5 Feb 2015
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship continues publishing Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
The first installment was published on Feb 2 and can be read here.
What the Party wants, it gets, and what it fears, it suppresses
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About Swamp of the Assassins
Thomas Bass spent five years monitoring the publication of a Vietnamese translation of his book The Spy Who Loved Us. Swamp of the Assassins is the record of Bass’ interactions and interviews with editors, publishers, censors and silenced and exiled writers. Begun after a 2005 article in The New Yorker, Bass’ biography of Pham Xuan An provided an unflinching look at a key figure in Vietnam’s pantheon of communist heroes. Throughout the process of publication, successive editors strove to align Bass’ account of An’s life with the official narrative, requiring numerous cuts and changes to the language. Related: Vietnam’s concerted effort to keep control of its past
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About Thomas Bass
Thomas Alden Bass is an American writer and professor in literature and history. Currently he is a professor of English at University at Albany, State University of New York.
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About Pham Xuan An
Pham Xuan An was a South Vietnamese journalist, whose remarkable effectiveness and long-lived career as a spy for the North Vietnamese communists—from the 1940s until his death in 2006—made him one of the greatest spies of the 20th century.
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Contents
2 Feb: On being censored in Vietnam | 3 Feb: Fighting hand-to-hand in the hedgerows of literature | 4 Feb: Hostage trade | 5 Feb: Not worth being killed for | 6 Feb: Literary control mechanisms | 9 Feb: Vietnamology | 10 Feb: Perfect spy? | 11 Feb: The habits of war | 12 Feb: Wandering souls | 13 Feb: Eyes in the back of his head | 16 Feb: The black cloud | 17 Feb: The struggle | 18 Feb: Cyberspace country
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The process by which censorship works in Vietnam is described by Vietnamese reporter Pham Doan Trang in a blog post released in June 2013 by The Irrawaddy Magazine. Trang explains how, every week, the Central Propaganda Commission of the Vietnamese Communist Party in Hanoi and the Commission’s regional officials in Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere throughout the country “convene ‘guidance meetings’ with the managing editors of the country’s important national newspapers.”
“Not incidentally, the editors are all party members. Officials of the Ministry of Information and Ministry of Public Security are also present. …At these meetings, someone from the Propaganda Commission rates each paper’s performance during the previous week—commending those who have toed the line, reprimanding and sometimes punishing those who have strayed.”
Instructions given at these meetings to the “comrade editors and publishers,” sometimes leak into the blogosphere (the online forums from which the Vietnamese increasingly get their news). Here one learns that independent candidates for political office, such as actress Hong An, are not be mentioned in the press and that dissident activist Cu Huy Ha Vu, who is charged with “propagandizing against the state,” should never be addressed as “Doctor Vu.” Also buried are reports on tourists drowning in Halong Bay, Vietnam’s decision to build nuclear power plants, and Chinese extraction of bauxite from a huge mining operation in the Annamite Range.
The weekly meetings are secret and further discussions throughout the week are conducted face-to-face or by telephone. “Because no tangible evidence remains that … the press was gagged on such and such a story, the officials of the Ministry of Information can reply with a straight face that Vietnam is being slandered by ‘hostile forces,’” Trang says. These denials were strained when a secret recording of one of these meetings was released by the BBC in 2012.
The Propaganda Department considers Vietnam’s media as the “voice of party organizations, State bodies, and social organizations.” This approach is codified in Vietnam’s Law on the Media, which requires reporters to “propagate the doctrine and policies of the Party, the laws of the State, and the national and world cultural, scientific and technical achievements” of Vietnam.
Trang concludes her report with a wry observation. “Vietnam does not figure among the deadlier countries to be a journalist,” she says. “The State doesn’t need to kill journalists to control the media, because by and large, Vietnam’s press card-carrying journalists are not allowed to do work that is worth being killed for.”
Another person knowledgeable about censorship in Vietnam is David Brown, a former U.S. foreign service officer who returned to Vietnam to work as a copy editor for the online English language edition of a Vietnamese newspaper. In an article published in Asia Times in February 2012, Brown describes how “The managing editor and publisher [of his paper] trooped off to a meeting with the Ministry of Information and the Party’s Central Propaganda and Education Committee every Tuesday where they and their peers from other papers were alerted to ‘sensitive issues.’”
Brown describes the “editorial no-go zones” that his paper was not allowed to write about. These taboo subjects include unflattering news about the Communist Party, government policy, military strategy, Chinese relations, minority rights, human rights, democracy, calls for political pluralism, allusions to revolutionary events in other Communist countries, distinctions between north and south Vietnamese, and stories about Vietnamese refugees. The one subject his paper is allowed to cover is crime, and the press is not toothless in Vietnam, Brown says. In fact, journalists can prove quite useful to the government by exposing low-level corruption and malfeasance. “To maintain their readerships, they aggressively pursue scandals, investigate ‘social evils’ and champion the downtrodden. Corruption of all kinds, at least at the local level, is also fair game.”
Another expert on censorship in Vietnam is former BBC correspondent Bill Hayton, who was expelled from Vietnam in 2007 and is still banned from the country. Writing in Forbes magazine in 2010, Hayton describes the limits to political activity in Vietnam, where Article 4 of the Constitution declares that “The Communist Party of Vietnam, the vanguard of the Vietnamese working class, the faithful representative of the rights and interests of the working class, the toiling people, and the whole nation, acting upon the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh thought, is the force leading the State and society.” In other words, what the Party wants, it gets, and what it fears, it suppresses. “There is no legal, independent media in Vietnam,” says Hayton. “Every single publication belongs to part of the state or the Communist Party.”
Lest we think that Vietnamese culture is frozen in place, Trang, Brown, Hayton, and other observers remind us that the rules are constantly changing and being reinterpreted. “Vietnam … is one of the most dynamic and aspirational societies on the planet,” says Hayton. “This has been enabled by the strange balance between the Party’s control, and lack of control, which has manifested itself through the practice of ‘fence-breaking,’ or pha rao in Vietnamese.” So long as you “don’t confront the Party or pry too deeply into high-level corruption, editors and journalists can get along fine,” he says.
In certain circumstances, even journalists who pry more deeply can get along fine, depending on who is controlling the news leaks and for what end. This process of controlled leaks is described by another observer of censorship in Vietnam, Geoffrey Cain. In his master’s thesis, completed in 2012 at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, Cain writes that the Communist Party in Vietnam uses journalists and other writers as an “informal police force.” They help the central government keep regional officials in line, limit their bribe taking, and patrol aspects of public life that otherwise might remain in the shadows. This represents “soft authoritarianism,” which is characterized by “a series of elite actions and counter-actions marked by ‘uncertainty’ as an instrument of rule.” What is often described in Vietnam as a battle between “reformers” and “conservatives” is actually the method by which an increasingly market-oriented society can be “simultaneously repressive and responsive.” In this interpretation, journalists and bloggers lend themselves to the “informal policing” of free-market profiteers.
The “legal” mechanisms for the arrest of journalists and bloggers who overstep the boundaries, or accidentally get caught on the wrong side of shifting rules, include Article 88c of the Criminal Code, which forbids “making, storing, or circulating cultural products with contents against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” and Article 79 of the Criminal Code, which forbids “carrying out activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration.” Other grounds for arrest range from “tax evasion” to “stealing state secrets and selling them abroad to foreigners.” (This was the charge leveled against novelist Duong Thu Huong when she mailed one of her book manuscripts to a publisher in California.)
Other repressive measures lie in the Press Law of 1990 (amended in 1999), which begins by declaring, “The press in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam constitutes the voice of the Party, of the State and social organizations” (Article 1). “No one shall be allowed to abuse the freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the press to violate the interests of the State, of any collective group or individual citizen” (Article 2:3). Then there is the Law on Publishing of 2004, which prohibits “propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” the “spread of reactionary ideology,” and the “disclosure of secrets of the Party, State, military, defense, economics, or external relations.”
On goes the list of laws and regulations through various decrees and “circulars,” including Decree Number 56, on “Cultural and Information Activities,” which forbids “the denial of revolutionary achievements,” Decree Number 97, on “Management, Supply, and Use of Internet Services and Electronic Information on the Internet,” which forbids using the internet “to damage the reputations of individuals and organizations,” Circular Number 7, from the Ministry of Information, which “restricts blogs to covering personal content” and requires blogging platforms to file reports on users “every six months or upon request,” and the 2012 draft Decree on “Management, Provision, and Use of Internet Services and Information on the Network,” which requires foreign-based companies that provide information in Vietnamese “to filter and eliminate any prohibited content.”
This 2012 draft Decree was codified the following year as Decree 72, which outlaws the distribution of “general information” on blogs, limiting them to “personal information” and making it illegal for individuals to use the internet for news reporting or commenting on political events. Condemning this statute as “nonsensical and extremely dangerous,” Reporters Without Borders, in an August 2013 press release, said that Decree 72 could be implemented only with “massive and constant government surveillance of the entire internet. …This decree’s barely veiled goal is to keep the Communist Party in power at all costs by turning news and information into a state monopoly.”
Vietnam has borrowed many of these techniques for monitoring the internet from China, its neighbor to the north. According to PEN International, China has imprisoned dozens of authors, including Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. Like China, Vietnam falls near the bottom in rankings of press freedom. Freedom House calls Vietnamese media “not free.” In 2014, Reporters Without Borders ranked Vietnam 174 out of 180 countries in press freedom. (It fell between Iran and China.) In 2013, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Vietnam as the world’s fifth worst jailer of reporters, with at least eighteen journalists in prison. Recently, a draconian crackdown against bloggers and anti-Chinese protestors sent dozens more to jail, for terms as long as twelve years. Pro-democracy and human rights activists, writers, bloggers, investigative journalists, land reform protestors, and whistleblowers are all being swept up in Vietnam’s totalitarian dragnet.
Part 5: Literary control mechanisms
This fourth installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 5, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
2 Feb 2015
By Thomas A. Bass
Today Index on Censorship begins publishing a serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by American academic and journalist Thomas Bass, who takes a detailed look at the Kafkaesque experience of publishing his biography of Pham Xuan An in Vietnam.
These are dark days in Vietnam, as the courts decree long prison terms for writers, journalists, bloggers, and anyone else with the temerity to criticize the country’s rulers. The brief efflorescence of Vietnamese literature that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989—known as doi moi, or the Renovation movement—is long gone. After twenty years of black pens and prison, the censors have wiped out an entire generation of Vietnamese writers, driving them into silence or exile.
I myself have spent the last five years fighting with Vietnam’s censors, as they busied themselves cutting, rewriting, and then blocking from publication a Vietnamese translation of one of my books, The Spy Who Loved Us (2009). Based on a New Yorker article published in 2005, the book tells the story Pham Xuan An, the South Vietnamese journalist, whose remarkable effectiveness and long-lived career as a spy for the North Vietnamese communists—from the 1940s until his death in 2006—made him one of the greatest spies of the twentieth century. Trained in the U.S. as a journalist and using his profession as his cover, An worked as a correspondent for Time during the Vietnam war and served briefly as the magazine’s Saigon bureau chief. Charged with drawing battlefield maps, following troop movements, and analyzing political and military news, An leaked invaluable information to the North Vietnamese Army.
After the war, the victorious communists made An a Hero of the People’s Armed Forces and elevated him the rank of general. He is a natural subject for a biography, and, indeed, six have already been published, including another work in English by Georgia State University historian Larry Berman. Called Perfect Spy (2007), the book characterizes An as a patriot, a strategic analyst who observed the war from afar, until he happily retired to his living room, where he entertained a stream of distinguished visitors, from Morley Safer to Daniel Ellsberg.
My own account of An’s life is more troubling. I concluded that this brilliant raconteur developed a second cover as a spy. Claiming to be a friend of the West, an honest man who never told a lie (although his whole life was based on subterfuge), An had worked for Vietnamese military intelligence, not only throughout the Vietnam war, but also for thirty years after the war. At the same time, Vietnam’s northern power brokers distrusted this wise-cracking southerner who was outspoken in his attacks on the corruption and incompetence of Vietnam’s communist government. An’s rise in military rank was slow and begrudging, and he had been kept under police surveillance for years. The Vietnamese government might initially have been pleased by the prospect of publishing not one, but two, American-authored books on their “perfect spy,” but the longer the censors squinted at my version of An’s life, the more nervous they got, and the more the story had to be chopped and rewritten before it could be approved for publication.
After rejecting offers to translate my book from several publishers, including the People’s Public Security Publishing House (an official arm of Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security) and the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism (one of the country’s largest censors), I signed a contract in July 2009 with Nha Nam, a respected publisher whose list of translated authors ranges from Jack Kerouac and Annie Proulx to Umberto Eco and Haruki Murakami. Nha Nam is an independent publisher, one of the few in Vietnam not affiliated with a ministry or other state censor. Nha Nam is occasionally fined for publishing “sensitive” books, and sometimes their titles are pulled from the shelf and pulped. Only later would I learn that Nha Nam’s status as an independent publisher does not guarantee its independence, but to their credit, the company has kept me apprised of every move made over the past five years to censor The Spy Who Loved Us.
Many authors ignore their books in translation. They delegate the sale of subsidiary rights to their agents and barely glance at the texts that arrive later in German or Chinese. I planned something different for my Vietnamese translation. I suspected it would be censored and wanted to track the process. I asked my agent to write into my contract a clause stating that the book would not be published without my prior consent and that I had to be consulted about changes made to the manuscript. Other clauses wired the book like a literary seismometer. I wanted it to record the work of the censors, to register their preoccupations and anxieties, so that by the end of the day I would know what the Vietnamese government feared and wanted to suppress.
The process of translating my book into Vietnamese began in March 2010, when I received an email saying, “I am Nguyen Viet Long of Nha Nam company, now editing the translation of The Spy Who Loved Us. I should like to correspond with you in regard to the translation.”
Long begins by asking if I know the correct diacritical marks for the name of Pham Xuan An’s grandfather. These are missing in English but important in Vietnamese, and I appreciate his attention to detail. Unfortunately, the rest of his email adopts a more aggressive tone. “You make some mistakes,” he writes, before correcting a laundry list of items. Many of these mistakes are not really mistakes, but questions of interpretation or judgment or matters of dispute in the historical record. They are the Vietnamese equivalent of inside baseball, arcane tidbits good for keeping scholars dancing on pinheads.
For example, did Jean Baptiste Ngo Dinh Diem (the first president of the Republic of Vietnam) become a provincial governor at the age of twenty-five? This depends on the day he was born, which is not an easy question to answer. People in Vietnam customarily fudge their birth dates, a practice recommended for scaring away demons, improving astrological signs, and attracting younger mates. An obscure item for an American author is apparently a big deal for the Vietnamese. If one assumes that Ngo Dinh Diem was an American puppet, a running dog for the imperialist invaders, then the last thing one wants to do is credit him with youthful accomplishment. Hence, one denies that he was the youngest governor in Vietnamese history and complicates the issue so extensively that it becomes easier simply to drop the claim.
Responding to a query from my literary agent, Long on March 15 writes, “There will be (absolutely) censorship, the book is sensitive. But please do not worry. We will keep talking to the author and will do our best to protect as much as possible the wholeness of the book.”
Long is trying to rush the book into print by April 30th—the auspicious day marking the end of the Vietnam war. After my agent reminds him that he is contractually obligated to show me the translation of the book before it can be published, Long misses the first deadline, and then he misses more deadlines, until, finally, six months later, in September 2010, I receive a copy of the galleys. The first thing I notice is an unusual number of footnotes scattered throughout the text, in a book that originally had no footnotes. I have enlisted a coterie of friends—academics, translators, an ex-CIA agent, and a former U.S. diplomat and his Vietnamese wife—to review the translation. They come back to me with sobering news. Apparently, many of the footnotes begin by saying, “The author is wrong.” Then they correct my “mistakes.”
Clearly, I have misunderstood the function of Vietnamese editors. Even before my book goes to the real censors—the chaps who control Vietnam’s publishing licenses—it has to be massaged in-house. Long will do the first whack, and the more efficiently he prunes, the more appreciated he will be by the state officials who can cap their black pens and turn to censoring more important things.
Part 2: Fighting hand-to-hand in the hedgerows of literature
This first installment of the serialisation of Swamp of the Assassins by Thomas A. Bass was posted on February 2, 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
6 Jan 2015 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa, News and features
Journalist Mona El Iraqi colluded with security forces in a raid on a public bathhouse allegedly frequented by gay people (Image: Al Kahera Wal Nas TV Network/YouTube)
When prominent Egyptian actor Khaled Abul Naga criticised President Abdel Fattah El Sisi counter-terrorism policies in Sinai in a video posted on the El-Bawaba news website last November, he was slammed by government loyalists and Egypt’s pro-regime media.
Lawyer Samir Sabry, notorious for filing legal complaints against opposition activists, filed a lawsuit against Abul Naga accusing him of “treason” and “inciting anti-government protests”. In a telephone interview with the Egyptian privately-owned satellite channel Sada El Balad, Sabry said “those who go against the will of the people who elected El Sisi, must be punished”.
Abul Naga’s prosecution reflects the growing intolerance in Egyptian society and the persistent intimidation of dissenters since the ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi some eighteen months ago. Since the military takeover of the country on 3 July, 2013, anyone expressing a view that runs counter to the official narrative is labeled a “traitor” and a “spy” by supporters of Egypt’s military-backed regime.
Even more disturbing than the criminal charges faced by Abul Naga is the barrage of insults hurled at him by government loyalists in the media who poked fun at the actor’s alleged sexual orientation.
Talk show host Tawfiq Okasha scandalously mocked Abul Naga’s sexuality, hinting that the actor was gay.
“Why do you sleep on your stomach and not on your back?” the controversial TV presenter (and owner of Faraeen Channel) asked, adding that there must have been a reason why Abul Naga was exempted from military service.
Mazhar Shaheen, a pro-government cleric who presents a talk show on a privately-owned satellite channel, also scoffed at Abul Naga, suggesting that he leave the country.
“If you are not happy with the military’s performance, you should go to either Syria or Iraq,” he said, addressing Abul Naga.
“But watch your pants while you are there,” he sarcastically warned.
Abul Naga’s lampooning by the pro-government media reflects the shrinking space for free expression in today’s Egypt. It also highlights the increased vulnerability of and continued discrimination against the LGBT community in Egypt’s deeply conservative society.
In recent months, Egypt’s gay population have increasingly been targeted amid a brutal crackdown that has seen 150 suspected homosexuals arrested and detained since November. While Egyptian law does not expressly ban homosexuality, gay people are frequently charged with “debauchery” and detained. Muslim scholars and prosecutors have condoned the arrests, arguing that “homosexuals are shameful to God” and that “it is the government’s duty to protect morality” — a conservative view that is widely shared by the Egyptian public. A Pew survey conducted in 2013 found only three per cent of Egyptians accept homosexuality.
While disdain for homosexuality is not new in Egypt, inflammatory reporting by Egypt’s pro-government media has in recent months further fuelled prejudice against gay people and deepened the stigma associated with homosexuality.
Last month, TV reporter Mona El Iraqi who works for the privately-owned Al Kahera Wal Nas TV channel, colluded with security forces in a raid on a public bathhouse in downtown Cairo, allegedly frequented by gay people. Iraqi used her cell phone to take pictures of 26 half-naked men wrapped only in bath-towels as they were arrested. After sending undercover agents to the bathhouse to spy on visitors, she alerted the police, claiming that “promiscuous orgies” were taking place there. On 7 December, police — accompanied by Iraqi’s camera crew stormed the bathhouse and indiscriminately arrested the suspects.
Iraqi unashamedly posted pictures of the half-naked men on her public Facebook page. The images were removed a couple of hours later after she was lambasted by rights activists enraged by what they described as her “insensitivity” and “flagrant intolerance”. Defending her actions in a Facebook post, she insisted that the bathhouse was a “hotbed of immorality” and was “helping spread HIV and AIDS in Egypt”.
Despite the outpouring of horror over the bathhouse raid on social media networks, Iraqi’s episode was broadcast to “mark World AIDS Day and spread awareness about the causes of HIV and AIDS in Egypt” — according to Iraqi.
The 26 men who were arrested were charged with “debauchery” and subjected to intrusive anal checks to determine their sexuality. Human Rights Watch has decried the anal examinations, describing them as being in violation of “international standards against torture“. The forensics report claimed that two of the 26 defendants may have been subjected to rape as signs of struggle were evident on the bodies of the men in question. At the trial last Sunday, defence lawyers argued however, that it was almost impossible to verify whether the men had indeed practiced homosexuality. They also slammed the decision to allow Iraqi to film the arrests, describing the move as “unconstitutional”. Denouncing the arrests, they said it was only natural for the men to have been naked “for they were either in the shower or the steam bath when police stormed the premises”. Khaled Naqash, one of the defence lawyers meanwhile, claimed his client had been fully dressed but was stripped naked by the police before his arrest. The defendants’ families were barred from entry into the courtroom and complained they were “ruffled up” by security guards who had apparently already condemned the defendants even before the verdict has been pronounced. The trial has been adjourned until 12 January when the fate of the men will be decided.
The latest mass arrests are reminiscent of the 2001 so-called “Queen Boat raid“, when security forces stormed a floating nightclub moored on the Nile in Cairo’s affluent neighbourhood of Zamalek, arresting 52 men. That incident sparked international outrage and condemnation and sent a chilling message to Egypt’s LGBT community. Rights advocates say the latest arrests are even more disturbing than the Queen Boat incident as they show media colluding with the police instead of holding security forces to account for their actions.
The bathhouse raid also comes hot on the heels of similar raids on gay hangouts in Cairo in recent months including cafes, bars and even private house parties. In March last year, four men were arrested in a raid on a house party after police allegedly found the men dresses in women’s clothing. The men were accused of “debauchery” and sentenced to eight years in prison. In September, a video of an alleged “gay wedding ceremony” posted online prompted the arrest of another eight men including the alleged “gay couple” who were seen in the video exchanging rings and hugging. While all the men had reportedly tested “negative” for homosexuality, they were nevertheless, sentenced to three years in prison each. A Cairo appeals court later reduced the sentences to one year in prison. The court also ruled however, that the men would remain under police surveillance after completing their jail terms. Last Sunday, El Youm El Sabe’ reported that two men were arrested in Alexandria by “morality police” and charged with “debauchery” and “destroying public morals”.
The recent spate of mass arrests of gay suspects has sparked serious concerns for Egypt’s LGBT community.
“I no longer feel safe,” Karim, a 26 year-old Egyptian homosexual told Index. “Egypt has never been safe for us but things are worse now under the military-backed authorities because we know we are being targeted.” He explained that the current regime was trying to woo the conservatives in the society by “appearing more Islamist than the ousted Islamist regime”.
“I’m always looking over my shoulder now and constantly live in fear,” said Mohamed, 32, another member of Egypt’s LGBT community. “I would leave Egypt if I could.”
For Mohamed and other gay people in Egypt, what is even more worrying than persecution and prosecution is the humiliation and shame they may bring onto their families if their identities were revealed — as has happened with the defendants in the recent bathhouse case.
“Now that the media is aligned with the police, we are at serious risk of public defamation and loss of dignity,” he lamented.
“What is even sadder is that few Egyptians are denouncing the arrests of gays as some media are telling the public that homosexuality is a disease that will destroy public morality and hence, it is necessary to rid the society of the scourge,” he added.
Buthayna Haleem ( her name has been changed to protect her identity) an Egyptian lesbian writer is one of the few people in Egypt condemning the raids.
“It is not something that concerns others,” she told Agence France Press in a recently televised interview. “This is oppression against people.”
Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Mona Iraqi had removed the images posted to Facebook. Facebook removed the images because they violated the service’s terms.
This article was published on 6 January 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
22 Dec 2014 | Belarus, Digital Freedom, News and features
Belarusian authorities attempt to hide a financial crisis by silencing critical voices in a new clampdown on media.
Several independent news sites were blocked in Belarus on 20 December. They include Naviny.by, Charter97.org, belaruspartizan.org, UDF.by, gazetaby.com, onliner.by and the website of BelaPAN, the only independent news agency in the country. No official explanations have been provided so far.
“It is still unknown who did that and for what reason. However, it is clear that the decision to block the ID addresses could only be made by authorities as in Belarus the government has monopoly on providing IP addresses,” the statement of BelaPAN Information Company reads.
These actions coincided with the decision of the government to introduce a 30% fee for purchasing of foreign currency as expectations of devaluation grew among the population of Belarus. On Saturday, Liliya Ananich, the Information Minister, gathered editors of leading non-state media and advised them “not to escalate the panic in the Belarusian society”. According to the minister, the coverage of the financial crisis in independent media “contravenes the interests of the state”.
“In times like these all media, both state and non-state, must work for the country,” Ananich told the editors, and warned that those who do not get the message might face sanctions.
Just three days before that, on 17 December, the parliament of Belarus adopted amendments to the Media Law that provides for official status of mass media for online news publications. Thus, online media might face the same restrictions, warnings and even closure for infringements of the Media Law as offline. The Law was adopted urgently without any discussions with civil society and independent professional community. It comes into force from 1 January 2015 – but, as it turns out, the authorities do not need any legal provisions to block news sites.
The special services of Belarus have a significant arsenal of means of blocking content online that they have used before. As it was revealed in Index’s Belarus: Pulling the plug policy paper, there are different ways the state authorities restrict freedom of expression online, including a repressive legal framework, online surveillance, website blocking and filtering, and cyber-attacks against independent websites and content manipulation.
The recent developments show the authorities of Belarus have no intention to stop its restrictive practices towards free speech. Internet has remained the last relatively free domain of freedom of expression in Belarus. As the country is moving into 2015, the year of the next presidential election, this space looks set to be shrinking further.
This article was posted on 22 December 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
