Journalist and activist Ramzi Bettaieb ended a 15-day hunger strike yesterday.
Three other activists and bloggers, Azyz Amami, Houcem Hajlaoui and Emine M’tiraoui, who went on hunger strike in solidarity with Bettaieb have also ended their action.
Bettaieb, who works for the blogger’s collective Nawaat, went on hunger strike to highlight the lack of transparency in a crucial case being tried in front of a military court. On 21 May, the military authorities confiscated two of Bettaieb’s cameras as he tried to cover trials at the Military Tribunal of El Kef in the investigation of the murder of protesters during the 2011 Tunisian revolution
Tunisian journalists’ video coverage of court hearings is currently restricted to three minutes inside court rooms and Bettaieb accuses the military of deliberately preventing journalists from documenting what Nawaat has described as “the most important trials of Tunisia’s modern history”.
Bettaieb has now his cameras back, and the support of Tunisia’s constituent assembly, which pledged to look into his demands of lifting the restrictions on journalists and activists seeking to cover the court hearings in the martyrs’ case.
Bettaieb has also demanded the case be tried instead by an independent judicial structure instead of miltary judges.
“Our bodies’ powers are limited, but our determination is unlimited,” Bettaieb said at a press conference.
In recent days a series of controversial public service announcements aired on state-owned TV channels in Egypt, angering Egyptians and foreigners alike. The advertisements, which warn Egyptians against talking to foreigners “because they might be spies”, have been slammed for being “shallow” and inflammatory.
In one of the advertisements, a foreign man walks into a cafe and inconspicuously joins a group of young Egyptians at their table. They go on to discuss Egypt’s current situation in front of the stranger — complaining about high prices, the gas shortage, and other social and economic problems plaguing the country. They also tell the English-speaking stranger about a reported conspiracy against the army, which he immediately tweets to an unknown third party. Sinister background music alerts viewers of an ominous threat, as the voiceover warns that “every word has a price” and that one word could “endanger a nation”.
In another advertisement, Egyptian job seekers are advised not to apply for jobs posted on job vacancy sites online.
“You never know who may use the information you post online and for what purpose”, cautions the advert.
Both advertisements were broadcast intermittently over the past week on all state-run TV channels, as well as a few privately-owned channels, raising concerns that they may restrict freedom of expression and exacerbate xenophobia in the country.
Facebook user Mayssa Mokhtar expressed fear that “the TV campaign may pave the way for another crackdown by the state on foreign journalists covering the ongoing protests”.
Many turned to social networking sites to express their anger. Pharmacist Mahmoud Nour wrote in a Facebook post that “the commercials would not help the tourism industry — Egypt’s main foreign currency earner — which has already been dealt a blow by the political instability over the past year and a half.”
The advertisement has now been pulled from the air, but the campaign is not the first time that state-controlled media has issued warnings about the alleged danger posed by foreigners to Egypt. During last year’s uprising, talk show hosts on state-run TV channels reportedly accused “foreign conspirators” of fomenting the unrest. Such accusations prompted attacks by angry protesters on foreign visitors and journalists attempting to cover protests in Tahrir Square.
The 11 February sexual assault on CBS reporter Lara Logan by a mob of men near the Egyptian Museum sparked international outrage, but it was not an isolated incident. Throughout the 18 days of last year’s uprising and protests since, many foreign journalists have faced both intimidation and suspicion over their coverage of unrest. Many have complained of being beaten, chased away or accused of being “foreign agents” and “spies”. In most cases, attackers were Mubarak supporters or anti-regime protesters nervous about the increased presence of foreigners in Tahrir Square. At times, those targeting foreign journalists were policemen or security officers in plainclothes.
Last June’s arrest of American-Israeli law student Ilan Grapel, who was accused of being an Israeli spy, further fuelled anti-foreigner sentiments. Photos of Grapel were published in local newspapers, and the state-owned Al-Ahram identified him daily as a “Mossad officer who was trying to sabotage the Egyptian revolution”.
Grapel was released four months later in a prisoner exchange with Israel, but the anti-foreigner wave did not subside.
Last November, reports of USA-made teargas being used by security forces on protesters sparked another surge of attacks on foreign journalists.
More conspiracy theories swirled in the wake of arrests earlier this year of 16 Americans (among a group of 43 NGO workers) accused of illegally using foreign funds to foment unrest in the country. State-controlled media used the arrests to play on the fears of uneasy Egyptians, with one front page article titled, “American funding aims to spread anarchy in Egypt”.
On Friday, Egyptian pro-democracy activists were back in Tahrir Square protesting the acquittal of six security chiefs accused of ordering the killings of protesters during last year’s uprising. Their demands also included calls for a new election, and the formation of a civil presidential council to replace the ruling military regime next month. Several of those protesters described the new TV commercials as “another attempt by the military junta to stop free expression and to divert attention away from what is happening in Tahrir Square”.
“It is the same old tactics once again,” lamented Ibrahim Saleh, a 35 year-old civil engineer.
When in trouble, the military junta points the finger at the ‘foreign invisible hand’ blaming it for all our woes
Noha Alaa, another protester and tour guide, agreed that such claims were a distraction from the problems facing the country.
It’s worked before when the ruling military generals allowed activists to vent their fury on the Israeli Embassy. Why wouldn’t it work now?
Journalist Shahira Amin resigned from her post as deputy head of state-run Nile TV in February 2011. Read why she resigned from the “propaganda machine” here.
Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman today called for cross-party consensus on the Leveson Inquiry’s recommendations for future press regulation, suggesting also that the Inquiry examine media ownership.
Labour leader Miliband said he felt News International’s share of 34 per cent of the national newspaper market was “too much”, and suggested limiting media ownership to 20 to 30 per cent. “More than 30 per cent is worrying,” he said, adding that his aim was “plurality”.
Miliband said it was good for democracy to have plurality in the market, stressing that his intention was not “to stifle one organisation or another”, but instead that “one organisation does not exercise overweening power.”
Harman, Miliband’s deputy, stressed the “opportunity” presented by the Inquiry into press standards, which is due to report this autumn. “People want this sorted,” she said of the press malpractice that led to the Inquiry being launched last summer.
“They want a strong free press and want it to act fairly, not a dressed-up version of the status quo.”
She said a new system of redress that operated on a voluntary opt-in basis — similar to the Press Complaints Commission — would be “pointless”. Miliband suggested the need for a body independent of press and politicians and stressed he was “conscious of the limits of statutory recognition”, while still suggesting a kind of statutory support might be needed for a reformed PCC.
Both emphasised the need for cross-party support of Leveson’s recommendations, a topic Leveson himself alluded to yesterday in stressing his desire to avoid “inter-party politics and the politics of personality”.
“The default position for us as politicians must be to try our hardest to use the recommendations of the Inquiry to provide a framework for the future,” Miliband said.
Miliband gave an impassioned defence of press freedom, reminding the judge that his recommendations should protect it.
He highlighted what he saw as a “mutual culture of contempt” between the press and politicians, and that we were a “long way” from the ideal of a relationship of mutual respect between the two.
He told the Inquiry there had been a “failure of the establishment” not to have spoken out sooner on abuses by the press, noting that there had been a sense of fear, anxiety and unwillingness to do so.
He compared calling for a public inquiry into phone hacking in July 2011 to “crossing the Rubicon”, suggesting it would have been seen by News International as “an act of war”.
“In retrospect I wish I would have said it earlier,” Miliband said.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with evidence from deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Scottish first minister Alex Salmond.
Follow Index on Censorship’s coverage of the Leveson Inquiry on Twitter – @IndexLeveson
The pile-up of the news agenda led to something quite odd this week. On Monday, Frank Zimmerman was given a suspended jail sentence for sending abusive, threatening emails to MP Louise Mensch among others.
On Tuesday, the defamation bill had its second reading in parliament.
Somehow, the two issues were treated as one.
The cause of the apparent confusion was clause 5 of the defamation bill, which many represented as forcing Internet Service Providers to hand over details of anonymous “trolls”. This despite the fact that, as Labour’s Sadiq Khan pointed out in the Commons debate, Clause 5 specifically relates to libel and not general cases. Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP, stressed that any steps concerning ISPs and anonymous posts should be voluntary (a concern shared by Index). The guidelines on these steps have not yet appeared, quite probably because they have not been drafted yet.
The term troll seems now to mean “anyone saying anything unpleasant on the internet”. But that simply isn’t correct. Trolling is the deliberate use of inflammatory language in order to provoke a reaction on a message board, or, increasingly, on a social media network. Sending emails to someone threatening to kill their children (which is what Frank Zimmerman did) is not trolling. Nor is it defamation. It is harassment, and already illegal under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 — a law that has its problems, as Paul Chambers of the Twitter Joke Trial will tell you — but is designed for this sort of thing.
Trolling is an issue on the web, as is bullying and harassment. But to conflate either with the matter of libel reform is to seriously confuse the issues.
Update 13/06/12 : The Commons debate on the defamation bill is online now, and worth watching, if only to see how so many issues got thrown into the mix that had absolutely nothing to do with libel. The tone was set by the Democratic Unionist Party’s Ian Paisley Jr, Conservative Nadine Dorries and Labour MP Steve Rotheram, who brought not just what they perceived as “trolling” into the mix, but also, in Dorries case, even alleged copycat suicide groups. Rotheram, bafflingly, warned the house of “professional trolls” learning their trade at “troll academy” (no, me neither).
There’s something about the web that brings out an extraordinary level of somethingmustbedonery in a certain type of politician. As has been remarked on this blog many times, the knowledge that it is possible to shut down or block a website or web page easily seems to make some people think that it is also desirable, and a simple solution that does not seem to carry any of the qualms that, say, supressing the publication of a book would. This view covers not just the illegal but also the merely unpleasant.
