Just days before the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) got under way in Tunis last week, United States State Department spokesman Adam Ereli expressed concern about restrictions on freedom of speech and political activity in Tunisia (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html). Over the next few days, the Tunisian government made quite clear that it would not tolerate freedom of expression. Journalists were harassed and beaten, an alternative civil society meeting was effectively shut down, and meetings discussing human rights and freedom of expression were disrupted. This prompted the official US delegation to the United Nations sponsored summit to express some disappointment at the role of the Tunisian government. “We are therefore obliged to express our disappointment that the government of Tunisia did not take advantage of this important opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to freedom of expression and assembly in Tunisia,” said a press note issued by the delegation (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html).

Interestingly, at the same time as the US decries the human rights situation in the country, Tunisia remains an important ally in the US ‘war on terror’. The US Department of Defence International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has trained over 3,600 Tunisian military officers and technicians since its inception in the mid-1980’s. In 2004, 87 Tunisian military personnel took part in the IMET program at a value of $1.88 million. The U.S. Department of Defense also supports Tunisia’s counter-terrorism program through bilateral training exercises and special counter-terrorism training courses for selected Tunisian participants. (http://tunis.usembassy.gov/tunisian_cooperation.html)

The US has previously supplied the Tunisian government with military hardware in the form of aircraft parts, machine guns and ammunition (http://www.fas.org/asmp/profiles/655-2002/FMS/Tunisia.pdf). According to a 2005 report from the World Policy Institute, Tunisia received $4,646,000 in military assistance despite a poor human rights record and serious abuses by the government (This figure is for 2003, the latest year for which details are available).

The report’s executive summary is worth noting: “Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush’s pledge to ‘end tyranny in our world’ than the United States’ role as the world’s leading arms exporting nation. Although arms sales are often justified on the basis of their purported benefits, from securing access to overseas military facilities to rewarding coalition allies in conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these alleged benefits often come at a high price. All too often, US arms transfers end up fueling conflict, arming human rights abusers, or falling into the hands of US adversaries.” In 2003, the report notes, more than half of the top 25 recipients of US arms transfers in the developing world were defined as undemocratic by the US State Department’s Human Rights Report because their citizens did not have the right to change their own government. (http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/wawjune2005.html)

US companies also assist the Tunisian regime in its crackdown on dissenters. Software from US company Secure Computing, called SmartFilter, is used by the Tunisian internet agency to block websites that the government does not approve of. One of the websites blocked during the course of the summit was that of the Citizen’s Summit on the Information Society (CSIS). The CSIS event ended up not taking place due to the efforts of the Tunisian government to shut it down. It was supposed to provide a forum where issues that were not a part of the main summit venue could be discussed, but the Tunisian government feared it would be used as a platform to denounce its human rights abuses. Websites mentioned in a training session on how to circumvent internet filtering were also blocked, although its not clear if they were already blocked or had been blocked during the course of the summit.

According to a Human Rights Watch report released at the summit, the Tunisian Interior Ministry employs 500 people to monitor electronic communication. Activists told Human Rights Watch of email arriving late or not at all, of responses to emails coming from third parties posing as the recipient when the intended recipient said he never received the original message, of email inboxes being filled to saturation by repeated emails saying only, for example, “You are traitor.”

The report says Tunisia has cited counterterrorism and the need to curb incitement to hatred and violence as among its justifications for censoring information online. However, tests carried out for the report showed that only four out of forty-one radical Islamist web sites were actually blocked. “The pattern of Tunisia’s online censorship suggests that, in practice, its policy has been guided less by a fear of terrorism or incitement to violence than by a fear of peaceful internal dissent,” says the report (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/mena1105/7.htm#_Toc119125755). In the name of the ‘war on terror’, the US, though its military and commercial support, is therefore propping up a regime that uses repressive policies against its own people in order to stay in power.

At the conclusion of the summit media and freedom of expression
groups called for a full investigation by the United Nations into attacks on human rights and freedom of expression that took place in Tunisia during the summit. Steve Buckley, President of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters and Chair of the Tunisian Monitoring Group of freedom of expression organisations said: “Never again should a United Nations World Summit be held in a country that does not respect its international commitments to human rights and freedom of expression.”

“This week in Tunis, both inside and outside the official Summit, we have witnessed serious attacks on the right to freedom of expression including harassment of delegates, attacks on Tunisian and international journalists and human rights defenders, denial of entry to the country, the blocking of websites, the censorship of documents and speeches, and the prevention and disruption of meetings.” (http://www.crisinfo.org/content/view/full/1029, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=15613)

The worrying trend highlighted by the holding of the WSIS in Tunisia, is the ease with which issues such as freedom of expression are sidelined as an important footnote, or simply sidelined all together. This approach allows governments to present glossy figures on their internet rollout while at the same time escape criticism over their human rights records.

Freedom of expression is a core component of a future information society and it should not be sidelined in the interests of diplomacy – nor should organisations working in the field of information and communications technology fail to acknowledge that this is an issue that should be at the centre of the agenda.

Tunis has highlighted issues related to human rights in the information society, but it should be clear that the problem is not confined to Tunisia. Efforts by governments to control internal dissent through repression, including through internet censorship, are on the increase, and pose a very real threat to the future structure and form of the information society. It will take a united front to reverse the trend.

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Windows, bridges and cafes. That’s how blogs were described in a panel discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Thursday. The discussion, entitled “Expression under Repression”, was organized by Dutch non-governmental organisation Hivos and Global Voices, a non-profit global citizens’ media project. Blogs, which are a form of citizen’s publishing that makes it easy for people with internet access to run their own website, were windows because they shone a light not only on the inside of a country but also gave a view of the outside world. They were bridges because they created social islands in divided countries, for the first time giving a voice to marginalized communities such as women. They were cafes because they created a space away from the monopoly of the government where important debates could take place that might have long-term political effects.

This was how Iranian blogger and event panelist Hoosein Derackshan saw the effects of blogging on his country, where about 10 percent of the population have internet access and where there are an estimated 700 000 blogs. Blogs had become a phenomenon in the country, he said, presenting a threat to the government who were afraid of the organizing potential of the internet and its possible disruption to the social and political order.

In the lead up to the event, it was unclear whether or not it would go ahead. The Tunisian authorities had indicated that they were unhappy with any events that dealt with the subject of freedom of expression or human rights and had marked out five events due to be held at the official exhibition centre – the Kram exhibition centre outside Tunis – that they felt did not keep strictly with the theme of information and communications for development. High-level diplomatic interventions meant that the event was eventually able to go ahead, but throughout the period in which it was held there was wrangling in the corridors outside between Tunisian authority representatives and event organizers. At one stage during the meeting instructions were given to those attending that they were not allowed to hand out material to those assembled. The WSIS has been marred by the Tunisian authorities barring an alternative civil society meeting, by attacks on journalists and by the disruption of meetings.

Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, said a powerful shift was taking place in terms of global citizens media, which had the potential to democratize the media. In the past there had been no way to access and understand what people in other countries were saying, but as a result of the internet and the development of blogging, people were able to share their voices with the rest of the world.

While some people had questioned how relevant the internet was to the improvement of economic and social well being, it was critical because without individual empowerment development was not sustainable. Censorship was therefore very much connected with impeding development.

The issue of increased attempts by governments to control the internet came under the spotlight in a presentation by Nart Villeneuve, director of technical research at the Citizen’s Lab. Villeneuve has been studying filtering of the internet for the last three years. He described how states were beginning to create borders in cyber space through placing controls on the points of centralization on the internet infrastructure. Filtering was described as a specific technique used to implement controls and was in most cases about content. It could be implemented in various ways, from software on personal machines or through specialized technology at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or upstream at international connection points.

Most of the technology used for filtering was imported from the US, as was the case in Tunisia, where a US company had supplied the technology for blocking websites.

For the most part, governments were not transparent or accountable in their filtering activities. Some denied that it happened at all or obscured the fact that filtering was in place. Most were unable to answer what the blocking criteria was, or if there was a review or grievance process.

For the most part, filtering began as attempts to control content such as pornography, but an interesting trend, said Villeneuve, was that once filtering began it tended to migrate into other areas, with filtering seen as a quick fix to a larger social or political problem.

One of the worrying trends was that countries relied on commercial products for filtering, meaning that control over what was filtered therefore got ceded to the company developing the technology. There was also a large amount of “collateral damage” involved in filtering in that blocking one website could often lead to the blocking of thousands of others.

Filtering was in effect one mechanism and was linked with repressive controls and laws that caused people to self-censor. Reverse filtering was another problem, whereby filtering took place on the basis of geographic location. For example, because of the US embargo on Iran, websites were blocked for US web surfers.

Villeneuve said in some countries a “national interest” model was being pursued, with countries creating what were effectively intranets that could be accessed from within the country at lower cost than the international network. This meant that the local content would only be approved content and only wealthier internet users would be able to access the mainstream internet.

“What we are seeing is that non-transparent filtering is starting to turn into forms of political censorship and this has an impact on the internet and on democratic participation in a country. What filtering does is to isolate nodes of a network and cut them off – isolating them so that they can be more easily repressed. This is the opposite of what the internet is meant to be,” Villeneuve said.

Taurai Maduna, information officer for www.kubatana, a forum for civil society voices in Zimbabwe, also spoke as a panelist at the event. He said freedom of expression in Zimbabwe had been eroded through a variety of factors including repressive legislation such as the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA). Adopted in 2002, POSA had been used by the government to make it difficult to hold public meetings. AIPPA had contributed to curtailing people’s freedom of expression. Zimbabwe media had been shrinking over the years.

He said the internet remained one of the few uncensored methods of communication and information dissemination and described the use of the internet to distribute information relevant to the civil society sector in Zimbabwe, the powerful use of email in civil society campaigns and Kubatana’s involvement in the training of organisations in the use of email and the internet in their activities. “You find that most civil society organisations, when a human rights violation happens, don’t know how to disseminate the information. Using email they can get the word out.” “What Kubatana does is to focus on local content – there is a lot of content out there but not a lot that focuses on Zimbabwe. We are helping Zimbabwean organisations to come together.”

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The marketing line of Skype, the internet telephony phenomenon, is “The whole world can talk for free”. That one line captures so much that is thrilling about the internet. Somehow the novelty of being able to cross boundaries, communicate and network in ways that weren’t possible before never seems to wear off, especially with new innovations popping up almost daily. Yet that one line dreamed up by the marketing experts also highlights the problem faced by the internet. This lies in the fact that unless you have a computer with broadband access you can’t talk to the world, or if you can - using traditional telephony - you certainly can’t do it for free. And because this goes for the majority of the world’s population, that means that those of us that do have access and can talk for free certainly aren’t talking to the world. We are in fact, talking to ourselves, at the expense of the world.

The theory goes like this: Providing information and communications technologies will enable people to access and create opportunities and is therefore key to development, although it’s a moot point as to whether development comes first and ICTs later. But this is why the digital divide – the gap between the information have’s and have-not’s - is such a disaster, because there are so many people without access that the development potential of the internet can never be truly realized. Only 1% of the world’s internet users are Africans, for example.

And to really drive the point home: Africa - the continent that everyone knows is the poorest in the world - has to pay seven times as much per kilobyte of data transferred via the internet than do the advanced capitalist countries.

It’s little surprise therefore, that the digital divide is one of the major themes of the WSIS process. This is not to say, though, that a solution is in hand, with historical differences of opinion over how to fund a closing of the gap leading to a lack of decisive action. Any previous suggestions for a global tax, for example, to fund the closing of the gap, has previously been opposed by those who state that that the market must take care of the problem, despite evidence that spending is down and that in the last two decades the gap has shown no signs of shrinking.

At the previous WSIS meeting in Geneva in 2003, a Digital Solidarity Fund was proposed as one way to bridge the digital divide. As a result the final Geneva summit declaration acknowledged that funding for investment in ICTs was an important issue, and requested the UN Secretary General to establish a Task Force to review the current availability of funding and report to the second part of the Summit, in Tunis. This Task Force on Financial Mechanisms for ICT for Development presented its report in December 2004. Although the idea of the Digital Solidarity Fund did not receive universal backing at WSIS, it continued to gather support, and the Fund was set up in March 2005, with a secretariat based in Geneva, but the challenge lay in collecting enough funds to make it viable. More information on this issue can be found by visiting www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/, where the information for this paragraph on the Fund was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit No. 3 on ICT’s.

While how to finance the narrowing of the digital divide is a key component of the Tunis summit, who governs it was the topic of the moment in the lead up to the event. The key debates centre around a concern that if corporate interests gain control of the internet it will have serious implications for the extent to which access is made available to all. But calls for reform of internet governance – currently residing under the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) – have raised fears that some governments might seek to control the internet at the expense of freedom of expression.

There are therefore two main views on internet governance. Firstly, there are those that want to maintain the status quo, with some reforms. The other view wants to see the internet come under control of the international system as a way to ensure more transparency and accountability. Increasingly, there is also a feeling that the ultimate power of the US government over Icann, even if it is only potential and not actually used, is an obstacle to a fully international, open and equitable system. This information on Icann was sourced from the Panos Media Toolkit on ICTs, No1, available from the website www.panos.org.uk/iwitness/.

The US, however, is strongly opposed to reform and believes that the internet is best served by maintaining Icann as the current system. This deadlock has meant that predictions in the lead up to the summit were that it would pack up without concrete agreement. This has indeed been the case, with civil society generally disappointed with the outcomes of the summit and weak language expected from governments in the final summit statement – essentially language designed to cover up the failure of the summit.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

In the days leading up to the official opening of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis on Wednesday, the Tunisian authorities blocked plans to hold an alternative civil society forum, harassed human rights activists, confiscated cameras, insulted and beat people, shut down a website and disrupted meetings at the official summit venue.

(See French version below)

The fiasco over the human rights attitude of the Tunisian authorities peaked on Tuesday morning, when civil society organisations took the decision to cancel their parallel events in protest and as a show of solidarity with Tunisian civil society who, once the summit shuts down, will continue to bear the brunt of abuses by the Tunisian government. In explaining the decision to cancel events, one civil society activist said: “The Tunisian organisations feel incredibly emotional and they want a show of solidarity. We can show solidarity and draw attention to basic violations which are a contradiction of what the WSIS is trying to achieve.” Not all civil society organisations holding events abided by the protest, with some feeling that airing debates about the free flow of information that they had scheduled was more important than remaining silent.

The day before, representatives of international civil society organisations had tried to meet with their Tunisian counterparts in order to organize an unofficial parallel civil society event – a standard occurrence at large international summits designed to give a voice to those who cannot be a part of the official summit. Several attempts to secure a venue for the Citizens Summit on the Information Society had failed because booked venues had been cancelled, even when they had been pre-paid, said R. Jorgenson, co-chair of the WSIS human rights caucus.

The organisations involved had met on Monday to discuss what to do about the difficulty of securing a venue, but security police had prevented the Tunisian representatives from entering the venue where the meeting was taking place, at the Goethe Institute in Tunis. When the international representatives had joined their Tunisian colleagues outside, they were pushed and harassed. “All of us were pretty stressed and frightened,” said Jorgenson at a press briefing later, adding that: “We are supposed to be discussing how to empower people and yet we are not allowed to meet people to discuss the issues.” The Association of Progressive Communications (APC) reported on the incident as follows: “Omar Mestiri, Director of the online magazine Kalima (http://www.kalimatunisie.com) and a founder member of the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia (Conseil national pour les libertés en Tunisie - CNLT) was seized as soon as he arrived at the site for the meeting of the coordinating committee of the Citizens' Summit on the Information Society (CSIS). Bombarded with blows and insults, Mr. Mestiri kept calm, before he was able to break away from the group of plainclothes policemen.”

The website of the Citizen’s Summit on the Information Society was subsequently blocked by Tunisian authorities. Reports also circulated about a blogger having his camera confiscated by security guards after taking pictures during the registration process.

In a brief presentation held before a scheduled panel discussion entitled ‘Human Rights in the Information Society’ on Tuesday morning, civil society representatives described events that took place the day before as an attack on the right to assemble and speak freely and the subsequent blocking of the alternative summit website as “the cyber removal of the rights of people”.

Earlier reports by the Tunisian Monitoring Group (TMG), a coalition of free expression organisations, have repeatedly raised concerns about the imprisonment of individuals related to expression of their opinions, the blocking of websites, restrictions on freedom of association, restrictions on the freedom of movement of human rights defenders and political dissidents together with police surveillance, harassment, intimidation and interception of communications and the use of torture by the security services with impunity.

The group has called on the Tunisian government to release prisoners of conscience, end arbitrary detentions, end harassment and assaults on human rights activists, stop blocking websites, end censorship of books and newspapers, open up the press and broadcasting, respect freedom of movement, assembly and association, and allow independent investigation of alleged cases of torture.

As the summit kicks into gear the host government of Tunisia is showing no signs of recognising the contradictions between their repressive policies on freedom of expression and the essentially free flow of information on the internet. And so while thousands of delegates meet to discuss issues of internet governance and bridging the digital divide, freedom of expression activists that have angered the Tunisian government will remain behind bars.

These include Mohamed Abou, a founding member of the International Association for Solidarity with Political Prisoners and the Centre for the Independence of Judges and Lawyers. He is currently serving a three-year prison sentence after publishing an article in February 2005 on the banned web site www.tunnisnews.com, which protested President Ben Ali’s invitation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Tunisia. According to a Human Rights Watch report launched Tuesday at the WSIS ‘False Freedom: Online Censorship in the Middle East and North Africa’, his wife says that: “When I see him, his clothes are full of the blood of bugs from his mattress.”

The Human Rights Watch report also documents the arrest of youths in different parts of the country, accusing them of planning to join jihidist movements and preparing terrorist attacks. “In most cases the convictions were based heavily on the statements given to the police that the defendants later contested – without success – on the grounds that they had been extracted through torture or through threats of torture.” But as one of the report’s authors noted at the launch, increased repression associated with the internet is not only a Tunisian phenomenon – it is also a trend in the countries of Syria, Egypt and Iran also covered by the report.

The right to association and freedom of expression are basic rights that repressive governments have long tried to quash. What’s different is that the internet allows for new forms of organisation and association, so its no surprise that governments will attempt to crack down on this area also. As Charlie Lewis, from the Link Centre at Wits University explains, email and the internet allow new ways of organizing and so a website of an NGO, for example, becomes a way that people associate with and a point around which organisations assemble. One of the ways in which governments violate that right to freedom of expression and association is therefore not only through physical means, but also by blocking websites, for example.

But it is not only the right to freedom of expression that is being directly violated in Tunisia. The information society is fuelling other abuses of human rights that mostly go unrecognized. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, there is evidence that the mining of coltan – used in a wide variety of electronic devices - has fuelled the war that according to some estimates has claimed 1.8 million lives since 1997. Another example can be found in the dumping of defunct computers and other electronic equipment in Africa, which creates an environmental hangover for the continent.

As the summit moves into the rubber stamping stage, the actions of the Tunisian authorities over the last few days have raised awareness about the links between human rights and the information society, and made clear the contradictions of holding an event to discuss how to open up the internet to all in a repressive environment.

UPDATE: Reporters sans frontières (RSF), Paris reports that French international television station TV5 Monde announced the withdrawal of a two-person team in Tunis because it had been "subjected to close surveillance."

"Since 11 November, a 'Libération' journalist has been beaten and stabbed, a crew with the Belgian television station RTBF has been attacked and now, to cap it all, two TV5 journalists have been harassed," the press freedom organisation said.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Répression à Tunis et Sommet Mondial sur la Société de l’Information

Patrick Burnett

Dans les jours qui ont précédé l’ouverture officielle mercredi du Sommet mondial sur la société de l’information (SMSI) à Tunis, les autorités tunisiennes ont bloqué tout projet de tenue d’un forum parallèle de la société civile. On a vu des activistes des droits de l’homme harcelés, des caméras confisquées, des personnes insultées et battues, un site Internet fermé et des délégués réunis en plénière perturbés.

Ce fiasco, dû à la position des autorités tunisiennes sur les questions de droits de l’homme, a atteint son paroxysme lorsque certaines organisations de la société civile ont pris la décision d’annuler leurs événements parallèles en guise de protestation et pour montrer leur solidarité avec le la société civile tunisienne qui, dès la fermeture du sommet, aura encore à supporter les abus du gouvernement tunisien. Suite à cette décision d’annuler les événements, un activiste de la société civile a déclaré : « Les ONG tunisiennes sont dans tous leurs états et ont besoin de solidarité. Nous pouvons faire montre de solidarité et attirer l’attention sur les violations qui sont contraires à l’esprit et aux objectifs du SMSI. » Toutefois, ce ne sont pas toutes les organisations de la société civile qui ont adhéré à ce mouvement. Certaines ont en effet jugé qu’il était nécessaire de tenir les débats sur la libre circulation de l’information, comme prévus, au lieu de rester silencieux.

Le jour précédent, des représentants des organisations de la société civile internationale avait essayé de rencontrer leurs homologues tunisiens en vue d’organiser un événement parallèle non officiel - ce qui est une pratique très courante lors des grands sommets mondiaux qui a pour but de donner une voix à ceux qui n’ont pas le luxe de prendre part au sommet officiel. Selon R. Jorgenson, co-président du caucus des droits de l’homme au SMSI, les organisateurs du Sommet des citoyens sur la société de l’information n’avaient pas pu trouver, malgré moult tentatives, un lieu de rencontre du fait de l’annulation de tous les événements prévus et des lieux où ils devaient se tenir, même ceux qui ont été payés d’avance.

Les organisations impliquées s’étaient rencontrées le lundi pour discuter des moyens de trouver un lieu de rencontre, mais la police tunisienne avait empêché les représentants tunisiens d’entrer dans la salle où la réunion devait se tenir, à l’Institut Goethe de Tunis. Quand les délégués internationaux avaient rejoint leurs collègues tunisiens dehors, ils ont été repoussés et harcelés. « Nous étions tous très stressés et avions peur, » a plus tard déclaré Jorgenson lors d’une conférence de presse. Il a aussi ajouté qu’ils étaient supposés discuter de voies et moyens de responsabiliser les gens, mais qu’on les avait empêché de les rencontrer pour parler de tout cela. Voici comment l’Association pour le progrès des communications (APC) en relate les faits:

« Omar Mesri, Directeur du magazine en ligne Kalima (www.kalimatunisie.com) et membre fondateur du Conseil nationale pour les libertés en Tunisie (CNTL), s’est vu empoigné dès son arrivée au lieu où devait se tenir la réunion du comité de coordination du Sommet des citoyens sur la société de l’information (SCSI). M. Mesri est resté calme, même après s’être fait rouer de coups et arroser d’insultes, et a pu s’éloigner du groupe d’ « hommes en tenue » qui l’a malmené. »

Les autorités tunisiennes ont par la suite bloqué l’accès au site Internet du Sommet des citoyens sur la société de l’information. On raconte également que la caméra d’un bloggeur a été confisquée par les gardes après qu’il avait pris des photos lors de l’inscription à l’entrée.

Dans une brève présentation tenue mardi en amont de la discussion autour d’un panel au programme sur la question des droits de l’homme dans la société de l’information, des représentants de la société civile ont décrit les événements de la vieille comme une attaque sur le droit de s’assembler et de parler librement et le blocage plus tard du site Internet du sommet alternatif comme « la cyber élimination des droits des gens ».

Le Groupe de Contrôle de la Tunisie, une coalition d’organisations pour la liberté d’expression, a plus tôt soulevé des inquiétudes concernant l’emprisonnement d’individus qui n’ont fait qu’exprimer leur opinions, le blocage des sites Internet, les restrictions relatives à la liberté d’association et de mouvement des défenseurs des droits de l’homme et des dissidents politiques, ainsi que la surveillance policière, le harcèlement, l’intimidation et l’interception de communications privées et l’usage avec impunité de la torture par les forces de l’ordre.

Le groupe a appelé le gouvernement tunisien à remettre en liberté des prisonniers dits de conscience, à arrêter les détentions arbitraires, à mettre fin à l’harcèlement et les assauts sur la personnes des activistes des droits de l’homme, à stopper les blocages de sites Internet, à mettre fin à la censure des livres et journaux, à ouvrir les voies de presse (écrite et audiovisuelle), à respecter la liberté de mouvement, de rassemblement et d’association, et à ouvrir une enquête sur les cas de torture déclarés.

Pendant que la machine du sommet se met en marche, le gouvernement tunisien ne semble guère se rendre compte des contradictions qu’il y a entre les politiques de répression qui porte atteinte à la liberté d’expression et la circulation non-stop d’informations sur Internet. Et donc au moment où des milliers de délégués se rencontrent pour parler de la question de la gouvernance d’Internet et de la réduction de l’écart numérique existant, des activistes de la liberté d’expression, qui se sont attirés l’ire de l’exécutif tunisien, croupissent en prison.

Parmi eux, Mohamed Abou, membre fondateur de l’Association internationale pour la solidarité avec les prisonniers politiques et du Centre pour l’indépendance des juges et des avocats. Il sert, en ce moment même, une peine de prison de trois ans, suite à la publication en février 2005 d’un article sur l’interdiction du site www.tunnisnews.com, qui protestait l’invitation en Tunisie par Président Ben Ali du Premier Ministre israélien Ariel Sharon. D’après un rapport de Human Rights Watch intitulé « Fausse Liberté : La Censure Sur Internet Au Proche Orient et En Afrique du nord », présenté au SMSI, sa femme a déclaré : « Quand je le voit, ses habits sont tachetés de sang à cause de la piqûre des punaises qui infestent son lit. »

Le rapport de Human Rights Watch fait aussi état de l’arrestation de jeunes dans différentes parties du pays. Ils sont tous accusés d’avoir des liens avec des organisations jihadistes et de préparer des attaques terroristes. Le rapport dit que dans la plupart des cas, les accusés ont tous été condamnés sur la base de déclarations faites à la police ; déclarations qu’ils ont ensuite contestées – en vain – arguant qu’ils y ont été contraints par le biais de la torture ou par des menaces de torture. Mais comme l’a noté un des auteurs du rapport lors de la présentation de ce dernier, le regain de la répression liée à Internet n’est pas un phénomène purement tunisien, il existe aussi dans d’autres pays tels que la Syrie, l’Egypte et l’Iran, qui ont aussi été épinglés par le rapport.

Les droits à l’association et la liberté d’expression sont des droits essentiels que les gouvernements de répression ont longtemps essayé d’escamoter. La différence c’est que Internet permet l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’organisation et d’association, donc ce n’est une surprise pour personne si les gouvernements essaient de s’attaquer à ce domaine également. Comme l’explique Charlie Lewis du Link Centre à l’université de Wits, le courriel et Internet ouvrent de nouvelles voies de formation et donc le site web d’une ONG, par exemple, devient la face qu’on associe à une organisation, de même que son point de convergence et de ralliement. Un des moyens par lesquels les gouvernements violent cette liberté d’expression et d’association est l’usage de la force, mais aussi le blocage de sites web.

Mais ce n’est pas seulement le droit à la liberté de l’expression qui est directement violé en Tunisie. La société de l’information cite également d’autres cas d’abus des droits de l’homme qui passent inaperçus. À la République Démocratique du Congo, par exemple, on a la preuve que c’est l’exploitation du coltan, utilisé dans bon nombre d’appareils électroniques, qui a attisé le feu de la guerre, qui, selon certaines estimations, a fait 1,8 millions de victimes depuis l’année 1997. Un autre exemple est le dumping de vieux ordinateurs et d’autres appareils électroniques en Afrique. Ceci crée de graves problèmes environnementaux.

Alors que le sommet tire à sa fin, il devient clair que les actions du gouvernement tunisien au cours de ces derniers jours ont suscité une prise de conscience quant aux liens entre les droits de l’homme et la société de l’information, et ont montré par là même les contradictions d’une rencontre dont l’objet est de discuter de l’ouverture d’Internet à tous, dans un environnement de répression.

INFORMATIONS DE DERNIERES MINUTES : Selon Reporters sans frontières (RSF) basé à Paris, la chaîne de télévision française TV5 Monde, qui est internationale, a annoncé le retrait de son équipe de deux journalistes de Tunis pour cause de surveillance trop rapprochée de la part des autorités tunisiennes.

Et RSF d’ajouter que depuis le 11 novembre, un journaliste de Libération a été battu et poignardé, une équipe de la chaîne belge RTBF a été attaquée et maintenant, pour couronner le tout, on harcèle deux journalistes de TV5.

*Vous pouvez envoyer vos commentaires à [email protected].

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) SMS is being used to monitor child rights violations. In Argentina indigenous communities are using SMS to halt the bulldozers that destroy their forest livelihoods. And in the Philippines, angry activists have used SMS to hold government to account. The power of cellular technology is no longer up for debate; what remains to be discussed is how to maximize it for social good. Mobile Active Convergence, held recently in Canada, did just this.

The goal of the first ever conference on using cell phones and SMS in campaign, human rights, and political work was to “help speed the dissemination of innovative practices and technology by skill and knowledge-sharing among participants”.

What came out of the three-day event, held in Toronto, Canada between 22-25 September, went far beyond this expectation, as a diverse group of people from around the world banged their heads together, mixed their ideas and thrashed out a vision for just how far cellular technology can go in creating a better world. The end result was new ideas, the formation of a lasting network and the production of a body of knowledge available to many beyond the confines of the conference.

Organised by Green Media Toolshed (http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org/) and Aspiration (http://www.aspirationtech.org/), 40-odd participants from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia explored strategies and tactics for the use of cell phones as an organizing tool towards the end of helping civil society activists capitalize on the global wireless phone infrastructure for advocacy communications and organizing.

Key areas addressed by the conference included tactics, networking and funding. The conference produced guides on how to use SMS in organizing work, discussed organizing challenges in the South and addressed issues of language and access. (Read the full conference proceedings by visiting http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Proceedings) The conference produced a declaration on the use of mobile phones entitled “Without the people mobile tech means nothing”, which can be read at (http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Without_the_people_mobi...)

The stories told below were related to Pambazuka News by three participants at the conference, each of whom are using cellular technology in their work to confront power and create change.

* Bukeni, Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project, DRC

“My name is Bukeni and I am from the eastern part of the DRC, South Kivu Province, Uvira. I am a director of a local NGO called Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project and am also a filmmaker. I make films on child soldiers in the DRC and started working on this issue in 1998.

In my town many children were abducted by the RCD-Goma during the conflict in the DRC. There was a militia called the Mai-Mai which was recruiting children by force. At that stage I was a student in Bukavu in 1998. Parents began to send me letters asking me to advocate for information about their children.

I went to the chief commander to talk to him. It was hard to reach him but eventually I got an audience. The list of children that I got from parents contained 22 names and I showed him the list. After discussion he agreed to do what he could and we agreed to meet in a week. When I returned I had to give the bodyguards cigarettes to be able to get an audience with the commander, who provided a list of 11 children who had been found. They said they could not do anything else and warned me not to insist - they threatened they would shoot me. I asked what message I should take to the parents and they told me to tell them that I had found nothing. I sent a letter to the parents telling them what I had found out.

By that time it was Christmas holidays and some parents came to thank me when I returned home. After that I tried to contact some friends to see what could be done to advocate. But the problem was that in the villages there is still a great deal of insecurity. However, we knew relatives in these villages and so we went to them to find out from other parents who had the same problem. We met again after 10 days and in that time had collected the names of 110 names of children who had disappeared. We decided to set up an NGO. Our primary goal was to advocate for these children and to monitor abuses.

In 2 000, I established a transit centre to accommodate children being demobilised from camps. In the training camps I would find hundreds of children and would speak to the commanders to get 3,4,5, or 6 children back. Up to last year we have been able to demobilise 310 children. Primarily we are doing demobilisiation and reintegration by uniting the children with their parents. We also do advocacy to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers.

Advocating in the camps is not without risk. I have been arrested four times and beaten twice.

In 2003 I introduced the use of video as a tool of advocacy. Some parents have encouraged their children to join militia because they believe that it will help to protect them. I began to try to go into the camps to make footage and in 2003 made my first film. The quality was not good, but in 2004 I found a partner in Witness, who specialise in using videos as a tool of advocacy. The video I made had the goal of sensitising the local community to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers. Since June 2005 the video has been screened in villages and sometimes 1000 people come to watch it.

In the villages people often don’t have access to TV. They are sometimes just fascinated to see the images so we often screen it twice so that the message sinks in the second time. The video has been a huge success.

This year in May I also made a video focusing on girl soldiers. The real reason for their recruitment is sexual exploitation. I addressed it to the international community because we need international action because our courts are not effective. Last year the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said the DRC would be the first country investigated before the ICC. The video called on the ICC to take into consideration the recruitment and use of child soldiers because that is a war crime under the ICC. The video raised the necessity of prosecuting those responsible.

In our activities we also do reporting and monitoring activities on child rights. In 2000 we implemented village committees for child protection whose role is in reporting and monitoring on child rights violations. Each committee has five members and are established in each village and are known by the community. Usually when there is a situation they compile a report and send it by mail to our office, but this can take 4-5 days.

During May I got a small grant from a New York based organisation called Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict. I submitted a small proposal that asked if they could provide us with cellphones so that the village could provide reports. We now have 15 committees in 22 villages. They report by cellphone and SMS about abductions and maiming, who is responsible and who the victims are.

For example in a village called Akwe, there was a girl who was shot by militia. Information was collected about who shot her and it was reported to our office. We alerted the local authorities and asked them for quick intervention to make sure that an arrest was made and an investigation done. This was all through SMS and cellphones. It was very fast. Unfortunately, the authorities could not arrest those responsible because in our area there is impunity. We collect about two reports a week, but also do verification.

I have a passion for working on this issue. I am working voluntarily. These children are our children. Let us do something to solve the problem – what we can do is advocate for a cessation of impunity and of violations of child rights and maybe then these children can build a better future for the whole nation.”

* Trixie, TXTPower, The Philippines

“We were initially a consumer advocacy group formed in 2001. This was the year that President Estrade was ousted and one of the tools that we used was SMS. It took SMS to mobilise people to go out on the streets and vent their frustration.

During that time if you were a mobile phone subscriber you received 100 free SMS messages. When companies saw how much people were texting, they looked at decreasing the amount and in August 2001 this is what they proposed. Activists felt that something had to be done.

We formed TXTPower and one of the ways in which we fought against this was through a text boycott. At that time 100 million messages were being sent a day. One text message equals one peso so that was a loss of $2m a day for the companies. Almost immediately the companies made a public announcement saying they would not remove the text allocation.

The next major thing we did was in 2003 when the country was in the middle of a financial crisis. An IMF suggestion was to tax text messages. We said that this was really not going to happen. If something is already free, how are you going to tax it?

This led on to August 2004 when we picketed congress and sent messages out saying ‘Texters Revolt! Say no to text tax!’ We got the cellphone number of the speaker of the parliament and told people to text messages to that number. We also had overseas workers join in the campaign. It became front page headlines in the newspapers in September and it forced the speaker to declare that he would not tax text messages. There are still proposals to tax messaging but we are monitoring it closely. We had some complaints from the speaker because he could not use his cellphone for some time!

Last year we extended our engagement to the May 2004 national elections where we supported progressive party list groups. Cheating and vote-buying were common place. We therefore focused our activities on monitoring and had a central area where we set up a computer to receive messages from people in the regions telling us if there were problems or vote buying. A quick reaction team would be composed of a lawyer, a human rights worker and representatives from different parties.

Our most notorious activity was a few months ago. In the elections there were allegations of cheating. There were wiretaps of the president speaking to an election official. The Department of Justice declared that anyone in possession of wiretap recordings could be arrested at any time. A few days later people made a ring tone out of the tapes and were playing it on their phones. We had the idea of loading the ring tone up onto our website. We had to consult on the legal implications, but eventually we went ahead with it. There was an overwhelming response – we had 300 000 hits on our website in two days. Others emailed us different versions of the ring tone. Sometime later the president apologised for talking to the official.

Anger motivates me. We are an angry bunch of people. The economy is bad – the government does not care about the people. The cellphone is a way for people to express how they feel. Our government hides a whole lot of truth from its people – we have a right to know the truth and advocate to get the government to act in the interests of the people. For this we have been called cyber-terrorists.

We are just a loose group of people. We have no money and no offices. It’s just a group of really angry activists.”

* Oscar, Greenpeace, Argentina

“One of the many campaigns is against forest destruction and we work very closely with indigenous people. In this area the indigenous communities are fighting for the right to their land and are facing trouble because land owners buy up land to cultivate Soya, which is 99% genetically modified. These communities have a long history of resistance to eviction and the destruction of the forests.

One of the problems we detect is that there are no landlines to stay in contact if landowners are trying to destroy homes and forest. We gave mobile phones to different leaders in the communities and are using them to get messages from people.

When we get warnings that the forest is being destroyed we go into action with motorbikes to stop the bulldozers. We blockade the bulldozers with chains and demobilise them. SMS is also used to network and for organising protests. It is a good tool for remaining in close contact with local communities because one of the problems is that the communities are remote and don’t know each other. We now have around 50 leaders with mobile phones and they represent around 10 000 people.

Sometimes the bulldozer operators transmit that we are in action and they call the police, who wait for us at the entrance to the forests. Sometimes we take videos to show the media what is happening. We also have a helicopter which we sometimes use for escape. The Plan B is that we are arrested and one person escapes with the footage in order to get it to the media. Sometimes the police are violent and don’t respect the laws.

The circumstances of these people is that they are very poor and have no access to water or energy. They live in small communities of 5-10 families inside the forest. The forest is very important to them because it is a source of water and food.

According to legislation, the indigenous people have the right to their land but the problem is that they don’t have papers to show that the property belongs to them. Actually the government is selling the land to big landowners who have 10 or 50 000 hectares of land. In some cases it is difficult to know how many hectares of land they own. Once it is sold the bulldozers build routes and then deforest the area and grow Soya. The soil is very fragile and after a few years it becomes a desert.

Soya is a big international business and one of the reasons for the recovery of the economy is the export of Soya. Indigenous people are being evicted and end up on the borders of the big cities to live in very poor areas.

We are winning the local fights. We have stopped the sale of forests in a legal way and stopped the bulldozers with strong local resistance. We are now in a deadlock – they are not going ahead but they are not surrendering. This is the situation now. But Soya expansion means money and a ‘good’ economy.”

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

World Press Freedom Day was marked on May 03. In many countries in Africa journalists continue to be intimidated and jailed for the work that they do. If Africa’s many problems are to be overcome, there must be a recognition that active participation of citizens in shaping policy and decision making is essential to healthy societies.

World Press Freedom Day is usually an occasion where speakers promote the ideas of press freedom, freedom of expression and association. But at his fraud and corruption trial, Durban businessman Shabir Shaik, who is accused of bankrolling South African deputy president Jacob Zuma for his own financial benefit, broke the good tradition and expressed his own particular views on press freedom.

Shaik, angered by weekend newspaper reports that splashed his closing argument on the front pages before his legal team had presented it in court, said he had always wondered why Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was so negative towards the press. Shaik concluded that after 10 to 15 years of being presented as a demon in the press, Mugabe probably woke up one morning and said “enough is enough”. Referring to Mugabe’s draconian media laws, Shaik said: “As long as you continue with your rubbish all the time I'll be the first to vote for that law.”

Shaik’s statements on press freedom could be easily dismissed as those of a man prone to showboating and with an apparent insatiable hunger to see his name in print. It might be easy to dismiss them if it weren’t for the fact that Shaik is close to the corridors of power and an influential member of his community, even if this influence turns out to be for all the wrong reasons. People with public platforms should know better than to undermine hard won freedoms, especially on a continent where press freedom is in such a shoddy state.

So what exactly is the state of press freedom in Africa on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day 2005? As usual, a host of reports lamenting the poor state of press freedom globally were released by media rights organizations on May 03. The International Federation of Journalists, the world's largest journalists' group, released a report detailing how the four-year old "war on terrorism" is having a devastating impact on civil liberties.

The report said media and independent journalism were not immune from a "pervasive atmosphere of paranoia", leading to dangerous levels of self censorship, while at the same time dissent inside and outside the media were being restricted. The report says governments are increasingly working together through international fora such as the G8 to circumvent national resistance to attacks on civil liberties. Increased police powers and data collection and surveillance "on an unprecedented and global scale have granted extensive new powers to the state."

The authors claim these powers undermine democratic standards, "because they are introduced in covert processes which are largely secret and outside the orbit of parliamentary accountability. At the same time they are leading to the creation of a surveillance society in which the citizen is increasingly accountable to the authorities and the state." The report dubs this process "policy laundering."

These observations make clear that journalists globally now have to cope with new and more insidious threats to their independence. They point to an enormous transfer of power to the ‘security state’ in order to combat a largely fictitious threat under the name of terrorism. Combined with a sycophantic press in many countries, driven by the dictates of commercial interests and mostly reflecting unashamedly a particular type of free market ideology, the danger is that in the face of these new forces, the press will become increasingly more ineffectual and irrelevant.

In Africa, the Committee to Protect Journalists spells out the often desperate situation in which journalists operate on the continent. The overall context is described as being one where there is weak rule of law in many countries, with journalists regularly battling threats and harassment. Journalists who write about corruption or mismanagement are silenced through repressive legislation. “If fewer journalists were killed or imprisoned in Africa than in some other regions in 2004 - two were killed and 19 were behind bars for their work at year's end - the problems they face are insidious and ongoing,” said the CPJ. War and violence remain a major threat to journalists in countries such as Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Burundi, Central African Republic (CAR), and even Nigeria. Some of the cases of abuse that took place on the continent in 2004 include:

- In the Gambia, veteran journalist and press freedom activist Deyda Hydara was killed in a drive-by shooting in December, just days after the country adopted repressive media legislation that he had opposed.
- In Ivory Coast, reporter Antoine Massé was fatally shot while covering violent clashes between French peacekeeping troops and demonstrators in the western town of Duékoué in November.
- French and Canadian investigative reporter Guy-André Kieffer was feared dead after he disappeared from the Ivoirian commercial capital, Abidjan, in April.
- Eritrea remained Africa's worst jailer of journalists, with 17 held in secret prisons.
- One journalist was jailed in Cameroon and another in Sierra Leone at year's end

Africa is currently facing a multitude of problems. An HIV/AIDS epidemic is having a devastating impact on the lives of millions of Africans. While it is recovering in parts, the continent suffers from the effects of violent conflict. Hunger and famine are widespread. Maternal and child mortality rates are amongst the highest in the world. The list can go on, but on nearly every social and economic indicator it is Africa that is capable of producing the horrifying statistics which reflect a deep human suffering.

In this context, it is also important to realize that bringing an end to Africa’s problems involves a multi-faceted recognition of the rights of citizens, not least to freedom of expression and freedom of association. These rights are not something that should be instituted once a utopian country or continent is created. They are tied up in solving the problems facing the continent and creating an egalitarian society where the rights of citizens are respected.

As a 2003 petition to African Union Heads of States by a variety of media groups stated: “Active participation of citizens in shaping policy and decision making of their countries is impossible if their own governments continue to deny them the rights necessary to ensure such participation. These include the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association and political participation, as well as media freedom to facilitate a free exchange of information, ideas and opinion.”

* Please send comments to

Press Freedom Links:

http://www.rsf.org/
http://www.cpj.org/
http://www.misa.org/
http://www.article19.org/
http://www.fxi.org.za/
http://www.rap21.org/
http://www.mfwaonline.org/
http://www.jhr.ca/index2.html
http://mediawatch.clickpost.com/
http://allafrica.com/stories/200505030615.html
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/2f3284ed5a4b8b6834eb6a4484212169.htm
http://allafrica.com/stories/200505040274.html

On the same day that the documentary Farenheit 9/11 was released in the run-up to the recent US elections, a lesser-known film also made its debut. Entitled “George W. Bush: Faith in the White House” the documentary targeted a Christian evangelical audience.

A review of the film from the San Francisco chronicle states: “One thing the documentary makes unmistakably clear: Christianity is the guiding metaphor of the Bush administration. If, in Christianity, a sinner can find salvation through faith in Jesus, in America, the idea goes, a citizen can find salvation - from terrorism and a disordered, alarming world - only through faith in Bush. Within this construct, reliance on facts and expressions of doubt are forms of heresy. Blind faith is what's demanded by this president, as God’s instrument on earth.”

The film quotes a representative of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals, regular white house visitor Ted Haggard, assuring viewers that in 100 years, President Bush will be remembered in the Islamic world as “a great liberator.”

The point is that many outside the US might not realise that white evangelicals accounted for a large percentage of Bush’s vote in the 2000 elections and that the mobilisation of this vote was seen as crucial to his re-election campaign.

Bush has been forthright in his courting of the evangelical vote. For example, in remarks via satellite to the National Association of Evangelicals Convention in March, Bush said: “America is a nation with a mission. We’re called to fight terrorism around the world, and we're waging that fight. As freedom’s home and freedom’s defender, we are called to expand the realm of human liberty. And by our actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than 50 million people have been liberated from tyranny, and they are reclaiming their dignity as free people. Our nation can take great pride in these achievements. Yet I know that liberty is not America’s gift to the world - liberty and freedom are God’s gift to every man and woman who lives in this world.”

The evangelical lobby has exerted an influence not only over domestic US policy in relation to abortion and gay marriages, but also on the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. The ‘global gag rule’, for example, blocks US funding for foreign family planning agencies if they provide abortion services or lobby to make or keep abortion legal in their own country.

This lobby group is obviously not the only determinate of foreign policy, but its influence has grown and is expected to be stronger with the re-election of Bush. Initially motivated to exert influence on foreign policy through a desire to stop religious persecution abroad, its focus under the Bush administration has expanded, especially after 9/11 when the cause of religious freedom came to be more closely associated with national security.

Sudan provides a good example of how the evangelical lobby group have exerted influence over US foreign policy. Sometime soon after Bush was elected as president in 2000 a coalition of religious groups visited the White House and met with a political adviser of the president. According to a report in the New York Times, the issue of concern to the mainly evangelical groups was violence between Muslims and Christians in Sudan. The evangelicals wanted the combating of religious persecution abroad to be a major focus of American foreign policy and in Sudan they saw an opportunity to pursue this agenda. The White House was receptive to the lobbying and Sudan moved up the foreign policy agenda, resulting in US involvement in peace negotiations between the Khartoum government and the South. More recently, the evangelicals have also been involved in pressing for US involvement in Darfur.

In an August 2 2004 letter by the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million Christian conservatives, after the US congress had declared the situation in Sudan genocide, the organisation commended Bush for “fostering democracy, religious freedom and human rights”, but warned that: “Your Administration’s goal - to redefine our national interest not as power but as values, and to identify one supreme value, what John Kennedy called ‘the success of liberty’ - could be jeopardized by not taking a strong enough position on Sudan’s genocidal behaviour.”

The increasing role of the evangelical lobby on American foreign policy and its involvement in Sudan goes some way to explaining why the crisis in the DRC, where estimates put the number of dead due to war at over three million, has received scant attention compared to Sudan. It raises questions about the extent to which Sudan has been used as a platform for the evangelical lobby to pursue the “supreme value” – religious freedom as it marries with the cause of national security. It also raises questions about future US foreign policy towards countries in Africa where there is an apparent easy dichotomy of Christian vs Muslim and a corresponding need to fight the “war on terror” on foreign ground. How much influence the evangelical lobby exerts in Africa over the next four years – and the consequences of that influence - remains to be seen.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. He has never been to the US and is not an expert in US foreign policy.

* Please send comments to

LINKS:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1026-08.htm
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040311-1.html
http://www.plannedparenthood.org/gag/
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1026-08.htm

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N1515553.htm

Faceless, Amma Darko’s third novel after Beyond the Horizon and The Housemaid, is the tragic story of street children in Accra, Ghana told through a chaotic urban fabric where pressing social issues like the gap between rich and poor, HIV/AIDS, broken families and the role of women in society are all-pervasive.

The story is an investigation of the death of Baby T, a child prostitute whose body is found dumped behind a marketplace, naked, beaten and mutilated. Darko skilfully reveals details about Baby T during the progression of the novel through her younger sister Fofo, herself a street child who comes into contact with group of women who run a documentation NGO called MUTE.

Baby T’s story is heartbreaking and entirely believable, not only in relation to Accra, but also in a global context. She is the third child of Ma Tsumu, born after a brutal beating intended to fulfil the ambitions of an abortion because the father believes that Ma Tsumu is “too fertile”. Kwei, the father, disappears after fathering Fofo, leaving Ma Tsumu to fend for herself with four children. The family manage alone with the two sons bringing home money from fish-related activities. But Faceless is a novel where things only go very wrong when men are involved and when Ma Tsumu takes a lover into her bed in the form of Kpakpo, who earns his keep by “dubious” means, the stage is set for tragedy.

The first consequence of the new lover is that the brothers, unable to stand the new nightly sounds of the shared bedroom, pack their bags and disappear. This leaves Baby T at the mercy of Kpakpo, who sexually abuses her. Hurt and confused, she confides in a family friend, Onko, who brutally rapes her. Ma Tsumu, a tragic figure destroyed by the men in her life, is unable to do anything but take money from Onko, who then continues to live in the same compound as Baby T. Clearly the situation is untenable and Kpakpo has the answer. Baby T can be sent away to a distant relative of his who is actually a Madame – in reality Baby T is sold into prostitution.

Discrimination against women is a constant theme of the novel and symbolically Baby T is representative of the sins visited upon all women in a society where from birth women are discriminated against and made responsible not only for their sins, but for those of men in society. As mentioned earlier, nothing goes right when men are involved and many of the male characters in the novel are murderers, child abuses, rapists – or simply good for nothings.

Even those not presented in this light are trapped in their perceptions of women as caregivers and housewives, such as NGO worker Kabria’s husband, who expects her to be waiting at the door to take his briefcase when he returns from work. Despite the fact that Kabria works a long day, she is still expected to manage the household, cook and take care of the children. Darko is keen to highlight this hypocrisy.

The response of women to their experience at the hands of men varies from Ma Tsumu’s “Because they are animals, They know no mercy…” to the positive engagement of the NGO MUTE, which is made up entirely of women as if to suggest that it is women who must be in control of their response to a warped male world.

But if the fate of women in society is a major theme of the novel, it plays itself out through a street children narrative which allows Darko the scope for powerful social commentary that demonstrates the personal tragedy of each and every child that ends up on the streets. As one of the characters says in quoting assassinated US president John F. Kennedy: “The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth.” What is the hope, Darko seems to be asking, if societies can allow the conditions that result in the fate of Baby T?

Darko’s landscape is not entirely bleak: she does offer hope in the form of Fofo, who by the end of the novel looks set on the right road, and in the form of MUTE, whose members are the positive role models of the novel.

It might be said that the solutions offered by the novel are too simple, but Darko does leave enough in the air to suggest that nothing is certain. Indeed, the story is told with just enough skill to keep the reader guessing. While it is true that some of the characters sometimes feel a bit stereotyped, Darko is also capable of demonstrating some character complexity and contradictions, as in the case of the pimp Poison, who is also shown to be a victim through is own abuse as a child, but who now “no longer suffered the pain, he inflicted it.”

These criticisms aside, Darko succeeds in hammering home a powerful message that it is children and the way they are treated that are the true measure of how societies are judged. It is through their eyes that the answers to the myriad moral predicaments that society finds itself in, are to be found.

* Reviewed by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu

* Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers

* Exclusively distributed by African Books Collective
To purchase, email: [email][email protected]
http://www.africanbookscollective.com

When the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a July 30 resolution on Sudan demanding that the Khartoum Government halt killings in Darfur within one month or face economic and diplomatic action, aid agencies slammed the decision as providing more time for killings and rape by militias known as the Janjaweed. Nearly one month later figures indicate that there are currently 2.2 million conflict-affected people in Darfur and Eastern Chad. And as the UN deadline to the Khartoum government rolls to a close on August 30, activity by the Janjaweed is reportedly on the increase in West Darfur.

It now appears unlikely that strong UN action will be taken against Khartoum and that instead support will be given to the African Union’s efforts to solve the crisis. Sudanese government and rebel leaders are currently meeting under AU auspices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in an attempt to reach a political settlement and end the violence. The AU already has 80 observers in Darfur, protected by 150 Rwandan troops. However, an AU plan to send nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to monitor the region was rejected on Monday by a senior Sudanese official.

It may be that intervention under the auspices of the AU will be the favoured approach, because broader international action in Darfur through the UN is more complicated than it seems. One reason for this is that although Darfur is a charged topic in the United States ahead of the elections in that country, the most powerful member of the UN Security Council has been stung by its intervention in Iraq. It is unlikely that the US, even driven by the prospects of lucrative oil contracts, would risk an intervention in Sudan while it is embroiled in a disastrous occupation in Iraq. In any case, a “humanitarian intervention” in Sudan led by the US would be farcical while more than 100 000 of their troops are terrorising Iraq.

The US position is further complicated by the contention that the US has only become interested in the Darfur crisis because it threatens a peace deal between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People’s Liberation Army that would have opened up Washington’s access to Sudan’s plentiful oil supplies in the south of the country. Lastly, theories are circulating that the US supports the Darfur rebels against the Khartoum government because it is not sufficiently pro-American. All these factors leave the US hopelessly compromised with regards their credibility in leading an international intervention that is purely aimed at ending the conflict and does not contain insidious connotations related to political and economic ambitions. That this complicates an international response is to say nothing of other factors that might impact on the UN Security Council, such as the largely supportive role that the Arab League has lent Khartoum.

But whatever the UN decision on August 30, criticism remains as to the inadequacy of efforts to date. Part of the reason why it seems like attempts to end the crisis have been half-hearted is that genocide inevitable develops its own myths. The result is that it appears as if a particular situation has spun out of control and is too complicated for immediate action. In this scenario, the various parties are doing all that they can to rescue a seemingly irredeemable situation. But it is important to engage in an unmasking of myths because often they serve to perpetuate genocide.

The first myth to uncover is an obvious one. This is that the increased media attention of the last few months mirrors the timeline of the crisis and that therefore the time for response has been too short to yield results. In fact, the Darfur crisis played itself out throughout last year, so that in October, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) noted that tens of thousands of people who had fled from Darfur in western Sudan to neighbouring Chad were “invisible” to the humanitarian community, receiving practically no assistance.

The myth that the Darfur conflict is a crisis of the last few months is central to the failure of the international community because it shows that the early warning signs were ignored - or that at the time the conflict did not carry the political relevancy needed for international action. What has been opted for now is a kind of genocide crisis management, with a strong sense that more time is needed and that diplomatic ventures must be allowed to run their course. But both the international community and the Government of Sudan have known about the crisis in Darfur for far longer than it has been in the media spotlight. How much more time exactly would they like? How many more people must die?

This is linked to the idea that genocide somehow ‘just happens’. In reality, genocide has its own social, economic and political aspects. It has been argued that in Africa, the legacy of colonialism, economic problems and inequalities mean that governments or powerful groups can promote differences and conflict as a mechanism of power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation.

Another area that needs to be challenged is that of the “peace process”. There is a sense that once a “peace process” is underway or the perpetrators engaged in diplomacy, then whatever crisis that is underway is about to be solved. But this, as the organisation Genocide Watch points out, often obscures the fact that genocide is not conflict but rather one-sided violence of one group against another. Therefore it is the “genocidal nature of the government in Khartoum” that needs to be confronted. A peace process will not necessary result in a solution. Often, the “peace process” - and this would also apply to other diplomatic efforts - can work to distract attention from genocide or result in the international community being more lenient towards a perpetrating regime.

Often, genocide is characterised as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. In Sudan, it has been argued that what is happening there is a result of a kind of clash of civilisations between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. But as Alex de Waal has pointed out, this obscures a “complicated reality”. “Darfur's Arabs are black, indigenous, African and Muslim, just like Darfur's non-Arabs, hailing from the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and many smaller tribes.”

The ‘African’ versus ‘Arab’ theory may act to obscure the original causes of the conflict such as conflicts over resources, especially water and land. It may also work to obscure the historical causes of conflict, such as the fact that Sudan was a colonial construct arbitrarily created, in which the British entrenched divisions between a wealthy North and the rest of the country. Understanding complicated historical and political factors is important in understanding why the Darfur crisis has developed and is crucial in any solution.

In conclusion, the shameful response of the international community to the Rwandan genocide should have resulted in lessons being learnt on how to deal with similar crisis situations. But not even the obvious reminders presented by the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in April helped to move the world from genocide crisis management to genocide prevention. That these lessons have not been learnt indicates that those institutions responsible for protecting international human rights standards have not been made accountable for the decisions that they make with regards the lives of those who suffer as a result of inaction, nor have they been able to move towards clear decision-making that is based not on the interests of the powerful but in the interests of ordinary people who suffer most at the hands of violence.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. Please send comments to

Reference URLs:
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html

http://www.genocidewatch.org/Never%20Again.htm
http://allafrica.com/stories/200408021131.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,11538,1285443,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4449674,00.html

When armed men raided the printing press of Gambia's The Independent newspaper on 13 April, five of them opened fire on staff while a sixth doused the printing press with petrol and set it alight. It was the second time in six months that the newspaper's printing press was targeted, but employees complained that it took the police five hours to arrive at the scene, even though there was a police station only one kilometre away.

Earlier in the month, eight internet users in Tunisia who said they had simply used the Internet to download files about the situation in the Middle East where accused of promoting terrorist attacks and sentenced by a Tunis court to up to 26 years in prison. Reporters sans frontières (RSF)
commented at the time: "The trial of these young people demonstrates the Tunisian judicial system's outrageous contempt for the rights of the defence. Simply consulting Internet sites cannot be considered evidence of a terrorist plot. The Tunisian regime is trying to terrorise Internet users and silence dissent."

On Friday, April 2, Ethiopian authorities jailed Merid Estifanos, former editor-in-chief of the private, Amharic-language weekly Satanaw. This was after he was unable to pay bail in a criminal defamation case stemming from a September 2001 opinion piece titled "The Hidden Agenda of Prime Minister Meles." Estifanos did not write the article, but as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, he was held responsible for its content. The Committee to Protect Journalists said: "We call on Ethiopian authorities to release Merid Estifanos immediately, and to work toward removing criminal penalties for press offences."

These are arbitrary selections of press freedom and freedom of expression violations during the month of April. They are by no means unique. The routine stories that surface from around the continent on a daily basis paints a picture of a media environment where journalists are routinely harassed, suppressed, beaten, tortured and imprisoned.

Last year, on the occasion of the inauguration of the African Union, Pambazuka News carried an editorial which highlighted the shocking state of press freedom on the African continent. The editorial stated:

"This distinguished gathering of Ministers did not think it necessary to respond to the urgent issues such as warnings by the World Food Programme of looming food shortages and famine in several African countries .By no coincidence, the governments of these countries have been identified by several international and African press freedom and freedom of expression organisations as suppressing press freedom and freedom of expression. In almost all cases, the rights to association, assembly and political participation have also been curtailed."

Noting the serious development challenges faced by the African continent - education, healthcare, HIV/AIDs, agriculture, provision of adequate housing and conflict resolution - the editorial pointed out that these challenges could not be met without the active participation of the citizens of African countries. It said:

"Active participation of citizens in shaping policy and decision making of their countries is however impossible if their own governments continue to deny them the rights necessary to ensure such participation. These include the rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association and political participation, as well as media freedom to facilitate a free exchange of information, ideas and opinion."

But, the editorial went on to say, these rights continued to be violated by numerous governments despite the fact that virtually all African countries had signed up to or ratified the constitutive Act of the African union, the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other similar documents.

One year later and the almost daily violations of press freedom and freedom of expression rights in multitude countries continue almost unremarked except for the shrill protests of various media freedom bodies. As the African Peer Review Mechanism (ARPM) of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) kicks in with its first reviews, it will be interesting to see whether the ARPM shows any teeth when it comes to reporting on press freedom and freedom of expression violations.

According to an AU/Nepad paper giving guidelines for countries to participate in the ARPM, the purpose of the ARPM is to foster the adoption of appropriate laws, policies, standards and practices that lead to, amongst other aims, political stability. Although the media is not specifically listed, it is difficult to see how a respect for media freedom and freedom of expression could be excluded from the definition of political stability. Country review visits by the ARPM team will indeed be responsible for carrying out widespread consultations that include the media.

But As World Press Freedom Day approaches on May 3, it is important to note that there has been little progress towards the enforcement of the right to freedom of expression on the African continent. Until such time as institutions and leaders commit to entrenching media freedom and freedom of expression as a basis for development on the continent and not as a concession benevolently handed out - and withdrawn - on a whim, World Press Freedom Day in Africa will be marked for the bravery of those journalists who go to work under a cloud of repression, rather than a day for the celebration of a right fulfilled.

* Please send comments to

* Related Link:
Release of MISA's Annual Publication, 'So This Is Democracy?: State of Media Freedom in Southern Africa'
http://allafrica.com/stories/200404280686.html