Although the news about Tan Zuoren has been harmonized / censored in mainland China, many concerned citizens expressed their anger through twitter. Below is a selected translation of the twitter hashtag #tanzouren, and the tweets are arranged according to the time line between 9am - 4pm, Feb 9 2010.

Yahoo.cn sells out Tan Zouren, again?

E-mail providers in China have to follow local regulation and provide Chinese police with its clients' information even though some investigations are serving political prosecution and it is not the first time Yahoo.cn betrayed its clients in exchange for the China market.

daaitoulaam: No wonder Alibaba said Yahoo US was over the line for supporting Google against Chinese govt. Alibaba's Yahoo.cn sells out #tanzuoren, huh?

ruanji 美国雅虎虽然不直接经营中国雅虎，暂时作为一个投入10亿资金的大股东，也应该受到谴责。 #tanzuoren

secretaryzhang “境外敌对分子王丹利用电子邮件与谭作人主动联系”，谭作人使用的邮箱是雅虎中国 zuoren54@yahoo.com.cn #tanzuoren

Anger

Satantara 眼泪无助，愤怒廉价。愤怒会养出心中的暴力政治。民主政治是没有敌人和仇恨的政治( #tanzuoren 语)。他们自己在颠覆自己，不稀你我动手。不说谎，让更多的人知道事实，真相自有万钧之力，改变终会到来。

hkxforce 為何揭露豆腐渣工程會是煽動顛覆國家政權罪？因為這個政權本身就是豆腐渣政權。 #tanzuoren

szeyan1220 @28481k @LEMONed 高智晟「失踪」，胡佳3年，刘晓波11年，谭作人5年。起到了多大的威吓作用？唤醒了多少人？我只知道，这是一场持久战，而我无论如何不会认输。历史会审判你们。 #tanzuoren

Feng2084 呼唤非暴力不合作抗争,從今天起，我厭惡任何與暴政苟合的活動！ #tanzuoren

No justice no peace

noooo0000 颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆颠覆……….我就是想颠覆!!!我极想颠覆!!!我必颠覆!!! 一生的梦想–颠覆你!!! #tanzuoren

dgatterdam Chinese Government, you imprison your Heros, NO JUSTICE NO PEACE! NO JUSTICE NO PEACE NO JUSTICE NO PEACE #tanzuoren

AlChowh I support any measure to change the status quo,peaceful or violent!!!!#Tanzuoren

sanrencn 我们不能被压制而不反抗，我们不能被淹没，而不呐喊。我们微弱的抗议迟早会壮大起来踏平中共的无道 #Tanzuoren

gjlawyer 宣判谭作人之后，这个大地上没有了良知，良知被谭作人带进了牢房；宣判谭作人之后，这个大地上没有了正义，正义是谭作人脚下沉重的铁镣。——恸哭中 via (@cuiweiping) #Tanzuoren

dante1184 中共正在挑战全中国人的心理极限，追求全人类的无耻之最。畜生不如。去死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死死！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！！ #tanzuoren

Subverting the state with diaries

wglxh They say Tan's diaries may subvert the government. I think they mean the government of, for, and by perverts. #Tanzuoren

mranti A tweet is a mini-diary - if a diary can “subvert” a govt. #Tanzuoren

wdrdog 颠覆国家政权，最高可以判处死刑，你我这些 #Twitter 上的发言，都够这个罪，只要他们这样认为。 我们的小命，就这样和谭作人刘晓波们连在了一起。 #Tanzuoren

To be human

Feng2084 #tanzuoren 當一個個公民面對強權貪腐的垭口失言噤聲，对生命的哀鸿接近麻木的時候，是你站了出來，然而他們今天對你的審判，是卑鄙与无耻对良知与正义的审判，也是对我们的审判，在这一个罪恶的国家里，我们都有罪。

wglxh 所有的老师，都是在以各种方式给孩子们给学生们个说法。今天审判谭作人，是审判所有想给下一代一个说法的人。 #Tanzuoren

horse 今天检查的是我们“作人”的底限在哪里。一起来“作人”吧。 #Tanzuoren

General Sarath Fonseka in a press conference. Image from Flickr by Indi.ca - used under a Creative Commons License

News is just coming in that Sarath Fonseka, the opposition candidate who lost to the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the recently concluded 6th Presidential Election in Sri Lanka, has been arrested by the military police. The charges against him are military offences, conspiring to topple the government through a coup, creating divisions within the Sri Lankan army when he was at its helm etc.

Twitter is abuzz with the story and opinions, some of which have been captured below:

@LankaBreaking Gen Sarath Fonseka arrested http://tinyurl.com/yf7tnzc #slbrk

@mayooresan so its official, SF is being arrested… phew!!!! #Lanka #SRiLanka

@imahassen http://bit.ly/b380g9 Sri Lanka opposition leader arrested - physically abused and humiliated. (via @AruSivananthan) #LKA

@nrnikhil Gen Fonseka arrested in Srilanka! Are we seeing a new dictatorship in South Asia? #lanka #srilanka

@amanashraff #topstories Sri Lanka election loser arrested http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8504882.stm #lka #politics #news #bbc

@anooprk07: Opposition leader Sarath Fonseka arrested. Sri Lanka heading towards a Dictatorship??

@suhasinih: Emergency like sit in effect in Sri Lanka- Fonseka arrested say reports. #LKA

@BDUTT what? Fonseka?! Now is Sri lanka turning into Pakistan? Nawab and musharaf style! #LKA

@sardesairajdeep: the arrest of gen fonseca in sri lanka is no surprise. rajapakshe may have won elections, but he is a dictator.

@lpolgreenFonseka has been arrested for his conduct as military chief of staff, not as a candidate, a government spox told me. #SriLanka

@kanchangupta: Defence Spokesman: “Fonseka taken into custody by Army, will “face court martial for military offences committed during his service.”

@Muthukumaran Fonseka arrested and faces conspiracy charges.Life comes a full cycle.It wont be long when Rajapaksa will find himself in a dire state.

@amargovRequest right wing twitterati to hold back all the righteous indignation for Fonseka arrest. Chances are Fonseka was indeed guilty.

The Lanka Libertarian offers a quick reaction to the news of Fonseka's arrest.

nobody is above the law. if retired general sarath fonseka betrayed and endangered ppl including officers who sacrificed and contributed to defeat tamil tiger (ltte) terrorists…if he was planning to undermine democracy …if he was calling for foreign intervention to make him president after his loss in election (he is on record doing so) , he should pay the price. according to law. after a proper trial. no more no less.

Indi Samarajiva at indi.ca offers his opinion about the incident. According to him:

In this case I think the law is being applied as a weapon. People with connections can get away with murder and those without can get framed for anything. It’s a sad day for General Fonseka personally, but it’s sad day for us as well. Fonseka is no saint, but this is not even an issue of law. It’s the law being corrupted to serve a man. Sarath Fonseka’s real crime was opposing Mahinda. For that he’s in jail.

Looks like the post-Presidential-Election political drama in Sri Lanka is reaching a crescendo.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 27 January, 2010

We went into downtown Port-au-Prince again yesterday. We'd heard via Twitter that food was being distributed near the National Palace, followed by reports, from Carel Pedre and Karl Jean-Jeune, of UN security “spraying gas” and “throwing tear gas”. Examining the footage posted to YouTube by Carel Pedre, my Global Voices colleague Marc Herman concluded that the substance being sprayed looked more like pepper spray. The pepper spray story was corroborated by reports from the UK Times Online and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, though Al Jazeera English maintains the tear gas line.

Food distribution line in Port-au-Prince

Whether pepper-spray or tear-gas-related, the scuffle has died down by the time we arrive in town. The line is long, but people are waiting patiently. We ask a bystander what’s being distributed. He says he thinks it’s rice. I ask Roosevelt, our driver, to circle the Champs de Mars for a bit, so we can see what’s going on in the vast tent city that now occupies most of the city’s central square.

Unsurprisingly, the regular rhythm of Haitian life seems to have established itself in the maze of makeshift shelters clustered among plinths bearing statues of Toussaint, Pétion and company, the country’s founding fathers. Women are cooking, bathing babies and doing laundry in basins along the perimeter wall, bathing themselves at the roadside. Children are playing football, vendors have set up stalls on the periphery. Near the National Palace, people have gathered to watch a safe being lowered from a government building. Less formal salvage and scavenging operations are taking place in other parts of the city as well. We pass groups of men shoveling rubble, people picking among the ruins of buildings for things they can reuse. Among the detritus, Port-au-Prince is slowly coming back to life.

Around the tent city on the Champs the Mars, life resumes its normal rhythm

Last night a friend who's come here to work with a Canadian NGO wondered how many of the “displaced” were people whose homes were intact but who were simply afraid of sleeping indoors. Yesterday the Haitian government, such as it is, issued a bulletin summarising the impact of the earthquake. On her blog, Anne-Christine D'Adesky posts translations of some of the highlights:

“Around 112,000 dead, 195,000 wounded, 1 million homeless, half the houses destroyed in Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and Leogane; at least 23 private hospitals collapsed.

“The government yesterday announced the creation of 2 camps for displaced persons in Port-au-Prince: one on the road to Tabarre, the other at Croix des Bouquets. Another site has been identified in the zone of Leogane.

“Only qualified engineers can determine if a damaged building is sound enough to be recoccupied. The rule to follow until an engineer has evaluated a property is: if the building doesn't look sound, it isn't.

“Today, we estimate the capacity of food distribution varies between 200,000 and 300,000 rations a day. This means that, in Port-au-Prince and its surroundings alone, over 800,000 people will not be reached. This is the major challenge.

“The government is opposed to precipitous adoptions and uncontrolled departures from Haiti of vulnerable or orphaned children and is concerned about the risk of trafficking.

“NGOs engaged in humanitarian or food aid are encouraged to work with the UN system that has been established.”

It’s hard to know what’s really happening on the ground. Port-au-Prince is a vast and unfamiliar city, and my primary goal in being here is not to report on the situation. We’re staying in Pétionville, away from the fray. As the tear gas story above demonstrates, it’s difficult to verify information. You try to get around as much as you can, but in the end you’ll see only a tiny fraction of the whole, and perhaps understand or read accurately only a fraction of that. But the overriding story is about the distribution of aid: how badly it’s going, how supplies are failing to get to those who need it, and also how difficult the whole exercise is. I'm pretty sure that one is true.

On the edge of the tent city near the National Palace I talk to a pair of middle-aged women from Bel Air. They say they haven’t received any food supplies. I ask them if they plan on leaving the city for the countryside. The older one says no. I ask why. She says it’s because her father is dead — she has no family left “en province“.

Earthquake damage in Carrefour

We drive out west to the bedroom district of Carrefour, where 40 to 50% of the buildings are said to have sustained damage. Along the main roads at least, the impact of the quake doesn’t seem as dramatic as in central Port-au-Prince, as the buildings are lower and not as densely clustered. Tent cities have sprung up on the median strips and there are mounds of burning garbage along the roadside. But Carrefour didn’t need an earthquake to render conditions appalling. Still, the community is going about its business, obviously accustomed to the general squalor and the grey slurry of macerated garbage underfoot. We pass three money transfer agencies with long lines in front, a sign that remittances, which by some estimates account for over half of the country's national income, are flowing back into Haiti once more.

Tent city on the median strip on the Carrefour main road

Crowd gathered at a money transfer agency in Carrefour, awaiting remittances from abroad

We head back into central Port-au-Prince to engage with a different side of Haiti at the storied Hotel Oloffson in Bois Verna, where it seems like half of the Corbett Haiti mailing list is lunching. We chat briefly with hotel proprietor Richard Morse (@RAMhaiti), who now has 12,065 followers on Twitter and appears on 638 Twitter lists, all as a result of the earthquake. Also there: Anne-Christine D’Adesky, who’s been blogging and posting to the Corbett list consistently since the earthquake hit, and who says that Haiti is the litmus test for whether the lessons learned in other recent humanitarian situations have really been learned; New Yorker Tequila Minsky, just in from taking photos in a nearby neighbourhood; writer Amy Wilentz, who’s blogging for TIME magazine; Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, who corrects my camera-holding techniques; and Leah Gordon, who offers to take us to Portail Léogane to visit the sculptors of the Grand Rue.

But that's the subject of another post. Over and out.

Originally posted at Caribbean Free Radio.

Global Voices' work in Haiti is supported by our general support donors and by a humanitarian information grant from Internews. Please visit the Global Voices Haiti Earthquake page for more coverage.

We at Global Voices believe there is an urgent need to amplify Haitian perspectives on relief and reconstruction efforts. One crucial way is to increase citizen media activity locally in Haiti, thereby making available more news and commentary that may positively affect awareness, interest, conversations, and decisions in the coming months.

To this end, Global Voices has sent a two-person team to Port-au-Prince, to help support citizen media coverage. GV's managing director Georgia Popplewell and former Francophonia editor Alice Backer have spent the past six days assessing the situation on the ground, making contact with Haitians using citizen media tools, and identifying others with the potential to participate in and enrich the online conversation, given the right resources.

Both have been issuing regular reports via their personal blogs and Twitter accounts: Georgia at Caribbean Free Radio and @georgiap, Alice at Kiskeácity and @kiskeacity. Georgia is also posting photos at her Flickr account. And we will be using their firsthand reporting to complement Global Voices' coverage of the ongoing online conversation.

Writing at her blog a few days before leaving for Haiti, Georgia explained:

I suspect that given the magnitude of the damage—and the magnitude of US involvement in the relief and reconstruction efforts—the Haiti earthquake isn’t going to disappear from the pages of the major media in the way that other stories have. But it’s going to be a different kind of coverage, and one that won’t necessarily highlight local stories.

Another of our key goals, therefore, is to highlight the need for local voices in the mix and increase the opportunities for communities affected by the earthquake to be heard and understood by those working and reporting on the recovery—a group that includes Haitian institutions and media as well as international agencies. We don’t expect it will be easy: Haiti is a complex place and the damage to the country has been severe.

Global Voices' work in Haiti is supported by our general support donors and by a humanitarian information grant from Internews. Please visit the Global Voices Haiti Earthquake page for more coverage.

Twitter, as has been the case since the dolorous news broke, proved the quickest way to transmit opinions: Musician and hotelier Richard Morse, who has been regularly tweeting as RAMhaiti, continues to be quite candid with his:

What happened to money from 6 years of devastation.Big Black Hole.Go visit Gonaives if u don't believe me.We need new people involved,NOW

Six years ago was presumably September 2004: About 3,000 people died when Tropical Storm Jeanne unleashed her wrath on the northeastern end of the island, causing disastrous floods and mudslides in Gonaïves. Calamity struck again in September 2008, thanks to a seemingly unending succession of storms which battered the already beleaguered country.

The recovery process becomes more complicated when Haiti's political climate comes into play. Morse seems to have little faith that relief money will get into the hands of those who will use it properly:

Has anyone ever heard of an audit??? Historically, devastation funds don't go where they're supposed to. What's the difference this time??

He explains in a later tweet:

Haiti's former Prime Minister asked for an audit so she was dumped. The team that's now in place feared the audit.

He is referring to Michèle Pierre-Louis, who, after President René Préval nominated her for the post in June 2008, faced a tough battle for approval by the country's Parliament. She was eventually confirmed, but lasted just over a year in the post, causing some bloggers to question the circumstances of her discharge. But that wasn't the only controversial development in the country's political arena: Fanmi Lavalas, the party of ousted former President Jean Bertrand Aristide, which still enjoys considerable grassroots support in Haiti, was barred from contesting the country's next elections, which had been carded to take place at the end of February this year.

Morse continues:

OUT WITH THE OLD; IN WITH THE NEW. Let's hear what the candidates want. Let's hear what the PEOPLE want. No one wants current STATUS QUO

Haiti falls at position 168 out of 180 countries on Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perception Index ranking. Morse unabashedly refers to 2009 as “the YEAR of FRAUD” in Haiti, adding in another Twitter update:

It's not recovery if it's embedded in FRAUD and CORRUPTION.Did you see those elections last year? Internat. Comm. 100% approve @ZOEmagazine

He also responds to @ZOEmagazine quite sardonically:

If Haiti is part of IMF auditing system, then why is no one in JAIL? @ZOEmagazine

…but is careful to clarify his statements:

The UN was becoming part of the problem.Never said anything about disappearing AID and approved fraudulent elections @Dohnanyi

Morse is not the only Haitian blogger talking about alleged corruption on Twitter. thehaitian puts the practice in context with this tweet:

You can not expect an underpaid or unpaid govt workforce to not be corrupt. Hospital staff and teachers can go years w/out pay.#haiti

Still, he concedes that the government's track record leaves something to be desired:

Quick. Who trusts the Haitian govt to rebuild even one govt building? Honest question.#haiti

RAMhaiti seems to concur, sharing a bit of his own experience:

I'm getting visits from people.They're concerned about how the AID to Haiti is going 2 be distributed. Very concerned about locals in charge

thehaitian yearns for transparency in the way the aid money is disbursed:

I need to know where all this money is going to go. I really do. Is the point to get back to where we were? That's a bad idea.#haiti

…and suggests that:

Any funds going to the haitian govt should require a top to bottom rebuilding of the tax collection office and property rights reform#haiti

Interestingly enough, New American Media conducted a poll of the Haitian diaspora in the U.S. and one of the major findings revealed that:

Haitians in the United States appear to have lost confidence in the current Haitian government and its handling of the aftermath of the earthquake. Three-fifths of the respondents agree that the Haitian government has practically disappeared since the earthquake and 63 percent disapprove of the reaction of President Rene Preval and the Haitian government to the earthquake. The concern about the ability of the Haitian government to deal with the crisis is so strong that a majority of Haitians in the United States feel that officials from the United Nations and the international community should govern Haiti “at the very least until it recovers from this catastrophe.” And the poll reveals that most Haitians are not concerned about the large American military presence in their country.

Other netizens also put in their two cents' worth on Twitter, with a critical contribution to the discourse coming from melindayiti:

We need to have a voice in the plan for Haiti, more importantly, our HAITIAN partners need to be the ones creating that plan for #Haiti

Finally, meandering posts a link on his blog to the Haiti Business Portal and suggests that the international community also has a critical role to play:

$1-3 billion is coming Haiti’s way: maybe more Will the crowd pay attention, or will they buy their relief, recovery, and reconstruction goods and services abroad? At the risk of being politically incorrect, perhaps the international community might consider Rwanda strong man Paul Kagame’s words: “TRADE not AID”.