6 Nov 2013 | Greece, News and features, Politics and Society, Religion and Culture
The case of a little girl called Maria, allegedly abducted by a Roma couple on the outskirts of Farsala in central Greece, has filled local and world headlines with prejudice and racist stereotypes.
Maria’s appearance -a blonde girl with blue eyes- was enough to spark speculation in tabloid press about Roma involvement in child abductions and other serious offenses. “Roma grab babies” screamed a headline in a newspaper. Mainstream media’s sensationalism favoured the ancient notion of the “evil gypsies.”
However, no media outlet that carried sensationalised reports were eager to admit their abusive language when Maria’s parents proved to be Roma from Bulgaria. Maria’s adoptive parents in Greece had told the truth about the girl’s origins. Only it was too late to correct the demonization of an already excluded group.
Lina Giannarou, a reporter of the newspaper Kathimerini offered her insight into the coverage of the story:
“I think the main problem was that the media merely followed the police investigation. There was no first-hand reporting on what really happened with the little girl nor serious analysis on the major side issues that this tragic story revealed, like for example the thousands of illegal adoptions taking place all over the country. The vast majority of articles focused on the suspected crime and the supposed abduction. When it became clear this was not the case, the story ceased to be of interest.”
Smile of the Child, the charity entrusted with Maria’s care, compounded the misinformation.
On 1 October, Damian Mac Con Uladh, a journalist with online news service “EnetEnglish”, published a revealing story about the contradictory comments and the false assessments made by the charity’s director and other representatives.
The case was communicated with language targeting the Roma couple, while maintaining a climate of moral panic towards them. At times, representatives of the charity appeared to be sure of her origin (“the girl was not a Roma”), while mixing every possibility of her being abducted, being sold or mistreated. According to their claims, the girl had been treated as “a dancing bear” or like “a commodity.”
All the panic produced was to be answered by police operations carried out against Roma communities. This summer already, riot police squads had conducted large operations throughout the country, in the southern Peloponnese and in Thiva settlements in central Greece.
However, Dimitris Angelidis, reporter of the Editor’s Newspaper suggests that the linking of Roma with criminality is a false one.
“Roma people, together with immigrants, street drug users, people living on the street and other marginalized groups of people, have been the target of regular police operations. These operations, which have been condemned by European authorities for their extreme use of ethnic profiling, do little more than painting a negative picture that connects inescapably Roma to criminality. The few news items about Roma emphasize their supposed criminal behavior which is not supported by police statistics: raids in Roma settlements are very often but they result in very few arrests, a mere 3 percent.”
Panayote Dimitras, Spokesperson of Greek Helsinki Monitor and Humanist Union of Greece explained the wider context.
“The living conditions of Roma in Greece and Italy are at their worst level right now. And while there is much attention to Italy, no one focuses in Greece whereby Roma experience their worst year in a 15 years period. Hundreds of millions of euro aimed at their social inclusion and their living conditions have changed little. Most of their settlements remain unsafe while the children do not go to school or attend Roma-only schools.”
Poorly educated, disconnected from the world
The low level of education among Roma puts them at a constant social disadvantage. Although Greece has been found violating the European Convention for Human Rights, for the segregation of Roma children in separate schools, the contempt coming from non Roma parents and the pressure from state and local authorities pose serious restrictions.
Alexis Koutrouvelis has been teaching in a Roma-only school for the past 4 years, in Aspropirgos, a suburb of Athens in the West Attica region. Koutrouvelis described the way Roma children go to school.
“Roma communities are largely uneducated, thus, parents do not understand the necessity of education. Following this culture, children cannot easily perceive a space-time continuum, they don’ t seem to hold a strong sense of identity throughout history.”
Being at the bottom of the social class pyramid, Roma children grow up without knowing their rights. In addition, most of their contact with the government is when police conducts raids against their communities.
“There are children that never really leave the settlements. Some of them do not even know what lies behind the mountain of Egaleo. They grow up learning to pay for someone else’s bad deeds in their community,” Koutrouvelis said.
Poor education does not mean these kids are deprived of imagination. In 2011, director Yorgos Didimiotis made a short film with Roma children in Aspropirgos. The narrative and the themes were the childrens’ work, Didimiotis did only the technical staff and gave them basic tips.
He said that it was an unprecedented experience.
“I’ve never seen so much enthusiasm in children. You could see the need for expression with an unstoppable imagination. These children were so proud to be making a short-film when at the end, it was difficult to stop them from watching it, over the 25th time! And imagine that some of them have never been to the cinema.”
This article was originally published on 6 Nov 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
6 Nov 2013 | Africa, Digital Freedom, News and features, Uganda
(Photo illustration: Shutterstock)
The number of Ugandans with internet connectivity keeps on increasing, especially because of the influx of cheap handsets with internet access from China. Today, over 990,000 Ugandans have Facebook accounts. This though, is still a drop in the ocean keeping in mind that the country has a population over 35 million. By comparison, almost 20 million have access to mobile phones with SMS capabilities. The current Ugandan regime seeks to have direct control over all these vital information dissemination tools.
The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), a government arm set up as a regulator of the telecommunications industry, is the government’s barking dog in this endeavour, and has often been let loose to abuse digital freedoms in the country. Among other things, a directive was issued to all telecom companies to register phone and data SIM cards they sell, capturing all details about the buyer. The government also uses the option to transfer money via mobile phones, offered by many telecom companies, to monitor activities of opposition politicians and activists. With the enactment of the Public Order Management Act (POMA) into law recently, the Ugandan police has set up several bureaus in its different departments to monitor the social media, calls and SMS of individuals from the opposition and civil society, as well as journalists and other activists. POMA is a draconian law that has been enacted to limit the movements and gatherings of people without police permission, among other harsh provisions.
Since the government of Uganda liberalised the economy in the 1990’s, several telecommunication companies and other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been offering telecom services in tandem with the international developments in that industry. Today, the biggest ISPs are the South African MTN, the French Orange, Bharti Airtel, which has now merged with Warid Telecom, and the indigenous UTL. During the riots of 2009 and 2011, UCC asked all ISPs to block emails, SMS and Facebook messages that had any political content or that mentioned names of certain government and opposition politicians. Although some protested, they had to give in or risk losing their operation licenses in the country. It should be noted too that all the telecommunication companies in the country have political godfathers high up in the echelons of the current government. With this arrangement, ISPs are easily beaten into the “correct line.”
Among the different social media channels available today like Whatsapp, Twitter and e-mails, Facebook remains one of the most widely used and fastest growing social media channel. All others are used basically by what one could term as Uganda’s elite class. The Ugandan police, on behalf of the government, recently asked Facebook to provide them with information held about all Ugandans with registered accounts – a request Facebook turned down. Many Ugandans are today able to air out their grievances with government through Facebook, and this is one of the highly monitored social media outlets by the government. Critics have used this outlet to discuss issues with the public, and the regime is not happy with it. The government manoeuvres clearly indicate that it would very much love to have total control of the social media channels, but it is hampered by the fact that all firms controlling these channels are abroad and out of its reach and patronage.
Take the case of the now famous Tom Voltaire Okwalinga (TVO), a Ugandan blogger who is also very active on Facebook. He has written extensively about the abuses of government, and he is one individual the Ugandan government would pay any price to identify and apprehend. Despite the government’s efforts to identify him and the number of security operatives that have been deployed to apprehend this individual, TVO has developed a big following on Facebook, usually commenting on his exposés.
His case shows how, in the nutshell, the Ugandan government is trying to gain an upper hand in controlling and curbing digital freedoms in the country.
This article was originally posted on 6 Nov 2013 at indexoncensorship.org
6 Nov 2013 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, News and features
In a defeat for Google, a French court has ordered the search engine to pre-filter nine images of former Formula One chief Max Mosley, the company said today. Mosley was also awarded €1 in damages.
“In a troubling ruling, a French court held today that Google must build a filter to remove nine of Mr Mosley’s images from our search results. This decision should worry those who champion the cause of freedom of expression on the Internet. Our existing removal process represents an effective way of helping Mr. Mosley,” Daphne Keller, Associate General Counsel, said in a statement.
The company said in a blog post that the case was not just about Google.
Any start-up could face the same daunting and expensive obligation to build new censorship tools — despite the harm to users’ fundamental rights and the ineffectiveness of such measures.
More information on the case can be found here.
5 Nov 2013 | Digital Freedom, News and features, United Kingdom
(Photo: David von Blohn / Demotix)
German and British MPs last night called for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be granted asylum in Germany.
Addressing a meeting called to support the Guardian newspaper in the face of threats from the British government, Conservative MP David Davis said that safeguards for whistleblowers were the only way to protect civilians from an overreaching surveillance and security apparatus, adding that “If whistleblowers can look forward to a life in Germany rather than a life in Moscow, I think that would improve things for everybody.”
German Green Party MP Konstantin Von Notz had earlier said that his country “needed to grant political asylum to Edward Snowden.”
The issue of surveillance has been hotly debated in Germany since it was revealed that the United States’ National Security Agency had been monitoring Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone.
But speakers at the London meeting, convened by Observer and Vanity Fair journalist Henry Porter, expressed concern that a similar debate was not taking place in the United Kingdom.
Conservative MP Rory Stewart suggested that parliament’s intelligence and security committee should be openly elected and led by an opposition MP, thereby encouraging greater scrutiny of the security services’ actions.
“You are never going to have a government backbencher chairing a committee that is going to criticise the government properly,” said Stewart, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and a former diplomat.
Addressing Prime Minister David Cameron’s suggestion that measures would need to be taken to prevent the Guardian from publishing further revelations about surveillance by US and UK authorities, Davis said that no government in any other country where the stories had been published had attacked newspapers in the way the UK government had attacked the Guardian. He said “the only reason [the government] is doing this is out of embarrassment.”
The meeting, held at the Royal Institute for British Architects, heard from English PEN director Jo Glanville, who criticised David Cameron’s dismissal of civil liberties concerns about surveillance as “la-di-da” and “airy-fairy”. Davis echoed that sentiment, saying he delighted in being called “la-di-da” by old Etonian Cameron.
