspended jail term, while journalist Bouchra Eddou was also given a suspended sentence of three months.
The tribunal fined Anouzla 10,000 dirhams (876 euros, $1,315) and Eddou 5,000 dirhams.

Both men have appealed and accused the government of simply trying to clamp down on the press. As I noted previously, it continues a worrying trend. Continue reading →

Journalism and Gender

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Here are two articles that touch on freedom of the press and gender in the Islamic world.

A journalist in Afghanistan who had a death sentence for blasphemy commuted to 20 years in prison has now been released, officials say.
Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh has been pardoned by President Hamid Karzai, the Afghan justice ministry confirmed.
Relatives of Mr Kambaksh said he had already left Afghanistan as he had been granted asylum by a European country.
In 2007, he was convicted of distributing material that questioned Islamic attitudes to women.
Media rights groups have welcomed the release of Mr Kambakhsh, which they say is the result of persistent lobbying.
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In this second article, a journalist was arrested, but not for anything she said or did.  Unlike Mr Kambakhsh, she wasn’t charged with blasphemy or with some crime against the state, as dissident journalist so often are.  Her crime was her attire.  She wasn’t dressed properly.

A Sudanese court ruled on Monday that journalist Lubna Ahmad Al-Hussein should be fined two hundred dollars for wearing trousers; considered an indecent outfit in Sudan – applying Islamic Sharia in their law. It’s worth mentioning that Lubna was threatened of a verdict amounting to 40 whip lashes…  More than a thousand persons, including numerous women in trousers, demonstrated in front of the court on Monday in solidarity with the journalist. The police broke up the demonstrators and detained forty eight female activists and journalists on the charge of inciting a riot.
via Trouser-wearing Sudanese journalist escapes flogging, fined $200

It’s worth pointing out that this article is from the site Meedan, a site with the goal of connecting Arabic and English speakers by taking advantage of machine-assisted translation technology.  A useful resource.  More on that later.

Can Social Networking Redraw Boundaries?

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In cyberspace there are no boundaries or frontiers, yet it has a lot to say about borders and boundaries.  Not only is it used as a vehicle for nationalist, minority and anti-nationalist communication and propaganda, but there are attempts to actually assert borders in cyberspace.  There are national domain name extensions and ISPs are regulated by national agencies.  Anyone who has traveled just across the border to Canada or Mexico knows, you don’t have to go very far before you are off network if you try to use a mobile computing device and hence begin to incur massive international data charges.
Authoritarian regimes, in particular, attempt to assert national control through censorship, blocking access to politically sensitive or even morally offensive sites, at least as they see them.
Here, though, are two cases in which sites that have an international user base took decisions relating to territories in dispute.  The policies they came up with are interesting and probably the best available, given the status of these territories under international law.  All the major social networking sites are, in a very real sense, transnational.
In the case of the Gloan Heights, for example, Syrians resident there may belong to Syrian nationalist groups and Israelis there to comparable Israeli groups, but unlike what happens at the actual boundary between the Golan Heights and Israel or even in everyday life, they might also interact easily in in other groups because there are no documents or visas required.  Individuals in the network may see their location as a reflection of identity, but they may also see it simply as a geographic indicator. That background is what makes these cases so interesting.
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While Facebook is busy increasing our awareness of other people’s lives around the world, it stamps on globally sensitive nerves with one apparently very simple question: where do you live? Last week it started a controversy when it allowed residents of the Golan Heights to choose whether they lived in Syria or Israel. To put this in context: Israeli forces invaded and occupied the area in 1967, capturing it from Syria. They’ve controlled most of the area since. (The UN considers Golan a illegitimate part of Israel, and labels it Israeli-occupied territory.) But apparently Facebook considers itself an important enough global player to offer a re-drawing of the map. It’s not the first time: Facebook deems people in Kashmir as residents of India, though Pakistan and India control different portions of the embattled region, which has been in dispute for decades.

What do you think?  Social networking is a powerful thing and potentially and excellent tool for cross cultural interaction.  So I’m very interested in seeing how this plays out in the real world.  Read more at Could Social Networking Change the World.

Global Tweets

Global Tweets

Academic and Free-Speech Groups Join Criticism of Yale U. Press Over Cartoons

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Jennifer Howard writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education today,

Criticism continues to rain down on Yale University and Yale University Press for their decision to remove all images of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming scholarly book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen.
Now the National Coalition Against Censorship and a group of academic and free-speech organizations have sent a letter of protest to Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, and the Yale Corporation. “This misguided action established a dangerous precedent that threatens academic and intellectual freedom around the world,” the coalition wrote. It said that the university’s action “compromises the principle and practice of academic freedom, undermines the independence of the press, damages the university’s credibility, and diminishes its reputation for scholarship.”
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Yale had withdrawn the cartoons from the book for fear of offending Muslims and inciting violence.

GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

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Below is the text of an August 12 announcement from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Cambridge, Mass. – 14 countries in the Middle East and North Africa out of 18 countries surveyed filter Internet content using technical means, according to new studies released by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a partnership among groups at four leading universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These reports offer an updated view of Internet content controls in the region and a point of comparison to an earlier global survey carried out in 2006-2007. The studies show that Internet censorship has continued apace in the Middle East and North Africa.
“Our latest research results on Internet filtering and surveillance in the Middle East and North Africa confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information,” said Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. “The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention.”
“Internet censorship in the region is increasing in both scope and depth, and filtering of political content continues to be the common denominator among filtering regimes there,” said Helmi Noman, the OpenNet Initiative’s Middle East and North Africa lead researcher. “Governments also continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S.”
Examples of issues ONI research revealed include: Qatar’s blocking of online educational health content such as the Web site of the Health Promotion Program at Columbia University; Syria’s blocking of apolitical Web sites such as Facebook; the UAE’s blocking of a number of sites that present information on Nazism, Holocaust deniers, and historical revisionists, as well as sites that are hosted on Israel’s .il domain; and two Yemeni ISPs’ use of Websense.
Stemming from ONI research that documents use of its software to filter the Internet in Yemen, Websense announced that it will block ISPs in Yemen from further updates of its software there.
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Today’s release of new data and analysis follows the ONI’s May 2007 release of its first global survey, and the subsequent publication of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008). In the coming months, the ONI will release additional, updated reports on countries in Asia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as on North America and on Australia and New Zealand. These reports will provide the analytical basis for a book to be released in early 2010, Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights and Rule in Cyberspace.

via GOVERNMENT INTERNET FILTERING INCREASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA | Berkman Center
The percentage of countries filtering the Internet is not cause for celebration, but on the other hand there have been real advances in freedom of expression in parts of the MENA region.  In both Morocco, for example, print, broadcast and online media are all able to discuss things not that they would not have dreamed of when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 90s.  Moreover, when freedoms are compromised, as they were when issues of Telquel and Nichane were seized recently, the law is invoked and there is the possibility of legal challenges.  They are seldom effective, but nonetheless, the possibility exists.
Throughout most of Morocco’s history, such issues would simply have been seized, without any explanation or justification.  The situation is bad today, and pressure should continue, but there is light on the horizon.

Le Monde Banned in Morocco because of an Opinion Poll

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Cover of the seized edition of TelQuel

Cover of the seized edition of TelQuel


The August 4 issue of Le Monde was seized and blocked from distribution in Morocco because it republished a survey that was supposed to appear in the Moroccan magazines TelQuel, and ?????  but which was censored in them, as well.  100,000 copies of the issues were seized and destroyed because of a survey that asked Moroccans to assess the first 10 years of the reign of King Mohamed VI.

L’édition du Monde daté mardi 4 août a été censurée au Maroc. La non-distribution du quotidien dans le royaume a été confirmée, mardi matin, par la société en charge de la distribution, la Sochepresse. Au cours du week-end, les autorités marocaines avaient informé celle-ci que Le Monde serait censuré dès lors qu’il publierait les résultats d’un sondage d’opinion sur le bilan des dix années de règne du roi Mohammed VI.

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It is disheartening to read such stories because for the first few years of Mohamed VI’s reign there was an incredible spirit of hopefulness.  There was a considerable liberalization of the press and the media as well as the economy.  It seemed that Morocco was moving quickly down the road to democracy.  Ten years on, progress has stalled.  This is a real setback.

Donkey Suits, Online Satire and Censorship in Azerbaijan

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Late last month, a group of Azeri bloggers posted their latest tongue-in-cheek opus, a video in which a donkey holds a news conference before a circle of gravely nodding journalists.  Last week in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, two of those bloggers, Mr. Hajizada, 26, and his fellow activist Emin Milli, 30, were arrested, the New York Times reports.

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The arrests are believed to be a signal that the government is cracking down on the this outlet, as well.