What difference will the appointment of Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma really make to the African Union and the betterment of people across the continent?

Blackout. No international journalists. No network cameras. And yet the story of Libya’s revolution has poured out on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other online platforms. It’s a story that has been raw, uncut and shocking. Below is a selection of this material from four days in Libya this week.

Twenty-four hour network coverage, activist videos, Twitter, Facebook and blogs have all mashed together to convey the Egyptian revolution to the world, writes Patrick Burnett.

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As Pambazuka News celebrates its 500th issue, Patrick Burnett discusses the publication’s history and growth and the limits of Clay Shirky’s notion of the ‘cognitive surplus’.

In response to Mphutlane wa Bofelo’s : It's a good point that the same ANC office bearers who have failed dismally in service delivery at local government level are likely to be back in their positions in COPE T-shirts - with similarly disastrous consequences. The same thing can be seen in the Western Cape. It IS an important point which gets buried beneath the argument that South Africa will no longer have a one party monopoly on power and that this will be good for democracy.

It may be, but how does it help if SA moves from one party power to two party power, both of whom can't deliver the goods? COPE by and large doesn't seem to be tapping into a new, inspirational leadership - instead its leadership face is made up of those who have held positions elsewhere previously. Nor is it offering inspirational policies.

This week, police in Zimbabwe used tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition to crush Sunday's gathering by the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, a coalition of opposition, church and civic groups, in Harare's western township of Highfield. Police shot and killed one opposition activist, Gift Tandare. Lawyers and fellow opposition activists said Tsvangirai had suffered a suspected skull fracture after being beaten by police. Patrick Burnett summarises voices from the ground and highlights some key messages from articles published in Pambazuka News in the recent past. Is it a year of hope or will it all simply collapse into a quagmire?

'In pairs we were being led to the cells where there were five people dressed in police uniforms holding baton sticks who were beating the hell out of us," relates an unnamed woman opposition activist. "They would beat each pair for between 15 and 20 minutes after which they would order the pair out to fetch the next pair from the van." The woman describes how her head was banged against a wall causing her to fall down to the ground. "It took a long time according to what I was seeing and I was only praying if they could stop," she tells the camera in this video as her testimony is interspersed with shots of police brutally beating arrested protesters with batons in order to force them into a police van.

Another activist states in the same video: "We wanted the government to see and show the world at large that the Zimbabweans are suffering. The money they are getting is peanuts, it does not take them anywhere. It is the government that regulates the prices. You can hardly pay for a child at school. You have to feed the family and sometimes you have only one meal a day. We wanted to show the leadership of Zimbabwe that what they are doing is not fair."

Even video sharing site knows what's happening in Zimbabwe. This video was not testimony from Sunday's protest, though, but of a peaceful labour union demonstration in September 2006 in which 23 people were beaten and tortured. No doubt, videos of Sunday's march will find their way onto youtube, providing a valuable window into the situation – the above video already has over 12 000 views - but in the meantime compare testimonies from the video quoted above with that of MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, as told to the BBC:

"It was almost as if they were waiting for me…Before I could even settle down I was subjected to a lot of beatings, in fact it was random beatings but I think the intention was to inflict as much harm as they could. I suffered injuries on the head, six stitches, body blows, a broken arm. I also suffered injuries on the knees and on my back several body blows, but I think the most serious injury was the head injury because I lost a lot of blood. They have just administered almost two pints of blood."

Police used tear gas, water cannon and live ammunition to crush Sunday's gathering by the Save Zimbabwe Campaign, a coalition of opposition, church and civic groups, in Harare's western township of Highfield. Police shot and killed one opposition activist, Gift Tandare. Lawyers and fellow opposition activists said Tsvangirai had suffered a suspected skull fracture after being beaten by police.

World outrage followed news of the crackdown, with calls for more stringent sanctions and renewed engagement with Zimbabwe. African leadership, long muted on the issue of Zimbabwe, was also more strident. Ghanaian President John Kufuor, also the African Union chair, said: "I know personally that presidents like (South Africa's Thabo) Mbeki tried desperately to exercise some influence for the better," as reported by numerous media. "Please don't think that Africa is not concerned. Africa is very much concerned. What can Mbeki as a man do? Are you proposing that Africa compose an expedition team to march on Zimbabwe and oppose? It does not happen like that. We are in our various ways trying very hard."

As demonstrated by the youtube video and numerous human rights reports in the past months and years, Tsvangirai's beatings are the result of long term repression to which numerous Zimbabweans have been subject over the past years.

At this stage its worth trolling through a few of the articles published by Pambazuka News about Zimbabwe over the last five years, not because they are the only record of the Zimbabwean crisis or because they comprehensively cover all the issues faced by the country, but because they show the progression of events in the country, and provide useful analysis and insight into the complex Zimbabwean situation. At times like this its important to remember that short-term political outrage shouldn't mask the long-term nature of the situation in Zimbabwe – nor the long-term nature of political inaction.

Perhaps the most useful insight into Zimbabwe's path is provided in a series of articles written in March of each year since 2002 by Mary Ndlovu, a human rights activist from Zimbabwe. Her articles take readers into the heart of life in Zimbabwe, documenting the politics and effect of the land reform crisis, the controversial elections and the downward economic spiral and its effect on the Zimbabwean people.

In March 2004, Ndlovu writes: "On our side of the looking glass, the mounting catastrophe has political, economic, social and cultural components. Most objective observers would trace the economic problems back at least to the late 1980's. Certainly the introduction of structural adjustment at the beginning of the 90's can be seen as the process which eroded the living standards of Zimbabweans, and spawned the first broad-based opposition party. It also generated pressure from interest groups such as war veterans and ambitious black businessmen who felt they had waited too long to share in the country's wealth. The government's response to these developments sent the country into the downward spiral which today ensnares us. Instead of taking the criticism and the pressure and sitting back to plan a coherent strategy of how to deal with the inter-related issues, ZANU PF panicked, saw their ruling position threatened, and from 1997 on have responded piecemeal, reactively and irrationally, bringing us to the tragedy which unfolds before our eyes."

In another article, she writes: "In February 2000, ZANU PF discovered, in a rare moment of truth, that they were unpopular enough to be defeated at the polls, in spite of all the advantages they had in controlling most of the media, the electoral machinery and all the state security apparatus. They immediately began the process of ensuring that no matter what the people wanted, never again would ZANU PF lose a vote. The electoral process would be turned into a stage-managed spectacle."

Following on from this and assessing the 2005 Parliamentary elections, Ndlovu warns of economic collapse and "dire consequences" for the region should ZANU PF take power against the wishes of Zimbabweans. She makes three points on the back of this:

- SADC unwillingness to insist that regional electoral standards be upheld appears to signal that they are not prepared to implement them for their own countries either.

- Democrats should be aware that governments cannot be trusted with the task of defending democracy, in their own countries or anywhere else.

- There is a long road ahead for the building of democracy in Southern Africa, "from the bottom up, with much struggle to claim rights against the autocratic tendencies of all the governments and ruling parties of the region".

The startling lack of progress on the Zimbabwean front is evident in Ndlovu's articles. In March last year, Ndlovu wrote that: "Certainly we know that the multiple crises which embody Zimbabwe's millennium experience are intensifying, making life barely livable for the majority of the population. The crises have engulfed the working world, the learning world, the consumer world, the world of the supermarket and even of sport. The economy limps along, agriculture crawling, tourism virtually defunct, manufacturing crippled, and mining, the one still flickering light of the economy, under recent assault from government policies. Electricity comes and goes at will, water likewise in many places; fuel supplies (black market only) are erratic and prices exploitative. Schools are places of confusion, teachers demoralized, pupils unable to afford textbooks if they manage to pay fees, and only finding bus fare for half the school days. Courts barely function, police cells are filthy putrid hell holes, prisons even worse."

Writing in 2004, Steve Kibble points out the long-term nature of Zimbabwe's problems. "The inheritance of violent colonial dispossession and dehumanisation with the response of (in Brian Kagoro's words) a 'violent and hegemonic struggle for decolonisation…culminated in a largely symbolic independence devoid of material gain for the majority black population.' This meant an authoritarian elite unable/unwilling to transform the repressive state colonial structures into democratic institutions, and the emergence of neo-patrimonialism and clientilist structures along with long lasting cultures of intolerance and impunity."

In pointing to why regional responses to the Zimbabwean situation have been muted, Kibble writes in another article that: "The 'national security' strategy of the ZANU PF elite has led to economic collapse, severe repression, flight and severe economic consequences for the region, but as yet there has been no concerted regional reaction to this in terms of security. This in turn relates to national elites being unable to formulate a path directed to human security, and largely because of their lack of engagement with and mistrust of new social forces (which of course are not themselves necessarily united or coherent)."

Kibble questions how to shift the security focus from military to human security to focus on those without power and those affected by poverty, environmental degradation and human rights abuses. Values would include peace and the promotion of human rights. "It may not seem obvious when there seem more immediate concerns, but the fight against repression in Zimbabwe illustrates much of this, and involves what values postcolonial states and regions should have, their road to development, democracy and overcoming of colonial and apartheid structures, all of which pose human security dilemmas."

Patrick Bond and David Moore, in April 2006 ask what can be done to offer solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe: "…the real solidarity action ahead may revolve around COSATU and broader civil society forces. They must shake free of Mbeki's influence and establish a strategy for longer-term support. This would more forcefully and surgically target Mugabe and his cronies, and nurture the unpredictable resurgence of Zimbabwean protests, which certainly still lie ahead." More broadly, one could add to this the need for pressure on the African Union and other regional and international human rights bodies.

Perhaps the last word, before noting that based on the progression of events in Zimbabwe the happenings of the last week are hardly surprising and without concerted effort on behalf of all stakeholders worse will surely follow, should go to Ndlovu, writing in 2006: "The tension of expectation is building as the people's misery becomes unsustainable. Will this be the year, and if it is, will it hold hope for the future, or will we simply all fall down together?"

* Patrick Burnett is contributing editor of Pambazuka News
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Ever heard of street soccer activism? In Zimbabwe, the Uhuru Collective is using soccer to fight for social justice, mobilizing residents and encouraging them to challenge their local council on rates fees.

The full story is featured on the website a Zimbabwean portal on civil society, but it’s not only the use of street soccer for activism that is interesting, but the way in which Kubatana have integrated short audio recordings into the story. The result is not only a web-based story that provides context and background, but through the power of voice conveys the story first hand through those involved.

And so you can listen to Sam Farai Monro, the co-ordinator of the Uhuru Collective, talk about what they aim to achieve through soccer activism, how commentators at the matches highlight important social concerns, and why unfair social delivery needs to be challenged.

The spoken word is not new to storytelling or information dissemination, with radio being popular worldwide. But while the potential for distributing audio via the internet is a possibility that has existed since the first websites, it has only recently become more feasible due to developments that allow easy production and distribution.

Portable recording devices allow anyone to produce high quality sound. Easy editing and mixing – previously the domain of professional sound buffs – is made possible through software packages. Giant steps taken in the ease with which one can create a personal website and upload written, audio or video content makes it possible for anyone to be heard – theoretically speaking at least.

As a result mega-industries have sprung up and there are a growing number of internet search engines that specialize specifically in audio or video files. Even giants like Google =http://video.google.com/ have been forced to add video search functionality and hosting to their services.

The new craze has given rise to its own terminology - podcasting. As defined by Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, “Podcasting is the method of distributing multimedia files, such as audio or video programs, over the Internet using syndication feeds, for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. The term podcast, like 'radio', can mean both the content and the method of delivery.”

Sadly, if you type Africa into any of the search engines listing podcasts, the returns are not very satisfactory. In Africa, low internet access and high access costs mean that in large parts even downloading email can be a problem and that’s if you even have access to a computer. Listening to audio distributed through the internet is a rarity. The podcast trend is driven by North American and Western European interest and voices.

This is not to say that it doesn’t have potential for Africa. The medium has the ability for people to get their voices heard without having to navigate the complex gate-keeping of mainstream media; it has the power to reach a global audience; and it has potential for networking and activism. Africa has made some strides in internet access and many countries are now rolling out broadband internet access – the real sweetener when it comes to internet audio and video.

Distribution of audio via the internet in Africa is in its infancy, but with growing number of broadband users and Africa’s huge Diaspora population the audience is out there. It remains to be seen whether all the factors needed for the growth of the technology will eventually lead to a culture of listening online.

If you want to start listening, here are some starting points. Broadcasting weekly out of Berkeley, California, is Walter Turner’s Africa Today programme (http://www.kpfa.org/1pro_bio/1b_afric.htm). One of his more interesting recent interviews is with the journalist Gary Younge, who is the correspondent for the London Guardian in the United States. You can hear Younge talking about his latest book ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, being black in Britain, international solidarity and the oddness of living in America. “You see people walking around with cellphones and yet you still get the feeling that they think the world is flat,” Younge tells Turner.

Check out Indymedia South Africa http://southafrica.indymedia.org/ for audio and video content on what South Africa’s social movements are up to. The latest video content from the site is about a march to the Israeli embassy to protest against the recent war between Israel and Lebanon. The video shows the march with clips from speakers Sallim Vally from the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Willie Madisha of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Also on the site are a series of audio files discussing the World Social Forum’s Bamako appeal, including an interesting speech from Samir Amin.

Further offerings can be found on the website of One World Radio Africa =http://radioafrica.oneworld.net/, which has a series of regularly updated files, the latest being a discussion on climate change. Democracy Radio =http://www.idasa.org.za, on the website of South Africa’s Idasa, includes a series of recordings on child poverty in South Africa, political party funding and the struggle for women’s rights. These recordings are dated from 2004/05 but are still worth a visit.

Africa Files produces a regular podcast called ‘Africa Files: The Pulse’, with Silence Genti as the host. You can access the programme by visiting

"I was not aware of anything until they were hitting me. I think there were five policemen for every refugee. When we started to defend ourselves, there were many more coming. They came and attacked. I saw one person I knew. They were beating him and when he fell down, they broke his neck. One of the police broke his neck with his baton. One pregnant woman also died in the same place." – An interview with a demonstrator, as quoted in a report compiled by the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies unit at the American University in Cairo.

On 29 September 2005, Sudanese refugees began gathering at Mustafa Mahmoud Park in central Cairo for a protest that eventually swelled to between 1,800 to 2,500 protestors and lasted for three months until it was broken up by Egyptian security forces in the early hours of December 30. The protestors were demanding refugee status interviews, a clearer and transparent process, protection from the Sudanese government, protection of the vulnerable and investigation of detentions and mission persons. Egyptian security operatives forcefully ended the protest, an action that resulted in the death of 27 refugees and asylum seekers and the injuring of hundreds.

A new report compiled by the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies unit at the American University in Cairo and released this month, details the origins of the protest and the aftermath of its violent end on December 30. Entitled “A Tragedy of Failures and False Expectations”, it ends with recommendations to the parties involved. Coming as it does in a month when the world marks World Refugee Day, the report will be of interest firstly to those who followed the unprecedented protest and secondly to all interested in the rights of refugees.

Describing the situation in the park during the three months of the protest, the report states that although protestors were faced with obvious discomfort, there was an “unprecedented” level of community and solidarity in the park where the protest was held, situated near to the UNHCR offices. Meals were prepared in a communal kitchen, money was pooled to buy food and impromptu shops sprung up around the park. Art lessons and puppet shows were held for children.

But in the early hours of December 30, Egyptian security operatives moved in without warning, resulting in death, injury and detentions that lasted several weeks. The report says: "There are some indications that the level of violence was unplanned, or at least that not all security officers were enthusiastic participants in the mayhem. Two bystanders reported plainclothes officers shouting at low-ranking police to stop the beating but being ignored." The report describes the scene after the park was cleared as one of "stunned silence and desolation". "Hundreds of blankets and suitcases are strewn all over the park. Other private belongings, such as notebooks, family pictures, children's toys, and blue and yellow refugee identity cards, are scattered on the ground."

But the report is not only concerned with the events of December 30, but rather with what caused the protest. It intends not to assign responsibility, but to promote understanding of why the protest happened, what the issues were, and how similar tragedies can be avoided.

As such, the historical background provided in the report is extremely useful, describing how the first wave of Sudanese came to Egypt in 1955 as a result of the beginning of civil war. This continued into the mid 1980s, says the report. Further outbreaks of war led to more Sudanese arriving in Egypt in 1983. Most recently, the conflict in Darfur had led to a further exodus from Sudan. Egypt thus became a recipient country for refugees who were firstly in need of refuge from war and secondly seeking to be resettled in third countries, explains the report.

Responsibility for these people fell to UNHCR, whose Cairo office eventually developed one of the largest resettlement operations in the world, says the report. However – and this is where the problem comes in - only about 25 percent had the expectation of resettlement met, leaving them stuck in an Egypt often hostile to their needs. Acute problems detailed in the report relate to work, housing, education, public health and racist attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers.

A more immediate catalyst to the protest came as a result of the 2004 ceasefire between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. The report explains that UNHCR suspended Refugee Status Determination (RSD) procedures for all Sudanese asylum seekers, instead providing applicants with yellow asylum seeker cards that provided temporary protection against forced repatriation. This decision, reviewed every six months, was based on the argument that this was a better method than possible rejection of applicants on the basis of a change in their country of origin. "Sudanese asylum seekers were deeply disappointed and worried by UNHCR's decision, especially as it put a heavy damper on their hopes for resettlement and relegated them to a longer waiting period under difficult conditions in Egypt," says the report.

It was these factors, contends the report, that combined to create frustration amongst the Sudanese refugee community in Egypt. "Their decision to sit in at Mustafa Mahmoud Park and to demand fundamental changes in their circumstances should have come as no surprise."

In terms of its comments and recommendations, the report highlights the role of all three of the major actors – the Egyptian government, the UNHCR and the leaders of the protest – for failing to prevent the events of December 30. "A series of failures on the part of the Egyptian government and UNHCR, combined with unrealistic expectations and grave miscalculations on the part of the demonstrators and their leaders, resulted in the tragedies of the forced eviction. This is a complicated story with many actors, each of whom bears some level of responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of so many people, including 12 children, and the physical injuries and psychological damage to hundreds more."

According to the report, Egyptian security used "excessive and disproportionate force in removing the protesters, leaving no alternatives or avenues for escape". The use of "indiscriminate violence" and lack of immediate medical attention was a matter for Egyptian and international human rights organizations to pursue. "With attention focused on asylum seekers and refugees, and the issue discussed openly in the People's Assembly, this may be an opportune time for the government to seriously consider the passage of domestic legislation to detail and systematize Egypt's obligations under the 1951 and OAU refugee conventions, as well as to make its policies and procedures clear. Without transparency and clarity, asylum seekers and refugees cannot access services, and this translates into frustration that could lead to a repeat of the protest strategy."

Turning to UNHCR, the report says that despite its mandate being the protection of refugees and asylum seekers, the agency had adopted a "hostile and confrontational attitude” towards the protestors. The attitude of UNHCR had served to confirm the protesters' grievances and frustrations. "UNHCR took a number of grave risks concerning the safety of the population in the park. It must accept accountability for a number of failures and miscalculations that, at least indirectly, led to the tragic results."

Perhaps surprisingly, the leaders of the protest and the protesters themselves also come in for criticism. The report says: "The protesters remained adamant about their demands throughout the three months and refused to accept any compromise that may have ended the protest, such as that offered by UNHCR in the failed December 17 agreement. While the protest leaders did accept and sign the agreement with UNHCR, dissenting voices within the park succeeded in overturning the decision, despite warnings from supporters and friends, and convinced others to continue the protest."

In conclusion, the report notes that if a similar situation is to be averted, the same problems and issues that led to the protest need to be addressed through long term solutions. "These issues include problems of communication and trust, the provision of adequate services that make life livable even in limbo, and a redefinition of responsibilities and roles," said the report

* The full 68 page report is available at

* To read an article detailing the response of UNHCR to the report, visit
- Compounding the tragedy of 30 December in Cairo

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

As internet usage in Africa grows, governments are beginning to wake up to the power of the online medium to communicate, influence and organize. Already numerous examples of internet censorship in the form of arrests and website blocking can be found. This is likely to grow, says Patrick Burnett.

News last week was that Internet giant Yahoo! had been fingered in the November 2003 imprisonment of Chinese cyber-dissident Jiang Lijun, who was sentenced to four years for pro-democracy postings on the internet. The company found itself in the hot seat after Reporters Without Borders published documents it said proved that Yahoo! provided information that led to the jailing. Lijun, 40, was sentenced for “subversion”, accused of seeking to use “violent means” to impose democracy. It is the third time that Yahoo! has been implicated in collaborating with the Chinese authorities in tracking down those who use the internet to express divergent opinions, says the press freedom group.

Not that Yahoo! is alone. Microsoft and Google have also been accused of assisting the Chinese government to enforce their censorship laws. An enormous internet market of 111 million users combined with an official intolerance for opposing views has led the Chinese to develop sophisticated web monitoring and censoring systems. Web sites and blogs are frequently blocked and internet searchers disrupted.

Compared to China, Africa has a tiny internet market of only 23 million users, or 2-3 percent of the total population. As a result it has been easy for governments to ignore the threat that the internet poses to them in terms of its organizing potential and its ability to act as a vehicle for diverse thoughts and opinions. The reality is that this is changing. Regimes are likely to make greater use of internet censorship techniques and crack down on those who use the internet to express contrary views. Africa already has a poor record of press freedom and locking up of journalists. This record is likely to be duplicated in cyber-space.

It’s no coincidence that Zimbabwe, which relies heavily on China for financial and technical support, has drafted the Interception of Communications Bill 2006, which seeks to empower the authorities to intercept telephone, e-mail and cell phone messages. When the Bill comes into force the government will establish a telecommunications agency called the Monitoring and Interception of Communications Centre to monitor mail, according to the Zimbabwe Independent (http://www.kubatana.net/html/archive/legisl/060324zimind.asp?sector=LEG…). The Bill will compel operators to install software and hardware to enable them to intercept and store information as directed by the state. The service providers will also be asked to link their message monitoring equipment to the government agency. Failure to comply will result in a fine or imprisonment.

While the Zimbabwean government has thus clearly recognised that control of information extends to email and have plans to govern this area, examples of direct internet censorship are already easy to find. In February, the Ugandan government deployed filtering techniques against a Ugandan news radio station's website. This was the first known case of internet censorship in Uganda and came at a time when public debate was crucial - just before presidential and parliamentary elections on 23 February. The blocking was done by local Internet Service Providers, who effectively barred the site’s internet identity number, known as an IP address. This method of censorship meant that 700 other sites hosted by the same server were also blocked, according to tests by Nart Villeneuve, head of research at Toronto University. (http://ice.citizenlab.org/index.php?s=Uganda)

In Ethiopia, where up to 70 journalists are believed to be detained, Ethiopian security forces on January 27 detained Frezer Negash, a correspondent for the US-based Web site Ethiopian Review. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported at the time that Ethiopian officials had cracked down on Negash over her online writings, which were unfavourable to the government. Negash was freed from custody on March 10 after a court ordered her release on bail. (http://www.cpj.org/news/2006/africa/ethiopia30jan06na.html)

But the most sophisticated examples of internet censorship have emerged from North Africa. The extent of the problem was starkly demonstrated by the actions of the Tunisian government during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in November 2005, when it was made clear that any opinions outside what the Tunisian government deemed acceptable were not to be tolerated. Online writers have been imprisoned and websites are routinely blocked. According to a Human Rights Watch report, tests conducted in 2005 found that Tunisia censors hundreds of websites. In addition, Human Rights Watch reported that internet users believed the government monitored email and internet traffic. Stiff laws were used to detain online writers for expressing their opinions. In neighbouring Libya, the government has blocked critical web sites based outside the country and hacked a website critical of the government, Human Rights Watch says. Egypt, reports Human Rights Watch, had detained people for their activities online and used the internet to monitor and entrap homosexuals. (http://hrw.org/reports/2005/mena1105/2.htm#_Toc119125694)

These examples show that some African governments, caught between a rock and a hard place as liberalization of telecommunications opens up the internet market to more users but at the same time reluctant to let go of state controlled information channels, are beginning to wake up to the threat the internet presents to maintaining the status quo. Crucially, governments are not seeking to shut down the internet entirely and in many cases have facilitated its growth, but what they are seeking to do is to control the flow of information, in much the same way as traditional media channels have been controlled. This presents dangers in that it fosters an environment of self-censorship where citizens of a country do not feel free to express their opinions online. Internet Service Providers, fearful that they will face the wrath of the law, would rather remove content that may be remotely offensive, thus abrogating censorship to the private sector. This in itself can be profoundly unscientific. As the Ugandan example demonstrates, by taking down a single internet site, 700 additional sites were inadvertently blocked.

If the above examples and trends are anything to go by, as the internet spreads and new forms of expression such as blogging become more popular, internet censorship is going to increase as governments realize the power of the online medium. Control is likely to involve governments blocking websites they deem undesirable, the arrest and persecution of those who use the internet to express critical views and the introduction of laws that allow government to control the internet, given that in many African countries laws governing traditional media and forms of expression may not extend to the internet. Internet censorship is likely to take place with greater vigour in countries that already have poor freedom of expression records. Unless a government has an entrenched respect for human rights that extends to all areas of society, repression is likely to replicate itself in the virtual environment of the internet.

Lastly, an enormous barrier to the benefits of the internet in Africa lies in the fact that so few people have access – and that this is not going to change in the near future, even though growth rates between 2000-2005 were over 400 percent. In this sense, it is the structural inequities of the global economic order that censor tens of millions of people. As a 2003 Privacy International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-103801 ) report noted:

“Thus, the solution to African Internet censorship lies as much in finding global solutions to these problems, as it is about reinforcing national and regional respect for freedom of expression on the medium of the Internet.”

* Patrick Burnett is online news editor, Pambazuka News

* Please send comments to

Last week, the South African defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota took final delivery of the SAS Amatola, a R1,5-billion, 36 000 ton, 121 metre long warship complete with biological and chemical defense mechanisms, automated damage control and armour protection. The state-of-the-art Amatola is the first of four corvettes to be fully completed and is currently docked at the military harbour in the picturesque naval town of Simon’s Town near Cape Town.

The mountain peaks above Simon’s Town provide the best view of the four warships moored in the harbour below and while this may seem like an odd place to begin a discussion about South Africa’s March 1 local government elections, the ships speak to a number of issues that are relevant to the vote for 9 000 councilors in 284 South African city, town and district councils.

Amidst much criticism that the money could have been better spent on services delivery, the purchase of the corvettes formed part of a multi-billion rand arms deal which also included a shopping list of 30 helicopters, 24 Hawk fighter trainers and 28 Gripen light fighter aircraft. It was with the corvettes that the controversy over the arms deal started, with contractor Richard Young alleging a conflict of interest involving the government's former acquisitions chief, "Chippy" Shaik. Schabir Shaik, brother of “Chippy”, was a shareholder in the Thomson Group and African Defence Systems, which were awarded the contract to provide combat technology for the four corvettes. Schabir Shaik was found guilty in 2005 on two charges of corruption and one of fraud, and sentenced to an effective 15 years' imprisonment. His appeal will be heard later this year. But it was Judge Hilary Squire’s assertion in that case that Shaik had enjoyed a “generally corrupt” relationship with former deputy president Jacob Zuma that rocked politics in South Africa to its foundations.

As a result of the outcome of the Shaik trial, Zuma was fired by president Thabo Mbeki and now faces court later in the year on corruption charges. The charges have been characterized by Zuma’s camp as an attempt to eliminate him from the race for the presidency in 2009 elections. Zuma also faces a March trial in connection with the alleged rape of a 31-year old Aids activist. The events have pitted factions in support of Zuma against those of Mbeki and further strained the relationship between the ANC and its alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP).

So when you’re looking down on the four corvettes in Simon’s Town harbour its impossible to divorce them from South Africa’s wider political reality. There’s no doubt that the arms deal has been part of a defining period that will resonate far into the future. For this reason, local government elections, taking place in an atmosphere of heightened national political tension, seem far more significant this time around than when they were last held in 2000.

Simon’s Town and the resident corvettes are linked to the rest of South Africa in other ways. The town forms part of a string of coastal villages along the False Bay coast that since 2000 have seen a doubling and in some cases even a trebling of property prices. The coastal enclaves that hug the mountains have become the home of a mix of foreign property owners, old and new money, all attracted by the beauty of the False Bay coast and the massive returns offered by a lucrative property portfolio.

Yet alongside this boom are communities that the wealth windfall has bypassed completely. Just over the hill from Simon’s Town harbour is the shack settlement of Red Hill, where high unemployment rates, poor housing and lack of services are common problems. A few valleys and mountains from Red Hill is Ocean View, where the apartheid government dumped the original inhabitants of places like Simon’s Town under its forced removals policy and where unemployment, gangsterism and drugs are rife. And a few kilometers from Ocean View is Masiphumelele, where unemployment and lack of housing are common problems.

These communities, segregated by high walls, electric fences and an enormous privatized security industry from properties literally next door to them that sell for millions of rands, mirror the broader South African picture that shows a widening gap between rich and poor, a gap already large as a result of apartheid but compounded by market friendly economic policies which have favoured those who are able to access resources.

It’s in communities like Ocean View and Masiphumelele where a new flank has opened up in the South African political story. In May last year, Ocean View erupted in protest over housing shortages and poor services. Protests in Masiphumelele over education led to clashes with the police. These small, localized protests have sprung up in towns across South Africa, peaking across the country in a 2005 “winter of discontent” and simmering ever since. Although the causes of these protests have been diverse and sometimes rooted in local politics, a common characteristic has been that they have all included an element of protest against a lack of government delivery in the area of housing, electricity, water or sanitation.

As the local government elections near, the media has sometimes used these protests as evidence that the ANC is going to be punished at the polls through low voter turn out, even if victory is assured (Only 48% turned out in 2000). This may still turn out to be the case in some areas, but there are also indications that the equation might not be so simple. A recent ACNielsen survey, for example, shows that support for the ANC does not dissipate in correlation with support of protests. Factors such as loyalty to the ANC exists together with support of protest.

This suggests that the protests could oddly assist the ANC, something a recent Markinor poll published by the Sunday Times newspaper pointed out. Protests had raised awareness in some municipalities and would increase voter turn out. In this sense the protests could assist the ANC not only by getting voters to the polls, but by pressurizing councilors to get on with the job of delivering services. This line of argument, however, only holds for so long as the ANC can maintain some kind of control over the protests. Arguably, events of the last week, where Lekota, a senior ANC figure and defence minister, was chased out of the town of Khutsong and prevented from addressing a rally, is not an example that the ANC leadership in Pretoria would want to encourage.

But what these community actions have done is to raise the profile of issues of delivery at the local government level, even though the voices of those protesting seem to have been sidelined from the mainstream political debate, characterized by reports which show the protestors as violent even when the police fired on them first, or by a lack of voices articulating the concerns of communities beyond the initial sound bites in media coverage of protest action.

Why has there been an apparent short out at local government level? The reasons advanced are many. Massive apartheid era backlogs at local government level meant that the process of service delivery started out on the back foot. The ANC top guard, typified by President Thabo Mbeki’s remote style of leadership and centralization of power, has detached itself from the hurly burly of service delivery. Bruising battles within the ANC for control of the organisation have detracted attention from grassroots delivery. Local councilors, faced with massive backlogs and little capacity, have simply buckled under the pressure. Widespread corruption based on power and patronage has permeated the local government level. The Growth Economic and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy, the unilaterally adopted market-focused growth path adopted by the ANC in 1996, limited the amount of money that could be invested in social development projects, boosting the rich to be even richer, but leaving the poor behind.

Which ever or all of those reasons you choose it’s clear that the ANC has an ever-increasing workload if it is to meet its service delivery commitments. As long as this situation is allowed to continue, the pressure from below is likely to increase rather than decrease, no matter what the result of voting next week.

* Patrick Burnett is online news editor, Pambazuka News

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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.”

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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_mob…)

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