Mick Hartley

Bill Fisher in the Daily Star looks at blogging in the Arab world:

[B]logging technology is available to anyone with access to the Internet, it is cheap, indeed free, and content can easily be created in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other languages. While home-computer ownership is still embryonic, the deep suspicion of government-owned mainstream media has almost certainly helped spur the growth in the region’s Weblogs.

But there is at least one critical difference. In most of the countries of the Middle East, using a personal Weblog to express political dissent can land someone in jail as easily as taking part in an unauthorized political protest in a public square. For example, recently in Iran – one of the worst anti-blogger offenders – a blogger was jailed for 14 years for “spying and aiding foreign counterrevolutionaries,” after using his site to criticize the arrest of other online journalists. Despite the risks, an estimated 75,000 Iranians among the country’s five million Internet users maintain online blogs. Especially among middle class youth, they have become an important way of expressing dissatisfaction.

Mona al-Tahawy, a columnist at the London-based Saudi daily Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, writes that bloggers in Iran and Iraq “have inspired others in the Arab world.” She also adds: “Despite working in an elite medium, requiring a computer and literacy, bloggers are the voice of the true Arab Street, especially the young.”

Like Iran, most countries of the region impose varying degrees of restriction on Weblogs. Saudi Arabia, where authorities block some 400,000 Web sites, is among the most restrictive. It is unclear how many blogsites there are in the kingdom, but those that are accessible focus largely on political dissent.

Typical is a site called “The Religious Policeman.” One recent posting asked:

“What reforms? There aren’t any reforms! The government promised to set up a higher commission on women’s affairs, guaranteed women participation in the recent National Dialogue Forum and in the National Human Rights Commission.” It adds: “The National Dialogue Forum agreed to change nothing, the ‘team photo’ had no women in it, anyone with any sense left in tears.”

A recent posting? The Religious Policemen has, sadly, been silent since last August. Stll, it’s a useful round-up.

In Egypt, authorities have tightened their control of the country’s 600,000 Web users. For example, the Web master of the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly was sentenced to a year in prison for posting a sexually explicit poem, and a 19-year-old student was sentenced to a month in jail for “putting out false information” after reporting that a serial killer was on the loose in Cairo.

In Syria, one blogger asked others to sign an online petition addressed to “The White House” and “The ElysŽes” [sic], the French presidential palace. “With the killing of [former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon,” the site said, “Syrian Baathists are out of control. Who’s next? Syria is inciting civil war in Lebanon.” Another Syrian, calling himself “Kafka,” wrote that a recent speech to the Syrian Parliament by President Bashar Assad “made the Syrian people forget that [he] never cared to give a damn about us since he came to power.”

In Tunisia, President Zine al-Abidin ben Ali has been determined to stamp out all cyber-dissidence. The death just over a week ago of prominent cyber-dissident Zouhair Yahyaoui, who was sent to jail in 2002-03 for publishing an open letter by his uncle, a prominent magistrate, asking for an independent judiciary, provided a reminder of how harshly the regime had treated the young editor of Tunisia’s most popular TuneZine Web site. But Yahyaoui was not alone. Recently, a well-known lawyer was arrested merely for posting an article online.