06 Mar 14 | Digital Freedom, Germany, News and features, Young Writers / Artists Programme
Photo illustration: Shutterstock
In February, thousands of websites urged their users to help stop web monitoring. The Day We Fight Back, led by American lobby group Demand Progress, condemned NSA Internet surveillance and remembered Aaron Swartz, opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), who hanged himself last year when faced with fifty years in prison for downloading academic texts. Swartz, from whom courts sought $1m in fines, is synonymous today with US clashes over online justice, but the subject is a global one. Germany, where I moved just before SOPA hit the news, offers a frightening glimpse at what happens when copyright policing trumps privacy.
I moved to Berlin in September 2011, as the German Pirate Party won its way into the city state’s assembly. Papers bewildered by this breakthrough named the party, all of whose candidates gained seats, the new rebels in national politics, noting their platform reached young, deprived and disaffected voters. I spent October in a part of town with plenty, renting a cupboardlike room while seeking somewhere longer term. The other tenants, a Barcelonian tour guide and science student from Berlin subletting empty space for cash, already knew each other. Nocturnal, inconsiderate and antisocial, the new kid scared of trying to make friends, I wasn’t a good flatmate, and left amid severe awkwardness.
At my new address, the scientist – passive-aggressively polite – told me I had to sign a retroactive rental contract. This could easily have been done by email — when he asked to meet, I should have smelled a rat, but obliged outside a supermarket in November, not stopping to wonder why both ex-flatmates turned up. “While you were here,” he said once papers were filled out, “you used BitTorrent?”
I had, I said, like almost all my friends. Filesharing was in my eyes like speeding on the motorway, an illegality most practised and few cared about. “We all do it”, the Barcelonian said, who seemed to have come reluctantly.
The scientist produced a further wad of fine-print forms. “We got sued”, he told me, “by the music industry.”
This wasn’t quite true. The document he held was an Abmahnung, a razor-edged cease-and-desist letter of German law, which lets lawyers bill recipients for time spent drafting them. The aim is to curb legal costs for poorer plaintiffs, but since other laws allow solicitors to act without instruction, firms monitor the web (often via private companies), posting them en masse to copyright infringers as a profit-making scheme; 500,000 people, reports claim, receive them yearly. Whoever issued one to my flat sought money for themselves – rights holders almost certainly weren’t briefing them.
I didn’t know any of this back then. In England, where no such business model thrives, being caught filesharing was unheard of. When I moved there, I had no idea of the German situation, and wasn’t ready for the consequences. Ambushed by ex-flatmates, intimidated and off-balance, I didn’t just sign forms admitting I’d downloaded one major artist’s album – I signed others the scientist handed me stating I’d bootlegged files I hadn’t. These accounted for nine tenths of what I later had to pay — at current exchange rates, close to £2000.
The film and record the forms named, presumably, were torrented by someone else in the flat. I’d never heard of them, and with ten minutes to think straight would have realised that – but thinking straight when bombshells land, not least while scanning foreign legalese, is difficult. Half on autopilot, half assuming I knew them by other names, I signed the papers in the bedlam of the moment. “Um ehrlich zu sein”, the scientist said once I realised my mistake, “glaube ich dir nicht.” To be honest, I don’t believe you.
If I didn’t pay the four figure sum the Abmahnung called for, the firm behind it would file suit – in which case, he said, he’d forward them what I signed and I should find a lawyer. Had I hired one, I might have been cleared or at least fined less. Specialists can haggle numbers down – typically, says Cologne solicitor Christian Solmecke, “by about half”. The trouble, which led me to pay up, was that this wouldn’t be much better.
Abmahnung victims, the Pirate Party states, are often “seriously intimidated”. A court case at the best of times is hard — this was my year out as a language student, my German was nowhere near strong enough, and the thought terrified me. Inflated study grants for life abroad arrived, by chance, just as the crisis hit, and my finances were fortunately healthy even after paying out, but a lawyer wouldn’t have been cheap. Solmecke’s firm charges €400-500 to represent its clients (£300-413), seemingly a mainstream rate, and legal bills stack up.
Not all those affected are BitTorrent users. Hamburg resident Karin Gross was charged €300 when an Abmahnung alleged she’s downloaded an obscure illegal media program which bore all the marks of infectious malware; firms like Kiel lawyer Lutz Schroeder’s make thousands threatening those in her position. “You either get ripped off by some lawyer sending you an Abmahnung”, she told the press, “or you have to hire another lawyer who costs just as much.”
Others pay for honest oversights. Pensioners Lydia and Heinz Paffrath, who sold their grandchildren’s old toys for them on eBay, were charged over €650 when they accidentally advertised a doll’s wardrobe under the wrong brand name. Canadian exchange student Nina Arbabzadeh, visiting Berlin in 2012, was billed €1200 for downloading Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, which neither she nor her flatmate had done. A visitor who had, they guessed, had used their wireless with torrent software left on.
It’s true, I torrented a handful of things, in one case getting caught, and that most Abmahnungen go to users who do. Does this justify the fines at hand – more, I noted then, then you’d get for vandalising Berlin’s city trains, and far more than for shoplifting DVDs? I haven’t touched illegal downloads since, and my web use now is hemmed in by a mesh of proxy servers and precautions. Even having sworn off BitTorrent, I’m anxious, second-guessing every click and panicking at German-language post (last month, when an official looking envelope came for my flatmate, I Google-searched advice for half an hour — it turned out she had unpaid speeding tickets.)
“If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”, the snooper’s mantra goes, but it’s more and more impossible to know what will and won’t be punished.
Last July, a Hamburg court capped sums ordered of downloaders at €150, a measure lauded by the press and praised by local activist Anneke Voss as curbing “the Abmahnung industry’s shameless excesses”. The federal Law Against Dubious Business Practices followed in October, applying an admittedly less helpful €1000 limit nationwide. It didn’t stop the biggest wave of Abmahnungen in history, more than 30,000 people getting them in one December week who’d visited RedTube.com, an adult site whose pornographic clips – some, under copyright, uploaded by third parties – are streamed like YouTube videos.
This isn’t even filesharing — users are made to pay up or face a legal fight simply for viewing web pages. It doesn’t matter that the case against them is a flimsy one. Costs plunge many in to crisis even if they win. Torrenters may not be protected either, as the new law waives its cap on fines “if the stated value [lost to rights holders], according to the individual case’s own circumstances, is considerable”. No one knows yet what this means in practice – a lengthy period of wrangling is expected to ensue – but vested interests will no doubt defend their moneymaking prospects.
British and US laws give firms less room to act like this, but it’s clear to those who care that Germany’s status quo is less a triumph of fair play or honesty than a toxic cocktail of profiteering and surveillance. It’s easy to see, post-Swartz and post-Wikileaks, how the assault on piracy might lead down such a road.
If it does, the world will be dragged with it. SOPA, which threatened the wholesale existence of media platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo, was meant to take worldwide effect. Officials opted to “postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement”, shelving rather than scrapping the proposals. The act, or the prospect of one like it, still hangs over us. Even that may not be needed. In David Cameron’s Britain, where service providers were ordered last year to block video-sharing sites, the Big Society ideals of web-policing and privatised justice could produce a German style free-for-all if left to run their course.
The internet was made for instant data replication – in other words, for filesharing. Copyright laws weren’t passed with it in mind. On social media this week, you’ve likely witnessed dozens of infringements – photos, gifs, videos, quotations. Clampdowns on piracy, as the German system demonstrates, attack the core idea of the net, scapegoating users for new technology’s inescapable impact. Rights protection has its place, but must be reformed.
This article was posted on March 6, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
20 Feb 14 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Vietnam
Le Quoc Quan (Image: RFAVietnamese/YouTube)
The 30 month prison sentence for Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger, Le Quoc Quan, was today upheld by a Hanoi appeals court. Quan, who has frequently blogged about human rights violations by the government, was convicted in October 2013 on tax evasion charges. He has been arbitrarily detained since December 2012. A crowd of hundreds wearing t-shirts in support of Quan were present outside the court, while a European Union delegation, representatives from the United States and Canada and a small group of journalists were present at the trial. This is just the latest move in the Vietnamese authorities’ ongoing attack on dissent, free speech, free press and a free internet.
If you need to communicate with someone the Vietnamese government is interested in keeping an eye, it is always been useful to be careful. Phone conversations can be listened to. Meetings at houses could be watched. Protests are invariably filmed by government operatives. If you were going to, say, chat via Gmail’s chat function it should be switched to “off the record” to prevent a copy of the discussion being archived. Some unlucky people have seen their blog posts traced to the internet cafe they’ve later been arrested at. If you are a dissident you won’t be the only one the police are interested in; they’ll talk to your family, friends and employers, too. The latter they may ask to dismiss you.
It is Vietnam Ministry of Public Security conducts this surveillance work, while the Ministry of Information and Culture drafts many of the laws regarding internet usage and “abuse”. And it is most likely a unit within the MPS that is responsible for these, and earlier, malware attacks.
Much of the surveillance and intimidation is hardly new; similar operations took place during the Terror in the USSR. In fact, the CIA has compared the MPS with Russia’s KGB. The KGB of comrade days, however, never had to deal with the vastness of the internet. The government owns every newspaper and printing press in the country, but it has few serious servers, making control of the internet difficult. It does not stop them from trying.
In January the Associated Press in Vietnam reported on malware attacks against one of its journalists, against an American-Vietnamese blogger and against the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). These are certainly not the first of their kind but may have been the first directed against those on foreign shores. The private correspondence of Vietnamese-American blogger Ngoc Tu was posted on her blog after someone — supposed, but not verified to be the Vietnamese government — sent her an email with a link that installed malware and key logging software giving the sender access to her password and her email account. The Associated Press reporter was a sent an email purportedly from Human Rights Watch with a link to a ‘white paper’ on human rights.
Vietnam’s internet history: Enthusiasm and repression
Vietnam’s relationship with the internet has not been simple. The government has always been enthusiastic about the internet and the wholesale benefits it could, and has, brought to the nation. Though classified as an “enemy of the internet” by Reporters Without Borders for its blocking of websites and arrests of bloggers and journalists, Vietnam’s communist government has done an awful lot to ensure good internet access.
But the country’s vibrant internet culture is a direct result of government guidance and intervention. Vietnam has long valued literacy and learning and according to Professor Carlyle Thayer at the Australian Defence Force Academy, the government believed that the “knowledge era” was key to the nation’s economic development. The internet helped to provide that and greater world integration, something they have been increasingly keen for since Doi Moi in 1986 when the country began a period of economic renovation, shunning its former isolationist politics.
Twenty years ago the Vietnam Communist Party (CPV) noted three dangers facing the country: corruption, deviation from the socialist path and falling behind. The internet was seen a perfect way to engage more with the world. A 2011 report by market research firm Cimigo, headquartered in Ho Chi Minh City, says: “Vietnam has seen a more rapid growth of the internet over the last few years than most other countries in the region and is one of the fastest growing internet countries in the world… Since the year 2000, the number of internet users in Vietnam has multiplied by about 120.”
However, the government misjudged, believing control to be easy, and circumventing its block beyond the ken of its citizens.
Putting the genie back in the bottle
There are three main laws bloggers, activists and others the state dislikes are charged under. Criminal Code Article 88 relates to “conducting propaganda against the state”. This is the one most often used — both draconian and helpfully vague. Then there is Article 258, relating to “abusing democratic freedoms”, and Article 79 covering “activities aimed overthrowing the Communist Party of Vietnam and People’s Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
However there have also been numerous internet laws drafted, largely aimed at keeping citizens’ net activities restricted to useful research or harmless entertainment. An August 2001 law imposed “stringent” controls and required net cafe owners to report breaches to relevant authorities and to collect ID from their users. An August 2005 law criminalised using the internet to oppose or destabilise the state, security, economy or social order, infringe on the rights of organisations or individuals, or mess around with Domain Name System (DNS) settings — something many Facebook users started doing in 2009. In October 2007 the Ministry of Information and Culture issued a decision requiring all businesses to obtain a license before setting up a website. This has stymied growth in some ways, as it is only now that businesses are as present online as individuals.
In August 2008 Decree 97 made it illegal to “abuse” the internet to oppose the government. What got more attention was Circular 7, restricting bloggers to cover only personal, not political, topics. At the time blogging was a favoured pastime in Vietnam, Yahoo! 360 the favoured platform. Interest in blogging and blogs in general has since waned significantly. According to Cimigo, in 2009 40 per cent of internet users visited blogs and 20 per cent blogged themselves. By 2011 those numbers had halved as people increasingly moved to social media sites like Facebook.
It was the quiet block of Facebook in 2009 that caught the world’s attention. The government never mentioned a ban publicly though a purported scan of instructions to ISPs to block the site did rounds online. As the government never said much, Vietnam’s legion of Facebook users simply muttered something about “technical problems” as they “fixed” the DNS settings to access the site.
What led to the Facebook block was the organising between previously disparate groups against Chinese-run bauxite mines in the Central Highlands of Vietnam — an already ecologically and politically sensitive area. Catholics, activists, environmentalists and anti-China activists all united via Facebook to protest the mines. In 2010 the government tried to launch its own social networking site (which led to headlines such as ‘In Communist Vietnam, State Friends You’), go.vn, where users had to provide their full names and ID card details, but could also “friend” communist luminaries. The Minister for Culture and Information Le Doan Hop praised the site’s usefulness for young people and promotion of “culture, values and benefits”.
In 2010 came a decision requiring all public hotels to install Green Dam monitoring software. Theoretically it allowed the government to see what was being looked at, possibly by whom and take appropriate steps. In fact decision 15/2010/QD-UBND was something of a paper tiger; many pointed out how such a piecemeal and scattershot approach would have limited utility and could be wholly circumvented by any serious activist, though rights organisations took the appropriate potshots as a matter of course.
In 2010 a ban was put in place, ostensibly on all online gaming between 10pm and 6am, to combat gaming addiction. However, it was never fully possible to enforce thanks to most popular games being hosted by overseas servers.
The most recent attempts at curbing net use via legislation has been Decree-Law 72 on Management of the internet which formally came into effect in September 2013. Like many laws it is confusing and vague enough to be useful for any enthusiastic government prosecutor. Among other things it banned the sharing of news online. Or, rather, it banned the aggregation of news onto websites. The government took the time to publicly respond to the flurry of foreign concern and the head of the Ministry of Information and Culture’s Online Information Section protested to Reuters that the law did not violate any of Vietnam’s human rights commitments. “We will never ban people from sharing information or linking news from websites,” he said, arguing it had been misinterpreted.
There has been talk that Decree 72 was also designed to protect intellectual property, as violations have long been problematic and go far beyond dollar copies of new Hollywood films on DVD. One of the things 72 supposedly sought to do was prevent websites re-posting news from its original source with no attribution and thus make things easier for news sites whilst also laying groundwork for membership of the Trans Pacific Partnership in regards to intellectual property protection.
The more interesting requirement was that ISPs locate servers, or at least one, within Vietnam and deliver information on users to the government, rather as internet cafes have been required to do. They were also required to take down anything contravening laws. However Vietnam’s most trafficked sites do not have servers within Vietnam and with such new laws do not entirely see the point, either. Indeed there are not many substantial servers located there at all, and bloggers who fear the law usually host their blogs overseas in any case. Should the government instruct local ISPs to block say, Google, many will simply respond again to “technical difficulties” by readjusting their settings.
Peaceful evolution, draconian repression
The threat of peaceful and not so peaceful evolution hangs heavily over the heads of those in power in Hanoi.
Vietnam is regularly excoriated for its human rights record which generally means the way the nation locks up its dissidents, bloggers, religious leaders. Even US President Barack Obama made mention of blogger Dieu Cay’s ongoing detention, ostensibly for tax reasons.
According to Human Rights Watch there were at least 63 political prisoners convicted in Vietnam last year. And yet, as Professor Thayer said in a 2011 paper: “Great effort is put into monitoring, controlling and restricting Internet usage. The enormity of resources devoted for these purposes contrasts with the comparatively small number of political activists, religious leaders, and bloggers who have been arrested, tried and sentenced to prison.”
Though the numbers have increased since the above was written there is still little mass organising in this area, and large scale protests tend to be over more concrete issues: workers’ rights and wages or land grabs. However those considered potentially subversive are closely monitored, watched by both a physical presence and an online one.
Actual harassment of bloggers and their families has been common over the years. Most famously, mother of Vietnamese blogger Ta Phong Tan set herself on fire outside the Bac Lieu People‘s Committee building in the Mekong Delta in July 2012, in protest at the way her daughter had been treated.
Within the MPS are units that monitor all forms of communication and there are records of the country purchasing more complicated surveillance equipment. According to the same 2011 paper by Professor Thayer, Vietnam by 2002 had the Verint call monitoring system. Verint, a US company, supplies over 150 nations and 10,000 organisations with varied forms of security and monitoring equipment.
China in the 1990s also offered technical assistance to “monitor internal threats to national security” to the General Department II. The military also collects intelligence related to national security and with attention paid to those, abroad or within Vietnam, who “plot or engage in activities aimed at threatening or opposing the Communist Party of Vietnam or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam”.
General Department II not only, arguably, watched dissidents but also tapped senior party officials in an incident of usually opaque factionalism that later came to light.
There have been many attacks against varied blogs and websites; 16 starting in 2009 and intensifying in April of the next year. Varied activists came under fire: Catholics discussing land issues — there have been ongoing spats between Catholics and the state over land grabs — as well as environmentalists and political agitators. Sites allied to the anti-bauxite movement were also hit. IP addresses were allegedly traced back to within Vietnam and to addresses connected to the military. The attacks, verified by McAfee and Google, were botnet attacks where spyware hid in seemingly innocuous Vietnamese language keystroke software (though a Romanised alphabet Vietnamese has 29 letters and many diacritics). Neel Mehta, a security expert with Google, wrote in a blog post that: “While the malware itself was not especially sophisticated, it has nonetheless been used for damaging purposes.”
Vietnam joining the “technology race”?
That Vietnam has taken up the internet quickly and with great passion is beyond dispute but there are still gaps in the industry. Everyone may be using Google but few local businesses are profiting from the web and mobile boom.
Bryan Pelz, an IT developer, says there is “no means for direct monetization”.
“The banking industry and regulatory environment hasn’t taken strong steps to lay the groundwork for easy online payments. Essentially nobody has credit cards. If you’re building a website and hope to charge users or make a living off of advertising, it’s a tough road in Vietnam.”
And despite talented hackers and software engineers — Flappy Bird was designed by a Vietnamese engineer — with experience and skill comparable to the rest of Asia, software isn’t considered a hugely lucrative field, according to Pelz.
Of those aged 15 – 24, according to Cimigo, 95 per cent are online and spend over two hours each day on the web, via internet cafe, desktop or phone. Ninety five per cent use it for news. Google remains the top rated site in Vietnam, followed by local entertainment hub Zing. News sites Dan Tri and Tuoi Tre also feature, as does Yahoo!, Facebook and YouTube.
Last year a Russian-backed challenger to Google called Coc Coc (knock knock) opened shop. It has aimed to take some of Google’s 97 per cent market share, the reasoning being that Google had no offices in Vietnam and did not have algorithms well written enough to understand Vietnamese well. Unlike other startups it was backed with serious investment and a staff of over 300, according to the AP.
A recent article in The Atlantic reported that Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology has sponsored something called the Silicon Valley Project which aims to push Vietnam to be more than a simple producer of electronic parts (Intel has a 1 billion USD plant in the country) to a tech powerhouse with a strong startup industry and innovative firms. The recent success of Flappy Bird — one of the most downloaded apps ever — is seen as evidence of Vietnam’s larger potential.
Indeed the Silicon Valley Project’s mission statement is not dissimilar to the Communist Party’s mid-1990s ideas about the upcoming “knowledge era”: “This is the time for Vietnam to join in the technology race. Countries which fail to change with this technology-driven world will fall into a vicious cycle of backwardness and poverty.”
This government-backed and sanctioned creativity and entrepreneurship has been lauded, though it’s also been pointed out how it may rather clash with many of the internet restrictions set out in varied laws, such as Decree 72. Of course Vietnam’s ministries do not always march in-sync and what the Ministry of Information and Culture believes to be good may clash with a more pro-tech Ministry of Science and Technology.
The confirmation today that Le Quoc Quan is facing 30 months behind bars, does not bode well for the future of internet freedom in Vietnam.
This article was published on 20 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Feb 14 | Religion and Culture, Turkey
A companion report: Developments in cultural policy and its effects on freedom of the arts, Ankara
As we have shown in previous publications, artists engaged in the Kurdish rights struggle are differentially affected by limitations to freedom of expression in general and in the arts in particular. This is even more the case in the (predominantly) Kurdish regions of Turkey where freedom of expression and assembly are monitored and affected by Turkey’s anti-terror legislation. In practice this has meant that all cultural (e.g. language) and artistic expression within the Kurdish rights struggle can be construed as illegitimate ‘separatist propaganda’ and hence outside of the protection of freedom of expression and the arts.
This year we wanted to conduct follow-up interviews in order to examine if and what kind of changes artists have experienced with the beginning of the “peace process” and the armistice between the Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, Kurdistan Workers Party). Officially announced in early spring 2013 by the government, this process has been all but transparent or linear, yet has raised hopes to bring an end to 30 years of armed conflict. Interviews were conducted with the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Diyarbakir Municipality, the Diyarbakir Municipal Theater, the Dicle Fırat Culture and Arts Center (Dicle Fırat Kültür Sanat Merkezi), independent filmmaker Zeynel Doğan who is also a lecturer at the Aram Tigran City Conservatory, the Kurdish publishing house Lis Yayınevi, members of the Bahar Cultural Center (Bahar Kültür Merkezi) and their lawyers as well as BART – the Batman Culture and Arts Association (Batman Kültür ve Sanat Derneği).
It may come to no surprise that while the reforms announced within the framework of the “democracy package,” especially the legalization of the Kurdish letters Q, W, X and teaching Kurdish in private schools, were highlighted by officials of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Ankara as achievements in the area of freedom of expression, the perception in the region is considerably different. As interviewees frequently noted these changes have merely legalized what Kurdish artists, activists and politicians have practiced – often under threats of incarceration and harassment, or worse – over the past decades. While all stated that the “peace process” has engendered hopes in the region and that the end of armed violence has a brought considerable relief, it seems that other practices, such as the constant surveillance of arts and cultural centers by Turkish security forces is still in place. Given that Ankara emphasizes arts and culture as important vehicles of societal peace that ought to be promoted, the question remains why artistic production in the Kurdish region remains under generalized suspicion of being or aiding terrorist activities.
As the director of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Diyarbakir Municipality, Muharrem Cebe, notes the Ministry of Culture and Tourism still shows little engagement with the city of Diyarbakir. Their activities center mostly on bringing one or two popular artists to town every year. In the area of restoration the Ministry continues to focus on historical sites that fit easily into nationalized (i.e. Turkified) narratives, such as the Ulu Mosque and the İçkale, rather than those that evidence Kurdish presence and history in the region. Since the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP) has come into office in Diyabakir, the municipality has explicitly pursued multicultural arts and languages policies, printing all its official communications in Kurdish, Armenian, Assyrian, Arabic and Turkish. The municipality has supported the renovation of the Armenian Surp Giragos Church and is in close collaboration with Surp Giragos Foundation. The Diyabakir Municipality is currently overseeing the restoration of the Cemil Pasha Mansion (Qonaxa Cemil Paşa), which will host the future city museum. This museum is intended to decidedly represent not only the city’s Kurdish past but aims to acknowledge other minority communities and their histories as well. The municipality has also granted the local Alevi Cemevi official status as a place of worship and hence logistical support entailing electricity, water and the like. Cebe emphasized that provisions for Kurdish as an elective or as offered in private schools without comprehensive structural support for Kurdish language education does not offer any real-life changes, not least by noting: “What good are these kinds of reforms as long as the Governor’s Office is not answering my letters.” Beyond the issue of language, Cebe’s statement points to the continued tension between centrally appointed governors and locally elected Kurdish representatives. For instance, in Turkey governors have some leeway to suppress arts and culture events at their own discretion, if they believe that the event may disturb the public order, be it in regard to morals, health, customs, or traditions, apart from the already mentioned perceived threats to national security and territorial integrity (similar discretionary powers also rest with the police that can intervene in art events without necessarily having to draw on the legal apparatus.) It is in the field of tension between the two levels of governance that restrictions on the freedom of expression in arts are frequently constituted in the Kurdish region.
One of the few municipal theaters in the Kurdish region, the Diyarbakir Municipal Theater (Diyarbakır Büyükşehir Belediyesi Şehir Tiyatrosu) has started to build up a Kurdish language repertoire from 2003 onwards and now is entirely performing in different Kurdish languages. Artistic director Rüknettin Gün recounts that before 2003 Turkish Security forces would function almost as unofficial “dramaturges” in that they wanted to see all scripts in advance and even attend rehearsals. Since the 2004 municipal elections, but even more so after those in 2009 that went to the BDP, the municipal theater has been free of such supervision and surveillance, at least officially. Unfortunately this is not the case for independent arts organizations. However, whenever the Diyarbakir Municipal Theater tours outside of Diyarbakir for guest performances in Dersim or Iğdır a mere four to five months ago, they remain subject to security checks and surveillance, unless the stage they are using is connected to a BDP municipality. This means that they still have to provide a synopsis of the play and relay ID information of all actors and support personnel in advance to the local authorities to receive a performance permit. Gün noted that by recording of the plays security forces “always make their presence felt.” While Diyarbakir Municipal Theater has not encountered any last minute cancellations during this year’s guest performances, our research showed that refusing previously promised spaces and venues remains a frequent tool in suppressing Kurdish artistic production throughout Turkey. [1]
Gün also clarified that their performance of Hamlet in Kurdish was a co-production with the Amsterdam-based Theater RAST and did not receive any support from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The play was performed in Ankara on the invitation of Ankara Arm of TAKSAV (Toplumsal Araştırmalar, Kültür ve Sanat İçin Vakıf, the Foundation for Social Research, Culture and Art) and that then Minister Ertuğrul Günay attended the performance along with other officials out of his own initiative.
The disjuncture between state institutions and local arts organizations was long mirrored by the Diyarbakir State Theater as well. Gün noted that the state theater did not pursue an organic connection with the city. However, its new director Uğur Çınar, who has previously worked in the Municipal Theater, is promising in terms of changing this policy. The Director General of the State Theater, Mustafa Kurt, has announcement that the state theater is thinking about establishing bilingual theater repertoires and that they are considering Diyarbakir for a pilot program. Although the legal reform packages of 2002 and 2004 had already lifted restrictions in language use there has been to date not state theater production in Kurdish. Even the often-cited performance of “Mem û Zîn” by the state theater in Van was actually staged in Turkish. While Gün too stated that hopes were tied to the current political process, he also noted that the latest reforms but legalize what has long been practiced in Diyarbakir and the region overall. This was also confirmed by Lal Laleş of Lis Publishing.
Filmmaker Zeynel Doğan highlighted how beyond direct state interventions, 30 years of armed conflict have produced a psychological toll on the Kurdish population that has also impacted artistic production. Resources to produce films reflecting daily experiences of Kurds remain limited. For instance, it is nearly impossible to visually portray or reenact scenes of military interventions, the destruction of entire villages, or even the customary ID controls in their actual scope as this would involve showing military and police vehicles. This is not an issue for mainstream Turkish productions, both in terms of budget but also with regard to permits and the cooperation of, for instance, the Turkish Armed Forces to provide tanks and similar machinery. The same is true for trying to reenact mass protests. Even filmic representation of these experiences on a small scale tend to draw attention by local security forces and end up in potential interventions.[2]
During the shooting of his 2012 film “Babamin Sesi (My Father’s Voice)” in Elbistan, rumors began to circulate that they were shooting a guerilla film. These rumors led to the Elbistan municipality withdrawing all support it had previously promised, and this although the project was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Doğan recounts that they were under constant surveillance by plain cloth officers. While they did not explicit intervene in the shoot, their presence produced constant tension and discomfort on the set.
Members of the Dicle Fırat Culture and Arts Center likewise note that while physical violence has retreated into the background over the past decade, regular surveillance of their center and recording of their performance (i.e. procedures that are nothing short of harassment) continues to be part of their everyday lives. The kind of psychological stress inflicted by these experiences stays, as do some of their still unresolved court cases, mostly for performing songs like “Herne Pêş”[3] and taking part in rallies and Kurdish arts festivals, which have consistently been interpreted as illegal political expressions by the Turkish authorities. The see the recent steps of the government while in part positive as running the danger of merely instrumentalizing Kurdish artistic and cultural production.
Outside of Diyarbakir and other BDP municipalities however, we are confronted with an even more daunting picture. One of the most striking cases of censorship in the region has been that of 13 artists affiliated with Bahar Kültür Merkezi (NavenDa Canda Baharé) in Batman. Prosecuted by the 4. Diyarbakır High Criminal Court the artists’ “offenses” range from participating in the 2006 Batman Kültür Sanat Festivali, local Newroz celebrations, attendance of press conferences and supporting slogans by playing percussions at political rallies and demonstrations. Apart from being charged with ‘separatist propaganda’ or, alternatively, ‘being a member of a terrorist group,’ a number of artists were also convicted of several counts of transgression against law 2911, i.e. the regulations pertaining to freedom of assembly (Toplantı ve Gösteri Yürüyüşü Kanunu) opened against them in the past four years – a part of which is now in from of the appeals court.[4] The cases illustrate that all utterances by Kurdish artists can still be construed as unconstitutional political expressions rather than recognize the expressions as art and hence protected by Articles 27 and 64 of the Turkish Constitution.
Lawyer Mesut Beştaş explained that in accordance with the 3rd and 4th legal reform package a part of these verdicts has been deferred under the condition that the accused artists do not repeat the ‘offences’ with which they have been charged in the coming five years. This means that the 13 artists are de-facto on probation (denetimli serbestlik). According Beştaş the legal parameters of such a probationary decision are rather vague and their enforcement is left to the discretion of the individual judge rather than being based on clearly defined regulations. The decision of the court hence presents a measure of trying to discourage artists active in the Kurdish rights struggle from taking part in events that could be deemed political by the courts, and foreclose any kinds of expression produced on their part.
Beştaş explained that in these cases freedom of the arts was not accepted as a valid argument of the defense, as the courts interpret artistic expression not in its own right but rather as a vehicle “to become one with the masses that are taking part in an illegal demonstration,” or alternatively as a vehicle that motivates protestors in activities deemed unlawful by the courts. The generalized suspicion that artists engaged in the Kurdish rights struggle are faced with also becomes apparent in the raids conducted on the Bahar Cultural Center as parts of the recent KCK operations. If and what kind of changes will emerge from the “peace process” and the recent “democracy package” remains to be seen. Beştaş noted that the court of appeals rarely reviews cases unless there are substantial legal changes. According to his observations in over 90% of the cases the appeals court confirms the original verdict. It is also disconcerting that while the government has presented the steps taken in 2013 as path-breaking, practices of surveillance and prosecution not only remain in place. Abdullah Tarhan, who is a member of the board of directors of the Bahar Cultural Center and a theater artist by training, for instance, has incurred two new court cases this year: One because he took part in the 2013 Newroz celebrations in Van as a presenter and the other because he recited a poem by Cigerxwîn during an event in Batman. As the Bahar Cultural Center is incorporated as a private business the police is not authorized to conduct surveillance on the premises, yet all of their public performances continue to be recorded.
Despite the government’s proclaimed reform efforts, which were supposed to be illustrated by Erdoğan’s visit to Diyarbakir in November 2013 and to which Şivan Perwer and İbrahim Tatlıses were invited to perform not only in Turkish but also in Kurdish, the question remains what will happen to the convictions and pending cases of the many Kurdish artists who have been indicted over the past decade. This unevenness remains as the recent reforms thus far formalize, if only partially, what has been a hard-fought for practice in the Kurdish regions. Yet, some also expressed hope that Kurdish language proficiency was becoming a more sought after and financially rewarded skill, especially as state and private media (such as the Gülen-supported Dünya TV) are producing more and more Kurdish programming and TV serials. Some project that these developments will raise interest in learning Kurdish and extend its institutionalization. This institutionalization is needed, so the respondents, not least to ensure the viability of Kurdish heritage. Yet they are also very aware that relying on commercial value alone presents is a doubled-edged sword and emphasize that what is needed are constitutional provisions for education in mother-tongue and the protection of Kurdish cultural production in the framework of freedom of expression.
[1] See Siyahbant (Istanbul, 2012) and Siyahbant, Sanatta İfade Özgürlüğü, Sansür ve Hukuk >(Istanbul, 2013).
[2] This was the instance the case for directors Kazım Öz and Mizgin Müjde Arslan who along with members of their crew were taken into custody while working on their feature films (see “Batman’da Kürt Sinemacılara Gözaltı”, and “Kayıp Mezar’ı Önce Savcı Gördü”).
[3] A revolutionary Kurdish march based on the poem by Cigerxwîn.
[4] A compilation of available online news items.
This report on the effects of cultural policy and its effects on freedom of the arts was conducted by Siyah Bant with the support of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. It is reproduced here with permission.
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/02/developments-cultural-policy-effects-freedom-arts-ankara” title=”This article was published on 13 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org”>This article was posted on February 13, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
12 Feb 14 | Digital Freedom, News and features, Turkey
Riot police in Istanbul use water cannons on protesters against the amendments to internet law 5651 (Image: Bulent Selcuk/Demotix)
The specifics regarding website censorship and data gathering in the controversial, recently approved amendments to Turkey’s internet law remain murky. The updated bill 5651, which adds restrictions on internet users’ freedom of expression, and now only hinges on President Abdullah Gül signing it into effect, has been widely criticised.
Opponents protesting the amendments this past Saturday in Istanbul were met with water cannons and tear gas, mirroring a similar police reaction to anti-censorship demonstrations in mid-January. The changes to the law were first proposed last December, just one day after the unraveling of an ongoing corruption scandal that has embroiled Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Party. Opponents say increased censorship aims to harness criticism of government and prevent the spread of leaked recordings about corruption. The Republican People’s Party (CHP), Turkey’s leading opposition party, published a report warning that the new powers given to the Directorate of Telecommunication (TİB) to decide on website bans would allow the government to block and censor websites at will. “Possession of such authoritarian power doesn’t exist in democratic countries,” it says. “It’s a very familiar pattern to us of putting law through very fast without consultation, without enough expert opinion, without enough consideration,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, a senior researcher on Turkey at Human Rights Watch.
The amendments mean judicial orders are no longer necessary for a ban to be carried out. TİB can ban websites within hours and without giving notice, which could mask the censorship to internet users. Furthermore, websites can be blocked based on URL addresses. Because this would allow offensive content on a website to be blocked while its other pages remain active, supporters of the law claim that URL-based bans are a liberal alternative to larger scale censorship.
However, the move to URL-based website blocking may further threaten media in Turkey, says Elif Akgül, freedom of expression editor for the independent news website Bianet. A number of mainstream Turkish news outlets owned by conglomerates close to the government have notably been affected by censorship in recent years. Although also subject to website blocking, smaller, independent news platforms have often been swayed less by direct government pressure. “If you’re a journalist and work in mainstream media, if you can’t publish something, you can publish it on a blog so people can read it,” Akgül said. With URL-based website bans that go into effect without any notification, alternative sources for information, like blog posts or articles on independent news sites like Bianet, may disappear suddenly if they’re considered offensive.
When leaked recordings led to Vimeo and SoundCloud being shut down temporarily in January, a court order was displayed on the sites. Most recently, a string of wiretapped phone conversations implicating corrupt business agreements and government meddling in mainstream media have surfaced on websites like SoundCloud, Vimeo and YouTube and spread through social media before the sites could be shut down. URL-based blocking may see recordings like these disappear, with no explanatory court order left in its place. Critics see the timing of the approved amendments amidst these leaks as motivated by the present government’s interest in controlling information in an election year. “Against the background of these phone calls, telling the press what to do, we’re seeing a very interventionist government that wants to control the masses,” said Sinclair-Webb.
The amended law would also make service providers store users’ internet activity records for two years. Service providers would have to forward any user information to government agencies upon request, although without informing users. An added element of the law’s ambiguity is its vague definition of service providers. Providers can mean internet service providers (ISPs) or small companies that host websites, says Berhan Soylu, an executive board member of the Chamber of Computer Engineers of Turkey. Critics argue that service providers will be forced to use deep package inspection (DPI) to collect data, which could affect internet quality. “Only some service providers have that technology for DPI because it’s a very hard thing to do and a very expensive thing. Some small companies can’t make this happen and they will have to close,” Soylu said. “After that, internet bills may increase. And internet quality, internet speed may decrease.”
Critics of the law say the use of deep package inspection to collect data will make internet users vulnerable to surveillance. For journalists, especially those working on topics the government may see as threatening, increased surveillance means they have to protect their own internet activity and communication with sources to avoid legal threats, says Akgül. “It’s going to be more difficult for us as journalists because our internet activity is going to be more dangerous to ourselves, to our sources. We have to find more secret ways,” she said.
This article was published on February 12, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
