The following letter calling for greater defamation law reform, including limiting corporations ability to use libel law to silence civil society critics, was coordinated by Index on Censorship and the International Freedom of Expression Exchange network (IFEX)
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Alber Saber, a young Egyptian blogger and computer science graduate has been arrested and detained for allegedly posting a trailer for an anti-Islam film on Facebook. The trailer for the film “Innocence of Muslims” deemed insulting to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, had earlier been lifted from YouTube in Egypt after it sparked anti-US protests. (more…)
A Libyan woman shows her ink-stained finger after voting during the National Assembly election this year. (Demotix)
As protests against the anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims, rage on across the globe, some began to ask if this means that the so-called Arab Spring was a failure, as news from the Arab world is once more dominated by chanting, burning American flags and beards. This conclusion is not only problematic, it is also wrong.
The number of protests only seems to grow, but we aren’t really saying much about the amount of people that are actually participating in them. Take Egypt — protests against the film drew about 2,000 protesters in Cairo Friday. A paltry number compared to the reported 1,000,000 that took to the streets of Cairo to call for the fall of Mubarak’s regime last year. Even now, labour protests have spread across schools, universities, and government bodies in Egypt, with thousands demanding improved pay and rights. The Muslim Brotherhood claimed that it organised 350 protests nationwide, no doubt distracting from some of the growing discontent with Morsi’s presidency.
There is no doubt that religious extremism is very present in the Arab world, but these groups are more interested in power, rather than protecting the integrity of Islam or the Prophet. I think it is no surprise that calls for protests have come from political religious groups like the Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. Religion is a pretty quick and easy tool to gain support and divide populations.
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, made a rare public appearance to address tens of thousands of protesters in Beirut, but made it clear that protests were about the age-old enemy: the US and Israel. No doubt an important message for Nasrallah, as his ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad continues to wage a brutal war to stay in power. Focusing on an external threat is a convenient way to distract from an internal struggle.
Sectarianism has been the choice tool of many repressive regimes and political groups. One of the major victories of the so-called Arab Spring was a start of a conversation to push back on those lines — hurting political groups and regimes that draw their loyalty along religious lines. Still, political leaders have clamoured to use the revolutions to their advantage, strategically condemning human rights abuses, and turning a blind eye when similar abuses are inconvenient. In a translation of a speech by Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi, where he condemned Syria’s regime, Iranian state TV replaced “Syria” with “Bahrain”.
Bahrain’s government has painted the country’s ongoing unrest as a Shia uprising, even though the protesters’ demands have been secular, and largely focused on calling for democracy. In addition to a brutal crackdown on protests, state-owned media has depicted the protesters as Shia troublemakers and agents of Iran — a transparent attempt to use religion to crush dissent. While Bahrain has voiced concern over Syria, it has yet to address its own ongoing human rights abuses.
Last year’s uprisings were the start of a long road of change, and religious extremism is another part of those struggles. The Arab world, much like many other parts of the world, is a region that has been rife with corruption, despotism and inequality, as well as groups struggling to gain power with whatever tools they can get, including religious, ethnic or racial identities. Boiling unrest in the region down to Muslim anger or an inherent hatred of the West is short-sighted: it only encourages the flattened image that benefits the groups who wish to exploit it.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index on Censorship. She tweets from @MissYasin
The Impossible State, Victor Cha, Ecco Press
For those travellers who dare to make the adventurous sojourn to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, expectation can often be met with a confounded sense of normality. Enthusiastic ideologues, or curious historians, go prepared to see a culture resembling Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but what they initially witness is something far tamer.
For a typical holidaymaker who arrives in Pyongyang, a passing glance of the city may look something like this: watching citizens walking through litter-free streets without the hassle of omnipresent military patrols; or noticing a visible absence of homeless people anywhere. Finally, one might even catch a glimpse of what appears to be a group of young, sophisticated teenagers, texting on their cell phones without any hassle from state authorities.
As convincing as this semblance may seem to the lackadaisical tourist, it is, as Victor Cha demonstrates in his new book The Impossible State, North Korea, Past and Future, simply the totalitarian-propaganda-machine at work. Beneath the veneer of this repressive regime, is a society with no access to knowledge: the key ingredient needed to fight back the oppressive forces of the state.
Cha, who was director of Asian affairs at The White House’s National Security Council from 2004 to 2007, gives the reader a comprehensive — if somewhat scattered — overview of North Korea, a country he refers to as “the impossible state”.
The book raises a number of interesting questions. Most importantly: why do the North Korean people continue to respect and revere a regime, who gorged on the finest food money could buy, while over a million of its citizens starved to death in the so called “arduous march” that happened in the mid 1990s?
Cha’s answer — and his underlying central thesis — maintains that the key to North Korea’s iron-fisted rule lies in one commodity: information.
North Koreans are taught to believe that South Korea is a nation where people eat rats and live in a crime-filled underdeveloped society. The stark reality is that South Koreans are, on average, nearly 15 times more prosperous than their northern counterparts.
Those who attempt to question the state’s God-like omnipotence are sent to one of the country’s five infamous political prison camps. Men and women are kept apart in these camps, with exceptions made for the coming together of public executions. The deliberate separation of the sexes is to avoid a new generation of so called “counterrevolutionaries” reproducing.
Any women found to be carrying a baby in these gulags are subjected to a forced abortion, or upon birth, the child is immediately killed.
The only way, Cha argues, this horrific regime can be debilitated, is through the spreading of accurate information. South Korea has been a key player in this process. In 2011, the country’s military sent three million leaflets into North Korea via hot air balloons, describing revolutionary uprisings that were unravelling across the Arab Spring.
It’s one of the many descriptions in this book of attempts that have been made to spread truth to a nation locked in an impasse of ignorance.
Moreover, Cha contends that the debate concerning unification of Korea has moved on from the Cold-War era discourse, which said that the two states could only merge when absolute victory of one side over the other took place. Instead, the common view now held, is that unification will be through the power of ideas, not through military force.
It’s the lack of access to these ideas, Cha posits, which has caused more damage than any famine, imprisonment, or other draconian human rights violations which the state has implemented.
The DPRK regime is only as strong as its ability to withhold the truth. The central argument of Cha’s book is therefore very simple: without control of information, there is no ideology, without ideology there is no North Korea in its current form.
As credible as this simple narrative works in theory, the reality of North Koreans being able to suddenly unlock their minds from this Orwellian thought-control experiment is much harder in practice. Fear is still the number one weapon used by the regime.
For example, last year, public executions in North Korea more than tripled; the number of inmates in prison camps has increased disproportionately; and the government has issued death threats to anyone found carrying Chinese cell phones or foreign currency. Despite the inexperience of the baby-faced Kim Jong-un — who assumed the role of new supreme leader following the death of his father Kim Jong-il in 2011 — the new regime is keen to make an example of any would-be dissidents who might take the new dictator for a soft touch.
Cha’s strength as a writer lies in his scholarly knowledge of international relations theory, and Korean history, most notably in the period after the Second World War. The book’s critical flaw is Cha’s penchant for the hubristic ideology that is American exceptionalism: the idea that the United Sates is morally superior to other countries, and has a specific mission to spread liberty and democracy around the world. This argument doesn’t hold well, particularly when discussing North Korea’s possible denuclearisation — a subject Cha seems clueless on, despite his time spent working as an international security diplomat in the region.
It’s also hard to take Cha’s sermons on human rights issues seriously, when he unashamedly cites George W Bush and Colin Powell as his heroes.
This book doesn’t claim to have the answers of where North Korea will be socially, politically, or economically, in the coming years. One can only hope it’s a place where two plus two will eventually equal four.
JP O’Malley reviews books for the Economist and the Economist Intelligent Life