20 Feb 2014 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Vietnam
Le Quoc Quan (Image: RFAVietnamese/YouTube)
The 30 month prison sentence for Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger, Le Quoc Quan, was today upheld by a Hanoi appeals court. Quan, who has frequently blogged about human rights violations by the government, was convicted in October 2013 on tax evasion charges. He has been arbitrarily detained since December 2012. A crowd of hundreds wearing t-shirts in support of Quan were present outside the court, while a European Union delegation, representatives from the United States and Canada and a small group of journalists were present at the trial. This is just the latest move in the Vietnamese authorities’ ongoing attack on dissent, free speech, free press and a free internet.
If you need to communicate with someone the Vietnamese government is interested in keeping an eye, it is always been useful to be careful. Phone conversations can be listened to. Meetings at houses could be watched. Protests are invariably filmed by government operatives. If you were going to, say, chat via Gmail’s chat function it should be switched to “off the record” to prevent a copy of the discussion being archived. Some unlucky people have seen their blog posts traced to the internet cafe they’ve later been arrested at. If you are a dissident you won’t be the only one the police are interested in; they’ll talk to your family, friends and employers, too. The latter they may ask to dismiss you.
It is Vietnam Ministry of Public Security conducts this surveillance work, while the Ministry of Information and Culture drafts many of the laws regarding internet usage and “abuse”. And it is most likely a unit within the MPS that is responsible for these, and earlier, malware attacks.
Much of the surveillance and intimidation is hardly new; similar operations took place during the Terror in the USSR. In fact, the CIA has compared the MPS with Russia’s KGB. The KGB of comrade days, however, never had to deal with the vastness of the internet. The government owns every newspaper and printing press in the country, but it has few serious servers, making control of the internet difficult. It does not stop them from trying.
In January the Associated Press in Vietnam reported on malware attacks against one of its journalists, against an American-Vietnamese blogger and against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). These are certainly not the first of their kind but may have been the first directed against those on foreign shores. The private correspondence of Vietnamese-American blogger Ngoc Tu was posted on her blog after someone — supposed, but not verified to be the Vietnamese government — sent her an email with a link that installed malware and key logging software giving the sender access to her password and her email account. The Associated Press reporter was a sent an email purportedly from Human Rights Watch with a link to a ‘white paper’ on human rights.
Vietnam’s internet history: Enthusiasm and repression
Vietnam’s relationship with the internet has not been simple. The government has always been enthusiastic about the internet and the wholesale benefits it could, and has, brought to the nation. Though classified as an “enemy of the internet” by Reporters Without Borders for its blocking of websites and arrests of bloggers and journalists, Vietnam’s communist government has done an awful lot to ensure good internet access.
But the country’s vibrant internet culture is a direct result of government guidance and intervention. Vietnam has long valued literacy and learning and according to Professor Carlyle Thayer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the government believed that the “knowledge era” was key to the nation’s economic development. The internet helped to provide that and greater world integration, something they have been increasingly keen for since Doi Moi in 1986 when the country began a period of economic renovation, shunning its former isolationist politics.
Twenty years ago the Vietnam Communist Party (CPV) noted three dangers facing the country: corruption, deviation from the socialist path and falling behind. The internet was seen a perfect way to engage more with the world. A 2011 report by market research firm Cimigo, headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, says: “Vietnam has seen a more rapid growth of the internet over the last few years than most other countries in the region and is one of the fastest growing internet countries in the world… Since the year 2000, the number of internet users in Vietnam has multiplied by about 120.”
However, the government misjudged, believing control to be easy, and circumventing its block beyond the ken of its citizens.
Putting the genie back in the bottle
There are three main laws bloggers, activists and others the state dislikes are charged under. Criminal Code Article 88 relates to “conducting propaganda against the state”. This is the one most often used — both draconian and helpfully vague. Then there is Article 258, relating to “abusing democratic freedoms”, and Article 79 covering “activities aimed overthrowing the Communist Party of Vietnam and People’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
However there have also been numerous internet laws drafted, largely aimed at keeping citizens’ net activities restricted to useful research or harmless entertainment. An August 2001 law imposed “stringent” controls and required net cafe owners to report breaches to relevant authorities and to collect ID from their users. An August 2005 law criminalised using the internet to oppose or destabilise the state, security, economy or social order, infringe on the rights of organisations or individuals, or mess around with Domain Name System (DNS) settings — something many Facebook users started doing in 2009. In October 2007 the Ministry of Information and Culture issued a decision requiring all businesses to obtain a license before setting up a website. This has stymied growth in some ways, as it is only now that businesses are as present online as individuals.
In August 2008 Decree 97 made it illegal to “abuse” the internet to oppose the government. What got more attention was Circular 7, restricting bloggers to cover only personal, not political, topics. At the time blogging was a favoured pastime in Vietnam, Yahoo! 360 the favoured platform. Interest in blogging and blogs in general has since waned significantly. According to Cimigo, in 2009 40 per cent of internet users visited blogs and 20 per cent blogged themselves. By 2011 those numbers had halved as people increasingly moved to social media sites like Facebook.
It was the quiet block of Facebook in 2009 that caught the world’s attention. The government never mentioned a ban publicly though a purported scan of instructions to ISPs to block the site did rounds online. As the government never said much, Vietnam’s legion of Facebook users simply muttered something about “technical problems” as they “fixed” the DNS settings to access the site.
What led to the Facebook block was the organising between previously disparate groups against Chinese-run bauxite mines in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — an already ecologically and politically sensitive area. Catholics, activists, environmentalists and anti-China activists all united via Facebook to protest the mines. In 2010 the government tried to launch its own social networking site (which led to headlines such as ‘In Communist Vietnam, State Friends You’), go.vn, where users had to provide their full names and ID card details, but could also “friend” communist luminaries. The Minister for Culture and Information Le Doan Hop praised the site’s usefulness for young people and promotion of “culture, values and benefits”.
In 2010 came a decision requiring all public hotels to install Green Dam monitoring software. Theoretically it allowed the government to see what was being looked at, possibly by whom and take appropriate steps. In fact decision 15/2010/QD-UBND was something of a paper tiger; many pointed out how such a piecemeal and scattershot approach would have limited utility and could be wholly circumvented by any serious activist, though rights organisations took the appropriate potshots as a matter of course.
In 2010 a ban was put in place, ostensibly on all online gaming between 10pm and 6am, to combat gaming addiction. However, it was never fully possible to enforce thanks to most popular games being hosted by overseas servers.
The most recent attempts at curbing net use via legislation has been Decree-Law 72 on Management of the internet which formally came into effect in September 2013. Like many laws it is confusing and vague enough to be useful for any enthusiastic government prosecutor. Among other things it banned the sharing of news online. Or, rather, it banned the aggregation of news onto websites. The government took the time to publicly respond to the flurry of foreign concern and the head of the Ministry of Information and Culture’s Online Information Section protested to Reuters that the law did not violate any of Vietnam’s human rights commitments. “We will never ban people from sharing information or linking news from websites,” he said, arguing it had been misinterpreted.
There has been talk that Decree 72 was also designed to protect intellectual property, as violations have long been problematic and go far beyond dollar copies of new Hollywood films on DVD. One of the things 72 supposedly sought to do was prevent websites re-posting news from its original source with no attribution and thus make things easier for news sites whilst also laying groundwork for membership of the Trans Pacific Partnership in regards to intellectual property protection.
The more interesting requirement was that ISPs locate servers, or at least one, within Vietnam and deliver information on users to the government, rather as internet cafes have been required to do. They were also required to take down anything contravening laws. However Vietnam’s most trafficked sites do not have servers within Vietnam and with such new laws do not entirely see the point, either. Indeed there are not many substantial servers located there at all, and bloggers who fear the law usually host their blogs overseas in any case. Should the government instruct local ISPs to block say, Google, many will simply respond again to “technical difficulties” by readjusting their settings.
Peaceful evolution, draconian repression
The threat of peaceful and not so peaceful evolution hangs heavily over the heads of those in power in Hanoi.
Vietnam is regularly excoriated for its human rights record which generally means the way the nation locks up its dissidents, bloggers, religious leaders. Even US President Barack Obama made mention of blogger Dieu Cay’s ongoing detention, ostensibly for tax reasons.
According to Human Rights Watch there were at least 63 political prisoners convicted in Vietnam last year. And yet, as Professor Thayer said in a 2011 paper: “Great effort is put into monitoring, controlling and restricting Internet usage. The enormity of resources devoted for these purposes contrasts with the comparatively small number of political activists, religious leaders, and bloggers who have been arrested, tried and sentenced to prison.”
Though the numbers have increased since the above was written there is still little mass organising in this area, and large scale protests tend to be over more concrete issues: workers’ rights and wages or land grabs. However those considered potentially subversive are closely monitored, watched by both a physical presence and an online one.
Actual harassment of bloggers and their families has been common over the years. Most famously, mother of Vietnamese blogger Ta Phong Tan set herself on fire outside the Bac Lieu People‘s Committee building in the Mekong Delta in July 2012, in protest at the way her daughter had been treated.
Within the MPS are units that monitor all forms of communication and there are records of the country purchasing more complicated surveillance equipment. According to the same 2011 paper by Professor Thayer, Vietnam by 2002 had the Verint call monitoring system. Verint, a US company, supplies over 150 nations and 10,000 organisations with varied forms of security and monitoring equipment.
China in the 1990s also offered technical assistance to “monitor internal threats to national security” to the General Department II. The military also collects intelligence related to national security and with attention paid to those, abroad or within Vietnam, who “plot or engage in activities aimed at threatening or opposing the Communist Party of Vietnam or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
General Department II not only, arguably, watched dissidents but also tapped senior party officials in an incident of usually opaque factionalism that later came to light.
There have been many attacks against varied blogs and websites; 16 starting in 2009 and intensifying in April of the next year. Varied activists came under fire: Catholics discussing land issues — there have been ongoing spats between Catholics and the state over land grabs — as well as environmentalists and political agitators. Sites allied to the anti-bauxite movement were also hit. IP addresses were allegedly traced back to within Vietnam and to addresses connected to the military. The attacks, verified by McAfee and Google, were botnet attacks where spyware hid in seemingly innocuous Vietnamese language keystroke software (though a Romanised alphabet Vietnamese has 29 letters and many diacritics). Neel Mehta, a security expert with Google, wrote in a blog post that: “While the malware itself was not especially sophisticated, it has nonetheless been used for damaging purposes.”
Vietnam joining the “technology race”?
That Vietnam has taken up the internet quickly and with great passion is beyond dispute but there are still gaps in the industry. Everyone may be using Google but few local businesses are profiting from the web and mobile boom.
Bryan Pelz, an IT developer, says there is “no means for direct monetization”.
“The banking industry and regulatory environment hasn’t taken strong steps to lay the groundwork for easy online payments. Essentially nobody has credit cards. If you’re building a website and hope to charge users or make a living off of advertising, it’s a tough road in Vietnam.”
And despite talented hackers and software engineers — Flappy Bird was designed by a Vietnamese engineer — with experience and skill comparable to the rest of Asia, software isn’t considered a hugely lucrative field, according to Pelz.
Of those aged 15 – 24, according to Cimigo, 95 per cent are online and spend over two hours each day on the web, via internet cafe, desktop or phone. Ninety five per cent use it for news. Google remains the top rated site in Vietnam, followed by local entertainment hub Zing. News sites Dan Tri and Tuoi Tre also feature, as does Yahoo!, Facebook and YouTube.
Last year a Russian-backed challenger to Google called Coc Coc (knock knock) opened shop. It has aimed to take some of Google’s 97 per cent market share, the reasoning being that Google had no offices in Vietnam and did not have algorithms well written enough to understand Vietnamese well. Unlike other startups it was backed with serious investment and a staff of over 300, according to the AP.
A recent article in The Atlantic reported that Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology has sponsored something called the Silicon Valley Project which aims to push Vietnam to be more than a simple producer of electronic parts (Intel has a 1 billion USD plant in the country) to a tech powerhouse with a strong startup industry and innovative firms. The recent success of Flappy Bird — one of the most downloaded apps ever — is seen as evidence of Vietnam’s larger potential.
Indeed the Silicon Valley Project’s mission statement is not dissimilar to the Communist Party’s mid-1990s ideas about the upcoming “knowledge era”: “This is the time for Vietnam to join in the technology race. Countries which fail to change with this technology-driven world will fall into a vicious cycle of backwardness and poverty.”
This government-backed and sanctioned creativity and entrepreneurship has been lauded, though it’s also been pointed out how it may rather clash with many of the internet restrictions set out in varied laws, such as Decree 72. Of course Vietnam’s ministries do not always march in-sync and what the Ministry of Information and Culture believes to be good may clash with a more pro-tech Ministry of Science and Technology.
The confirmation today that Le Quoc Quan is facing 30 months behind bars, does not bode well for the future of internet freedom in Vietnam.
This article was published on 20 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
11 Feb 2014 | News and features, Turkey
This is the third part of a series of conversations with Turkish playwright and author Meltem Arikan about her play Mi Minor and her experiences during the Gezi Park demonstrations.
Julian Farrington, head of arts programmes at Index on Censorship spoke to Arikan about how this government-orchestrated terror campaign was to change her life.
On 2 June Arikan – with her friends Pinar Ogun, Memet Ali Alabora and Melin Edomwonyi — struggled through the massive crowds of demonstrators on the streets of Istanbul, reaching her home around two in the afternoon. The peaceful Gezi Park demonstrations had turned violent.
There had been clashes between the protesters and the police during the night. The previous day they had been among a group of artists who they had gathered together to broadcast a message to the governor from Taksim Square. They called for him to end the excessive police response and use of tear gas on peaceful protesters.
On the evening of 2 June, the Turkish authorities would start naming and blaming in an attempt to explain this eruption of anti-government protest. As the finger pointing evolved into a hate campaign, Arikan and the artistic team behind her play Mi Minor were among those targeted.
Index: How long after the play finished did the Gezi Park protests start?
Arikan: Mi Minor was staged in Istanbul from 1 December 2012 to 14 April 2013. The play was performed 23 times, more than 10,000 people attended. Gezi Park protests started on 27 May.
Index: What was the reaction to the play?
Arikan: Mainstream media showed great interest in Mi Minor. Before and during the performances Memet Ali Alabora, director and lead actor, and Pinar Ogun, the lead actress, were interviewed and hosted by nearly all major TV channels, newspapers and magazines. After only 5 performances, Mi Minor was named Radikal Newspaper’s Best Play of the Year by readers.
At first the audience was not interacting much with the play. The first remarkable reaction was a woman throwing her shoe at the Pinima president. However, when young people started joining and interacting with the play, the perception of the overall audience and their involvement changed. When young people figured out that there was more than one game to be played in our play, they started responding to Mi Minor in such smart, humorous and joyful ways.
We also had great responses on social media all around Turkey as well as other countries — Netherlands, France, USA, Canada, Egypt, Australia and more. The play became a trending topic four times during the performances in Turkey.
In time, we started to have fans who would come to the play or join online every week and plan their own little games. For example one of the digital actors abroad came up with the idea of Pinileaks on the internet during each performance about the Pinima president. A group of online audience members, who were following the play online, got organised and came to Istanbul. There were also friends who got very excited about the play and came from abroad to see it. The play had the Marmite effect: Some loved it. some hated it. There have been many reviews about the play by Turkish and international critics, including Liberté info, Paulanow and Archetypeinaction.
Index: Were there any other awards or plaudits?
Arikan: Students of Galatasaray University awarded Memet Ali Alabora as best actor. Pinar Ogun was nominated for best actress. I was nominated for the best playwright in the Lions Theatre Awards. The play was named the Best Play of the Year by the Karvak Awards, which we refused to receive as I mentioned in the previous article.
Index: Did the government make any comments or have any reaction to it?
Arikan: There weren’t any comments or reactions from the government during the period when the play was being performed.
Index: I know you were uneasy about how it might be received by authorities. How did you feel it went?
Arikan: We took a great deal of care to make sure that our made-up country Pinima didn’t relate to any specific government, including Turkey. I observed that some of the audience felt uncomfortable when the Pianist was taking their pictures or interviewing them on Ustream. I believe this is mostly because people were afraid to be seen as opposing power, even though Pinima was a fictional country. After each performance many people said to us that we were very brave and asked us to be careful.
Index: So now, let’s go to the moment on June 2 when you got back to your house after the artists made the statement condemning police violence. What was your mood when you closed your front door?
Arikan: We were tired, angry and confused when we got home. I can say that we got more worried as the events got more violent. It was so painful to see young people lose their lives knowing it all started off to protect trees. We were trying to keep our nerves together as we followed the events on Twitter.
Index: When was the first time you heard that you and your friends were being named as the architects of the Gezi Park uprising?
Arikan: On 1 June, the first accusation was made against my close friend and the director of Mi Minor, Memet Ali Alabora, by members of the ruling party, claiming that Gezi protests were attempts to establish the grounds for a coup and his tweet, which would become so famous, was shown as evidence:
“It’s not just a matter of Gezi Park, haven’t you realised yet? Come join. #resistgezipark”
It was shocking to see how politicians could show such a simple tweet as an evidence for such a huge claim. All Memet Ali did was to attend the protests during the first three days and use twitter to express himself. It was hard to believe how he was being singled out and targeted.
As I said in the previous article, I tried to explain what happened in the first three days of Gezi Park protests. From the second night onwards, the protest that started about trees attracted thousands of people who were coming to the park to give voice to a whole range of issues that they were concerned about. There were political activists, environmentalists; even Turkish Airlines staff, who were out on strike at the time joined the demonstrations. And on 30 May the day Memet Ali sent his tweet, there were people holding up banners about protecting the environment, the demolition of the Emek Theatre, destruction of forests and rivers and government interference in personal lifestyles. Memet Ali’s intention was to report what he saw happening, as he stated in his press conference after the accusations of Yeni Şafak Newspaper:
“I went to Gezi Park on 28 May to protect the trees and the culture of Istanbul. After continuous police violence, the protest turned against the force used to suppress freedom of expression. People who gathered there started to express themselves on matters they were not able to express before. This was also the case for me. For me, as well as Gezi Park, I wanted to express my concerns about a whole range of issues I saw happening in the city: the demolition of Emek Theatre, the change in Istanbul City Theatre’s regulation, State Theatres that were being closed down, the green fields being destroyed on the Asian side of Istanbul, the old central station to be made a commercial building. I meant all these when I tweeted ‘it’s not just a matter of Gezi Park’.”
After 1 June, a campaign was launched by government officials, politicians, pro-government media and their social media supporters claiming that the Gezi Park protests were an international conspiracy, with links to business, arts and NGOs. Businessmen, artists, executives of many NGOs, sportsmen, journalists and many others started to be targeted as part of this conspiracy. First Memet Ali, then Mi Minor and all related to the play, were one of the main focuses of this campaign.
Memet Ali attended a news programme a couple of days later; during the programme President of AKP (Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party) Istanbul Party Organization almost threatened him via twitter:
“Memet Ali and his allies/friends/ will be “overturned” [referring Memet Ali’s surname “Alabora” as it literally means “overturn”], and our brotherhood will win”
On 10 June, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Şafak came out with the headline, “What A Coincidence”, accusing Mi Minor as being the rehearsal for the protests, six months in advance. The subheadline said that “New information has come to light to show that the Gezi Park protests were an attempted civil coup” and continued claiming that “the protests were rehearsed months before in the play called ‘Mi Minor’ staged in Istanbul”.
After Yeni Şafak’s headline, the mayor of Ankara, started to make programmes on TV specifically about Mi Minor, also mentioning my name. A news channel called A Haber ran a story about the graphic designer of the play, accusing her of being one of the masterminds of the social media behind the protests. They announced her full name and twitter account, giving false reports on her. She later lost her job as a consequence.
Index: The newspaper was making a direct connection between your play Mi Minor and the demonstrations. How did they justify, support this claim?
Arikan: As I mentioned before, a smear campaign had already been launched. Any news by pro-government media were built on the premise that Gezi Park protests didn’t start as protection of trees but as an international conspiracy by the secret powers and the interest lobby against the emergence of a new Turkey.
This introduction to the article in the pro-government paper Yeni Şafak’s is an example of this conviction:
“The Gezi Park protests that started off with claims about cutting trees and which suddenly grew into a campaign calling for the government to resign, with false news on social media has come into its 14th day. New information on events has revealed they were an attempt to develop into an international operation with the support of the interest lobby, and throws a new light on the supposed innocence of the Gezi Park protests. There have been precise rehearsals of the Gezi events in the play ‘Mi Minor’ which was staged between 1st of December 2012 – 14th of April 2013.”
By projecting Memet Ali as someone “who has drawn attention with his provocative public tweets ever since the first day of the protests”, the newspaper tried to link his popular tweet with the play. In Mi Minor we used gourds in our fictional country Pinima, as a nonsensical export which was supposed to drive the economy. We were very cautious when choosing the symbols used in the play in order to create a unique country. Referring to the AKP’s use of a light bulb as their party symbol, the newspaper claimed that we were “targeting AK Party by using symbols that resemble the AKP symbol”. They presented the unique theatre style of Mi Minor as training for young people, teaching, “how people should revolt and how they can organise their revolution on social media”.
For the newspaper, Memet Ali’s participation in the protests, the gourds, the way social media was used in both the play and the protests, the portrayal of a dictator president in the play and the opportunity that the play gave for the audience to oppose to the President was enough to justify its attack.
“The play “Mi Minor” proves that the Gezi Park protests, which was turned into a campaign to overthrow the government, were being staged on another medium before the actual protests started.”
Index: They claimed that you were part of a conspiracy, funded by foreign governments – can you tell us more about this?
Arikan: Once the premise of the conspiracy was established, any figure who somehow participated in the protests would always be linked to it, and thus to the foreign governments. On one of his programs the mayor of Ankara claimed, without proof, that Mi Minor was funded from abroad.
Ten days after their news on Mi Minor, Yeni Şafak featured another story, presenting Memet Ali’s holiday visits to the Red Sea and London as if they were preparations for Gezi protests. On various TV programs, websites and online forums Mi Minor or my name were being linked to secret international powers. Presentations were made to district organisations of the AK ruling party, explaining how Mi Minor was part of the international conspiracy.
There were so many groundless accusations that it is impossible to remember them all.
Index: You decided to lie low and stay in the house. What was it like in the house? Who was there? What was the atmosphere?
Arikan: Even now, I don’t want to remember what I went through during those days. We were extremely distressed. We were receiving hundreds of threats and accusations almost every minute via social media. We found it really difficult to believe what we were reading when we saw the news about Mi Minor. Even though most of the media covered Memet Ali’s press conference, it didn’t stop the accusations. The accusations were then carried on to TV. Mi Minor was being discussed on various TV channels at least twice a week. Pinar and I started to use anti-depressant pills during this period because it was impossible to understand and cope with what was going on. I wasn’t just worried for myself but also for the people I love.
Index: The protests continued until long after you closed your front door. Did the police make any arrests in the days following the protests? Given what was being written about you, did you expect they would arrest you?
Arikan: There were ongoing arrests at the time. We were prepared for every possibility. We knew it was also possible we would be arrested. It was nerve wracking to live with such uncertainty. There were continuous threats and accusations. All this was happening because I created a play and attended a peaceful protest to protect trees.
Sadly, this was just a beginning for us. While the demonstrations were happening at Taksim and Gezi Park, the prime minister held several rallies. During his speeches at two consecutive rallies in Ankara and Istanbul, he read Memet Ali’s tweet to his supporters and made the crowd boo Memet Ali. Pinar and I were watching the prime minister’s speech live on TV. Pinar was shaking with fear and shock, she was repeatedly asking “why?” We were not sleeping. We were not talking with anyone outside the house or on the phone.
Several complaints were submitted to the prosecutors about Memet Ali. They sued him for encouraging a crime showing his tweet as evidence. Prosecutors eventually dropped all charges, though the last one was only dropped in January 2014.
It wasn’t the arrests we were afraid of. We feared for our lives. The days were hard to follow. We lost track of time. We were numb, timeless, sleepless and speechless. I don’t like to remember those days we had to spend at home.
Index: After a while of this attack on Memet Ali and others, the mayor of Ankara launched his personal campaign against you. Why do you think he got so heated? Was there a particular political motive for his attacks?
Arikan: My nervous system had already been broken by the time I saw that one of the many programs on Mi Minor was now focusing on me. They were showing an edited version of one of my speeches that I made six years ago about secularism. It was edited in such a way that I came across as an anti-Muslim agitator. What I found so brutal about this was the fact that they were using religion to provoke people against me. Religion has always been one of the most sensitive subjects in Turkey. What upset me most was the fear I witnessed in my son’s eyes and the anxiety that my partner was living through.
I find it dreadful for a politician to be able to play with people’s lives so easily. I don’t know what his political motive was. But I do know very well that these motivations do not include any humanitarian sensibility or responsibility. In responses to all these accusations, I wrote a confession for my column in Kazete, which was subsequently shared on many websites and through social media.
“I’M GUILTY I CONFESS
I’m guilty; as a woman writer, for years I’ve been rejecting the male dominated system and for the last couple of years I’ve been trying to understand and express what’s been happening during the transition period from the analogue world to the digital world.
I confess; two and a half years ago, using my intellect and my imagination, I wrote a play called “Mi Minor”. Our play was performed 23 times in 3 different venues with the permission of Governorship of Istanbul for each venue. My imagination fails me when I try to understand those who accuse us of rehearsing the Gezi Park events before it has started, provoking all that is currently happening in our country; linking us to various foreign organizations and part of an fantastical conspiracy theory relating to all these lies – even though they haven’t seen our play.
I’m guilty; I know that for thousands of years the culture of fear has been creating ‘the other’ through race and religious differences and has been making up rational reasons for wars by imposing hate and violence. I say ENOUGH to the analogue world order imposed by the male dominated system based on culture of fear, which is the one and only common culture of all societies in the world and which has been forced upon all societies, for thousands of years.
I confess; culture shall not be attributed to any society or any race. Culture is formed through the results of women and men’s existence(s) affecting each other and their interactions with nature. When defining cultural differences, the analogue world order has always disregarded the differences between men and women’s lives, which forms the foundation of all cultures. It’s women and men that create cultures and civilizations. It is a big mistake to restrict the parameters of cultural formation just with race, religion, geography and traditions, seperated from the existence of women and men.
I believe the new digital order will be constructed by accepting that societies are formed by women and men without prioritising race, religion, language and sexual differences.
I’m guilty; I believe in freedom of thought and freedom of expression by getting away from the pressures of all ideologies, political statements, military or civilian coups.
I confess; I want to think and live freely by moving away from the thought patterns that have been imposed by the patriarchal system for thousands of years.
I’m guilty; I know that the only reason of running away from reality, deflecting reality, creating ‘the other’ is fear.
I confess; I will not be frightened and to become ‘the other’.”
Index: Can you describe the nature of the campaign and how it was manipulating the public?
Arikan: On YouTube everyday different users uploaded the video made about me, which was presented by the mayor of Ankara on his son’s TV channel. Discussions and comments about me started to be made on digital forums and blogs during his campaign, referencing the banning of my book in 2004. I received hundreds of rape and life threatening emails and tweets as a result of this campaign.
Index: At what point did you start getting frightened for your safety?
Arikan: I started to get really angry because — as a woman writer supporting secularism — I have been pointed to as a threat to Islamic faith and destructor of the Turkish family order, over and over on TV and social media. Such accusations against any woman, is a threat on her life. However, I was never frightened for losing my own life, I still stand for everything I said, my fear was firstly for the security of my son and the people I love.
On 24 June newspapers carried very frightening news. A Islamist journalist claimed that he had heard that there was a contract out to kill Memet Ali. He didn’t mention any names or any organisations. This was when we really started to worry about our lives.
Index: From 1 June until the time you left the country, you did not feel safe to go out and for the most part, friends brought food and things you needed. But you did go out once. What happened?
Arikan: Pinar and I had to go to the bank one day, since the bank is very close to where we live, we didn’t see any harm in driving there. But when we came back out from the bank we found the words “YOU ARE DEAD” written on the car. This of course upset us all very much. And just a few days after, I saw that mayor of Ankara’s son was tweeting about me for hours.
The selected sentences he chose to tweet about were all excerpts from my research publication called ‘The Body Knows’. He was clearly provoking people against me with false accusations and manipulating what I had written. Those tweets were the last straw.
I realised that we were surrounded, imprisoned in our own home and prevented from expressing ourselves freely.
I decided to leave to build a new life with my son, leaving everything else behind in order to express my thoughts freely.
This article was posted on February 11 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
7 Feb 2014 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features
(Image: Shutterstock)
Lord Chief Justice Campbell, while introducing The Obscene Publications Act 1857, described pornography as “poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine or arsenic” and insisted that the law was imperative to protect women, children and the feeble-minded.
The Indian Supreme Court’s observations and directions while hearing a petition in which online pornography is blamed for of the “epidemic” of rape and sexual violence is redolent of the pornophobia which had gripped the puritanical English legal system in the Victorian era. It is also a stark reminder of the befuddling and dangerous consequences of internet filters, as is being seen in the United Kingdom.
On 27 January, one of the defendants, the Internet Service Providers Association India (ISPAI) while stating that they would not indulge in voluntary censorship, posed a more challenging question — since there is no granular distinction to be made between “high art” and pornography, since temple sculptures can simultaneously be interpreted as both divine and obscene, how could they decide what to block and what to allow. On 28 January, all liberty-loving Indians were aghast at the Supreme Court’s intransigence on homosexual sex.
Taken together, these incidents portend to consequences more pernicious than just a chilling effect on free expression. As Lynda Nead contends, drawing a distinction between sublime and profane seeks to serve a social legitimising function which result in moral policing and violations of the rights of many.
Does pornography cause rape? Justice Douglas’ statement in Ginsberg — “Censors, of course, are propelled by their own neuroses” — and Ronald Dworkin’s reply to Katherine MacKinnon’s “breathtaking hyperbole” remain the most plausible answers to date, not a single study has been able to irrefutably prove correlation, let alone causation. However, Indian courts’ treatment of pornography has been ironic because exposure to obscene and sexually explicit material has been treated as a mitigating factor in rape sentencing. Reepik Ravinder and Phul Singh are two examples of rapists being regarded as victims of the “sex explosion” on celluloid. Not only that, a “ministry of psychic health and moral values” has also been directed to be established to nip this epidemic of vulgarity in the bud.
Justice Potter Stewart’s aphorism “I know it when I see it” holds true for any “definition” of pornography — even today. All we have got is a mystifying epithetic tautology — prurient, lewd, filthy, repulsive, which does no service to the clarity of judicial vision. It is easier to treat pornography as an accused, rather than an offence, because tropes and stereotypes make for poor and unjust legal definitions.
The plea to criminalise browser histories suffers from several grave elisions. For one, irrefutable evidence of correlation, let alone causation, between pornography and sexual violence or depravity is conspicuous by its absence. Though Delhi has a high rate of reported rapes, Google Trends data from 2013 shows more people in the apparently conservative bastions of Gujarat and West Bengal were searching for pornography online.
Most significantly, an obscurantist idyll defines the average consumer and purposes of online pornography. Evidence dispels the notion of only rapacious, lustful men devouring pornography. A 2008 survey reported one in five women watching and approving of porn. Forty-five percent of women who watched pornography also made their own porn videos, and stated how it had helped them being sexually inventive and more intimate with their partners. Another survey, deemed to be the most comprehensive, shows 60 percent women and 80 percent men admitting to accessing sexually explicit content online. Significantly, 30 percent of women respondents said that such content deals with sexual and reproductive health and romance, too. More significant is the response that usage of pornography improved couples’ sex lives.
Moreover, the upshots of dragnet internet filters are reasons for grave consternation. Google AdSense mistook an author’s memoir for pornography and blocked it. In reverse irony, smut sites got caught in an attempt to prevent bureaucrats from surfing sites related to the stock market. And since algorithms do not have a mind of their own, Christopher Hitchens’s polemic against Mother Teresa “The Missionary Position” might also lose its immunity.
India’s information technology law remains riddled with fuzzy definitions, and right now Google, stands indicted for defamation. A ban on internet pornography would further queer the pitch for intermediary liability, thereby delivering another blow to free speech.
Given the climate of legal homophobia, a reference to the aftermath of Canada’s ban on pornography becomes pertinent. There was a sustained persecution of bookstores stocking gay and lesbian literature, comics included, and 70 percent of prosecutions were of homosexual pornography. Besides, even if there were only opt-in filters, it would entail identifying one’s sexual preferences. And where demands for arresting homosexuals are raised on the flimsiest of pretexts, one would become a sitting duck for privacy breaches and criminal prosecution.
One can only wish these apprehensions, and not pornophobia, inform the Supreme Court’s decision.
This article was posted on February 7 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
23 Jan 2014 | Campaigns
Index on Censorship and IFEX members call for the release of Alaa Abd El Fattah and all those unjustly detained in Egypt
The military “interim government” in Egypt is cracking down on virtually all meaningful form of assembly, association, or opposition.
Following the passage of a November 2013 law banning peaceful protest, dozens of activists and organizers have been sent to prison. Among them is Alaa Abd El Fattah, software guru, blogger and political activist.
On the night of November 28th, security forces raided Alaa’s home, beat him and his wife when asked to see their warrant, and took and held him overnight, blindfolded and handcuffed, in an unknown location. Currently, he is held at Tora Prison, Egypt’s notorious maximum security detention center, historically used to house men suspected of violent crimes and terrorism.
But Alaa is not being prosecuted for crimes of violence. A critic of repressive state practices and a staunch advocate of free information, free and open source software, and Arabic localization in the Middle East, he was one of the first Egyptian netizens facilitating a movement for political change around a simple idea: freedom of expression.
His wildly popular blog—established with his wife, Manal—helped spark a community of bloggers in the Arab World committed to the promotion of free speech and human rights. It won the Reporters Without Borders award at the 2005 Bobs. Their groundbreaking website, Omraneya, collected blog entries across the Arab World, archiving dissent in the face of repression. As put by one popular independent media outlet: “[Omraneya is] at times the house of alternative expression and at others the amplifier of muted voices.”
Following the uprising of January 25, 2011, Alaa continued to promote free expression through online platforms. He started a nation-wide people’s initiative enabling citizen collaboration in the drafting of the Egyptian Constitution. He initiated and hosted Tweet-Nadwas (“Tweet-Symposiums”), that brought activists and bloggers from across the world into Tahrir Square, to participate in open format dialogue about tough issues ranging from Islamism to Economic Reform.
Without looking down at our feet, let’s look forward and envision the perfect state; I myself don’t want a state but I know that isn’t possible. Instead, I must focus on the steps that might lead me to build the ‘good’ state.” – Alaa Abd El Fattah (Tweet Nadwa, June 14 2011).”
Alaa has been jailed or charged under every government to take power in Egypt. In 2006, when he was only 22, he was jailed by the Mubarak government. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) jailed him in 2011. Morsi brought a case against him in 2013. And he is now imprisoned by the current military government. He is not alone in this cycle of persecution. Alongside him now in prison are activists Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel, and Ahmed Douma—all of whom were also targeted by Egypt’s recent regimes. Thousands of other young people are in prison or unaccounted for.
Alaa’s mother, Laila Soueif, one of the founders of the Kefaya protest movement, which is widely credited as one of the key precursors to the January 2011 uprising, commented:
Alaa is one of the most outspoken and uncompromising critics of state violence and repression of his generation. At this particular juncture, those in power are trying to sell the myth that the whole country is united behind them against the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies. The fact that Alaa, who was very vocal in his criticism of the Brotherhood while Morsi was president, is condemning – even more strongly – the current criminal behaviour of the police and the army explodes their myth. Particularly as he is not alone in taking this position. Arresting him and demonizing him in the media is a message to critics of the regime to shut up.”
The current government has already handed Alaa (together with his sister Mona Seif) a one year suspended sentence in a similar, but separate, trial. Current charges may find Alaa facing additional years. Ahmed Seif, prominent human rights lawyer and father of Alaa Abd El Fattah says:
The Prosecution has done everything in its power to impede Alaa’s appeal against his imprisonment on remand. It has been more than a month since the Prosecution completed its investigations and referred the case to the Criminal Court, but lawyers have still not been allowed access to the case file, and neither a district nor a date have been set for the trial.”
As the third anniversary of the January 25 revolution draws near, we express our concern that Alaa’s case marks a worrying trend for civil liberties in Egypt.
The undersigned demand the immediate release and a fair trial for all those unjustly detained in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Egypt is a signatory.
Signed,
Electronic Frontier Foundation
ActiveWatch – Media Monitoring Agency
Afghanistan Journalists Center
Arabic Network for Human Rights Information
ARTICLE 19
Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression
Association of Independent Electronic Media
Bahrain Center for Human Rights
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression
Centre for Independent Journalism – Malaysia
Derechos Digitales
Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
Foundation for Press Freedom – FLIP
Freedom Forum
Freedom House
Globe International Center
Human Rights Watch
Independent Journalism Center – Moldova
Index on Censorship
Initiative for Freedom of Expression – Turkey
Journalists’ Trade Union
Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance
Media Foundation for West Africa
Media Institute of Southern Africa
Media Rights Agenda
National Union of Somali Journalists
Norwegian PEN
Pacific Islands News Association
Pakistan Press Foundation
PEN American Center
PEN Canada
PEN International
Public Association “Journalists”
World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers
Rasha A. Abdulla, Ph.D., The American University in Cairo
Amir Ahmad Nasr, author of My Isl@m
7iber
Access
Arab Digital Expression Foundation
Association for Progressive Communication
Digital Rights Foundation, Pakistan
Freedom of the Press Foundation
Global Voices Advocacy
International Federation of Journalists Asia-Pacific
Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders)
Jadaliyya
Mada Masr
Social Media Exchange (SMEX)
The Workshops (Egypt)
