Bandh of brothers… [via Neha]

This footage, filmed by Dinesh Wagle, of United We Blog!, shows motorcycle riders being turned backed by members of the National Federation of Nepal Transport Entrepreneurs in Kathmandu. The NFNTE had called a bandh (strike) prohibiting vehicles from running on the streets, after public buses were torched in an earlier protest during the instability in Terai.

I'd love to know what's actually said in the exchange between the two sides - any offers to post a transcript or to subtitle via dotsub or elsewhere?

Wagle offers a worrying perspective on the unpredictability of life in Nepal at the moment:

“[…] it’s indeed hard to predict the political and other developments in today’s Nepal. The trend of creating anarchy and take advantage of such situation has increased over the past several months. There is a kind of planned competition to exploit the situation. You never know what’s going to happen when. Anyone can call a Nepal banda any time. General public has to face the difficulties caused by such prompt and unnecessary decisions. Public have always become the victim of such bandas in the past. What can they do other than quietly suffer?”

FarsiTube, Alexander Litvinenko, strikes in Lebanon, maids protesting at the beach in Peru, vlogging from UAE, and clashes in Bolivia after the jump…

FarsiTube shows a different side to life in Iran [via Hamid]

Iranian YouTube hommage FarsiTube holds reasonable quality footage of the 2006 Women's Day march in Tehran that was broken up violently by police.

The site holds a variety of material, including a documentary about the execution of 16-year-old girl Attafeh Sahaaleh.

It's one of a rash of sites like DocuTube using the “+tube” format - if you've come across another one, share it below, or mail me.

The half-life of Litvinenko [via Veronica]

If this video story from Polish newspaper Dziennik is true, the discovery of Alexander Litvinenko's face on a special forces shooting-range target is pretty embarrassing for the Russian authorities, even if the original video does date from 2002:

[Originally from Dziennik]

Russo-phobic blog The Russophobe takes up the story and AP adds more.

Beirut burns as strike leads to clashes [via Moussa]

In late January the Lebanese opposition called a general strike in protest against the government, and finkployd of Blogging Beirut took several videos of the resulting clashes between “Christians of Hazmieh, Beirut, Lebanon and the Demonstrating (with rock throwing and tire burning) Muslims of West Beirut, on January 23, 2007 […]” - the longest of which is below:

Video by finkployd of Blogging Beirut

After these pictures were taken, Sunni-Shia fighting broke out in Beirut, and a fight in a student cafeteria spilled over into wider violence. A curfew was imposed across Beirut in an attempt to restore order. According to Al-Ahram, tensions remained high over the weekend, and neither the government nor the opposition looks likely to back down. An estimated 300,000 citizens demonstrated in support of the government on Wednesday on the second anniversary of Rafik Hariri's assassination.

Cleaners take protest littorally [via Juan and David]

Hundreds marched onto the beaches of Asia, a Peruvian resort south of Lima, under the banner “Basta de Racismo” (Stop Racism), after domestic workers were banned from swimming at the beaches before sunset - despite a law which prohibits restricting access to the sea.

There are several videos of the protest - a brief taster of Operativo de la Empleada Audaz (Operation Bold Employee), as the action was called, below:

There's a longer version here.

David also sent me a video purporting to show two young men in Lima harassing and abusing their family's domestic worker. In a post at Peruanista, Carlos A Quiroz appealed for any information as to the identity of the domestic worker or the family, and asked readers to visit YouTube, and to flag the video for “graphic and violent content”. The video has now been taken down (”due to terms of use violation”), and Peruanista has posted an update, and a host of videos on the broader issue of violence against women in Peru, at “If you beat your wife, watch these”.

This is the first concrete example I have seen of users being mobilised to flag content of this kind, but I am sure there are others - let me know below, or by email.

UAE students vlog on bloggers [via Amira]

This comes out of, I am guessing, a journalism program in the UAE, as the site is entitled “Broadcasters of Tomorrow”. Please send me more links of this kind, as I'd love to see more examples of local perspectives on human rights stories from around the world.

Cochabamba clashes over coca [via Eduardo]

Finally, Eduardo Avila's superb overview of Bolivia's Black January clashes in Cochabamba, which is required reading and viewing (see videos from YouTubers nenamade and estotaweno), ends with these words:

“A witness in the story stated that the cocaleros (coca growers) had filmed the entire incident [of the death of 17-year-old Cristian Urresti] on a camera. That video could provide clues as to who was ultimately responsible for the brutal death, but it is very unlikely that video will ever find its way to sites like YouTube.”

As this tour of recent videos on GV shows, there's precious little that won't be on YouTube, Ikbis, DailyMotion and MetaCafe before long…

Something for WITNESS's Amazon Wishlist [via Veronica]

First to Pawlina, host of a Ukrainian radio show in Vancouver, Canada, who blogs about human trafficking at The Natashas. After her post in late December commending Ukrainian pop star Ruslana for releasing a video condemning human trafficking, Pawlina praises another musician, Peter Gabriel, for founding WITNESS, but, under the title “Some human rights abuses harder to expose than others”, offers some advice:

It's very commendable of rock stars to help expose human rights abuses around the world.

British rock legend Peter Gabriel has formd an organization called Witness that provides video equipment to human rights activists to record such abuses.

I suspect he may not be aware of the horrific abuses suffered by hundreds of thousands of young women and even children, at the hands of human traffickers pandering to men seeking instant, no-strings-attached sexual gratification.

In which case, someone should send him a copy of The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade.

Then again, no doubt it would be extremely difficult to film what goes on behind the closed doors and barred windows of brothels and “breaking grounds”, much less expose it to public view.

In fact WITNESS did produce a documentary about trafficking in 1997, Bought And Sold, but Pawlina's right - it's proving quite difficult to find footage from behind those “closed doors and barred windows” - so if you have seen, or even filmed footage of that kind, please email me (email address at the end of the article) to let me know.

Knocking on doors and making things happen [via Neha]

Opening doors and unbarring windows, India's Drishti collective have set in motion some pretty impressive video magazines made by their seven Community Video Units. The magazines often make for uncomfortable viewing for local officials, as this post from Reflections in a Window Pane shows. One of the CVUs is hosted by Navsarjan in Gujarat. When one Dalit community in Saurashtra, northern Gujarat, complained that a water-processing plant designed to lower the levels of fluoride in their water had not been used for three years, they met official stonewalling. The Navsarjan CVU's video magazine asked why, and after the magazine was screened to the whole community, including the relevant officials, the water-processing plant was turned back on.

Drishti works with Video Volunteers and you can see a presentation by Gavin White, of Video Volunteers here. I hope to feature some of Drishti's video soon.

Do videos show Nepali police joining in ethnic riots? [also via Neha]

In neighbouring Nepal, youths from the Pahadi community clashed with people from the Madhesi community, and businesses and houses burned in the western Nepali city of Nepalgunj in late December. Paramendra Bhagat at Democracy for Nepal presents three video extracts of the aftermath, claiming that the clashes were in fact a “hate crime” by the Pahadis against the Madhesis. Now the Nepali Times is reporting that the local police were seen attacking Madhesis too. All this is leading some commentators to fear that, with the entry of the Maoists into politics, ethnic rivalries may enter Nepal's politics.

Were the 2006 Fiji elections rigged? [via Preetam]

Fiji's military, which took power in a coup d'etat in 2006, released a video that purports to show senior members of the former ruling party, the SDL, admitting vote-rigging and interfering with ballot boxes. FijiBuzz uploads the video, but meets sceptical responses from commenters on two counts: first, that the man who shot the video, Peter Foster, is said to be a conman who can't be trusted, and second, commenters think that the video fits too neatly with the military's need for some kind of evidence justifying the coup.

Forced evictions ‘rampant' in Cambodia [also via Preetam]

Forced evictions in Cambodia are rampant, said the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions in 2006. In the absence of citizen-filmed footage of evictions, blogger Mongkol linked to a TV documentary showing the extent of forced evictions in Cambodia.

To find out more, visit the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, the Asian Coalition on Housing Rights, and COHRE's Cambodia page.

I'll be featuring more stories on forced evictions soon, so if you have access to relevant footage from anywhere around the world, I'd be very interested to hear from you by email or through the comments box below.

The ethics of filming the poor [back to Veronica]

Finally, Minsztrel at Pestcentric takes issue with a cameraman filming poor Hungarians at a soup kitchen outside the District VII Mayor's office in Budapest. A question for you: how are vloggers dealing with the issue of consent, and what guidelines do they need to follow?

You may be one of the millions who have sought it out online - or you may have decided to avoid it. Someone - a friend, a colleague, a relative - may have emailed it to you, or called you up to tell you about it. You may have seen a clip of it on the TV news. One way or the other, you're likely to have an opinion on it, because it's made for a memorable start to 2007, as political cartoonist blackandblack's cartoon illustrates:

Click here to launch blackandblack's blog in a new window.

If anyone was still in any doubt that sousveillance was one of the ideas of the year, then the Saddam video should put that beyond doubt. What's different about the cellphone footage of the execution of Saddam Hussein, former dictator of Iraq, is that, aside from being probably the most watched web video in history, it has re-ignited a global debate on a perennial human rights issue: capital punishment.

Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar links to both the official and unofficial videos here - on a personal note, I found it one of the most disturbing videos I have yet had to watch, so viewer beware…

Judging by the Iraqi government's indignation at the unofficial footage, and the ambivalent reaction of many major media outlets (as detailed by Armenia-based Onnik Krikorian here), they were the only ones genuinely surprised that a cameraphone was smuggled past the security checks into the death chamber. If whoever filmed it had surrendered his cellphone before the hanging, the world may never have seen beyond the mute, carefully-edited, tastefully-faded-out official video of the proceedings.

The real story emerging from the Saddam video is that, in laying bare the huge gap between the managed official account of his execution and the far messier reality, it has provoked people - and many bloggers - to reflect less on whether Saddam merited his fate, and more on the nature and appropriateness of that fate for the age we live in.

The UN and NGOs criticise Saddam execution…

It's important to remember that the International Community remains opposed to the death penalty, and that the right to life is enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights [audio versions of the UDHR in several languages here] - although new UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon needed reminding of this on his first day at work. Indeed the UN's Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has called directly on the Iraqi government to delay the executions of Saddam's co-defendants, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, his half brother, and head of the Intelligence Service, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former Chief Judge of the Revolutionary Court, citing questions over the fairness of their trial.

UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, says that Saddam's execution represents a clear violation of human rights law for three reasons: the lack of a fair trial, the Iraqi government's refusal to countenance an appeal, and the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out. In other words, in addition to the UN and human rights law opposition to the death penalty on the basis of right to life, the manner of this execution and the lead-up was a violation of human rights law in and of itself. And now Romano Prodi, Prime Minister of Italy, is pressing the UN to go further by ratifying a Universal Moratorium on the death penalty.

International human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which campaigns against the death penalty, have strongly criticised both the trial and the execution of Saddam Hussein, with Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme, saying:

His trial should have been a major contribution towards establishing justice and ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated when he was in power, but his trial was a deeply flawed affair. It will be seen by many as nothing more than ‘victor's justice' and, sadly, will do nothing to stem the unrelenting tide of political killings.

… so Iraq's government pins the blame

Facing a firestorm of international condemnation over Saddam's trial and for the manner of his execution, the Iraqi government has conducted an investigation into the unauthorised video. In an echo of the fallout of Abu Ghraib, the investigation has identified the source of the unofficial videos as two Justice Ministry guards, despite claims from Munkith al-Faroun, prosecutor at Saddam's trial, himself among the 14 witnesses of the execution, that two senior officials were openly filming events in the death chamber on their cellphones. At one point the New York Times even reported that one of the two officials was Iraq's National Security Advisor, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, but later corrected this, saying that it had erroneously quoted Mr Faroun.

Bloggers worldwide react to the Saddam execution video

Whoever filmed the cellphone footage, what it reveals has had an enormous impact. There has been plenty of discussion of the geopolitics surrounding the execution of Saddam - take a look at the Iraqi Blogodrome, Lebanon, Iran, North Africa, and elsewhere. The anger about the decision to execute Saddam on the morning of Eid al-Adha is well-documented too - Raed Jarrar is stunned, Abu Aardvark speculates on motivations behind the timing, and Leilouta simply describes a childhood memory of the sacrifice of a lamb. But the cellphone footage has brought a different edge to the discussion - and the irony that debate over capital punishment has been reignited by the execution of a man on trial for genocide is not lost on anyone.

GV's inimitable Salam Adil hits the nail on the head with The Ghost of Saddam Hussein:

Everyone .. and .. their .. auntie seems to have produced their own Iraqi blogger reviews rounding up reactions to the execution of Saddam Hussein.

However, what is needed now is some analysis. So here is my humble attempt to make some sense from the stream of opinions flowing out of the Iraqi blogodrome.

Nearby on GV, Jose Murilo Junior (or perhaps his auntie) provides a fascinating run-through of Portuguese-language bloggers' reactions - ranging from condemnation of the execution to a fearful evocation of “the emergence of a fifth power — decentralized, far-reaching, anarchical” (that's us and our cameraphones, in case you hadn't realised).

Kazakh blogger Adam Kesher invites his readers to vote for or against capital punishment in Kazakhstan, where the government of President Nazarbayev passed a moratorium on the death penalty three years ago. Does he deserve his punishment, or is it a “barbaric sacrifice to political gods?” Of the 27 votes received, 18 are against the death penalty.

From another country with a moratorium, Sean's Russia Blog rounds up Russian media coverage and opinion of the execution, including the news that far-right leader

Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDRP staged a minor protest in front of the Iraqi embassy in Moscow to oppose the execution. Forty four people attended to the demonstration, which wasn’t sanctioned by the police and no one was arrested.

At Two Weeks Notice, Greg Weeks shows how hard other governments are finding it to square the circle. He thinks the Cuban government, which retains the death penalty, might be displaying double standards in denouncing the execution.

Raed Jarrar's description of the execution sums up why the video has stirred up such conflicting emotions:

The execution scene did not at all resemble a State execution; rather, it looked like a chaotic sectarian act of revenge interrupted by shrieking militiamen who received him from the U.S. forces less than 30 minutes before killing him.

Raed, who says he is against the death penalty, makes a stinging attack on the Iraqi government's reaction to the leaked execution video, calling the incident “Execution-Gate”:

As if the problem is about who filmed the shameful scene, not about who designed it and participated in it.

In Malaysia, Ktemoc thinks that the guard held for filming the execution is a “low-level scapegoat”, and sees echoes in the execution fiasco of his country's Squatgate scandal, which I wrote about in September.

In Egypt, Sandmonkey says the video turned his stomach. Adele of Trinidad's The Bookmann goes further:

The use of a phone camera to bring the world more private imagery from the scene also lent an air of the perverse on top of the existing perversity.

Where are the protesters now?

Astrubal, a Tunisian in exile, writes more directly:

Le monde entier va être témoin -à vomir- de cet acte barbare, exécuté non point par un psychopathe sanguinaire et sadique, mais par un Etat sous couvert d’une pseudo justice.

and goes on to lament the absence of Arab protests against the continued use of capital punishment:

J’avais espéré que l’exécution abjecte de Saddam, par sa médiatisation, puisse servir à quelque chose. Quelle soit à l’origine d’un mouvement vers un moyen radical pour empêcher désormais nos tyrans (mais aussi les américains) d’exécuter nos concitoyens –chez nous- en toute impunité.

J’avais espéré observer des manifestations pour clamer “A bas la peine de mort !“, “A bas la sentence destinée à exécuter sous couvert de la loi les adversaires politiques“, “Finissons-en avec ce permis de tuer dont personne ne peut garantir l’impartialité !“, “Abrogeons cette offense à la dignité humaine qu’est la peine de mort !”.

Hélas, au lieu de cela nous assistons aux cris de : “A bas l’Amérique et gloire à Saddam le martyr“.

And on Friday, after prayers, several towns in Jammu and Kashmir witnessed violent protests against the execution, as local Muslim protesters burned effigies of George W Bush and American flags. Also on Friday, three thousand protesters marched in the Jordanian capital Amman against American and Iranian influence in the Middle East. And the NYT reports from Beirut that the cry of “Saddam the martyr” is spreading across the region.

AL Tarrar at Baghdad Connect turns to philosophical anthropologist Rene Girard to make sense of this, arguing that Saddam effectively committed ritual suicide:

The hanging of the Saddam on the first ritual day of religious festivities – when myths, fears, etc are at highest echelon, will produce a ritual ‘sacrificial’ victim for those who deem Saddam is turned into a martyr, and ritual ‘sacrificeacble’ victim for those who deem Saddam is a punishable murderer. […] Becoming more like gods, he refused to acknowledge the new social order and became nihilistic, and as with the ‘Heaven’s Gate’ members he had eventually committed suicide while he was reciting ritual verses during the act.

African bloggers rage against Saddam apologists

In the African blogosphere, Sudanese Thinker, suffering conflicting emotions on seeing the execution video, excoriates Saddam apologist bloggers. Next door, in Kenya, M of Thinker's Room sparks off a debate about capital punishment among his international readership in a post entitled “They Shouldn't Have Hanged Saddam”. UK-based Olawunmi takes a starkly different view, sending Nigeria's leaders a memento mori, that what happened to Saddam can easily happen to other wayward leaders. Another trenchant Nigerian blogger, Akin, advocates turning Saddam's posthumous trial for genocide into a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the most downbeat confession comes from Nkem Ifejika, also based in the UK:

On the night he was executed, a group of us had a debate about capital punishment. I am against it. Not because I believe the worst of humankind should be spared the indignity of state execution, but for our own dignity. We, the judge, jury, and excutioner. We are the ones who need to preserve our own nobility by not killing people. What has killing Saddam gained the world? One less mouth to feed maybe, but other than that - nothing. Is it ever possible for capital punishment to be seen as anything loftier than state sanctioned revenge? I think not. When we were growing up, most of our parents told us not to hit back. Turn the other cheek. Revenge is for the Lord. But even one of the mot theocratic governments in the world, the US government, is in favour of the death penalty.

It's 2007, but it might as well be Middle Ages. Firing Squad, Hanging, Lethal Injection, Electric Chair, Guillotine. What's the difference?

Finally, to the USA, where 60 executions took place during 2005, and 53 in 2006. But the debate made be shifting: in December, the US President's brother, Jeb Bush, suspended executions in Florida, where he is Governor, after an execution by lethal injection was “botched” - now 10 states have taken similar measures. And on January 2nd, the New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission issued its report [PDF] recommending to the Governor of that state that the death penalty be abolished. Organisations such as the Death Penalty Information Center and the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty are consistently trying to raise informed debate on the issue - and new grassroots discussion fora exist to house these debates. But since Saddam's execution, it seems everyone is talking about it - and it's the cellphone video that sparked it all.

A blog on Catholic legal theory, the Mirror of Justice, questions whether the Iraqi government qualifies as a functioning state, and therefore whether the execution was morally justified. One media columnist warns readers that they shouldn't gloat over Saddam's death, as he was, while he was carrying out the crimes for which he was executed, supported by the USA. Not everyone wants a debate, however, as this strident defence of Saddam's execution testifies at Reject The UN.

As always, feel free to comment, or to add links to coverage from where you are, via the box below.

Resources and further reading

Amnesty International has recently updated its Facts and Figures section on the death penalty. While 128 countries can be considered to have abolished the death penalty wholly, partly or in practice, 69 retain the death penalty, although not all of these will use it in any given year. At least 2,148 people were executed worldwide in 2005 in 22 countries - one country, China, carried out 1,770 of these executions. Six methods of execution have prevailed since the year 2000:

- Beheading (in Saudi Arabia, Iraq)
- Electrocution (in USA)
- Hanging (in Egypt, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Singapore and other countries)
- Lethal injection (in China, Guatemala, Philippines, Thailand, USA)
- Shooting (in Belarus, China, Somalia, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam and other countries)
- Stoning (in Afghanistan, Iran)

Amnesty USA provides a list of relevant international legislation showing the progress towards abolition of the death penalty.

The Project on Extrajudicial Executions, based at New York University School of Law, was established by Philip Alston, the UN's Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, and publishes extracts of his correspondence with governments around the world, and working papers on the right to life.

As for blogs, Abolish The Death Penalty is predominantly US-focused, and has recently been running a series of interviews with the families of executed prisoners. The site has a useful blogroll, with links to many US-based and international blogs on the death penalty, including the excellent Asia Death Penalty.

Beyond the USA, Think Centre is a Singaporean NGO lobbying for an end to the death penalty in Singapore, and Hands Off Cain is an Italian-led campaign for an immediate UN moratorium on the death penalty. Please do add further resources through the comments box below.

[This post benefited from the input of several GV colleagues - Salam Adil, Sami Ben Gharbia, Leila Tanayeva, Ndesanjo Macha, Veronica Khokhlova, Preetam Rai, David Sasaki, Natham Hamm - and Sam Gregory and Hakima Abbas at WITNESS. Thanks to all. Any mistakes are mine alone, likewise any infelicities of translation.]

The world is listening. Is GV talking?

Salam puts it in terms of getting the tools and technology out there, and getting a broader range of people to understand and use them. The next step for GV in particular might be, he suggests, encouraging more local people to blog, which could broaden the range of content on the site. As steps towards this, he pulls out four key areas: learning to blog, for the young and old; getting your blog noticed - or, as he puts it, “How I became famous”; getting blog content into other media, such as print; and staying safe, secure and anonymous as a blogger.

A blow-by-blow account after the jump…

Learning to blog

Salam and Preetam offer examples of teaching people to blog from opposite ends of the age spectrum. Salam approached his children's primary school, and offered to teach an after-school class for 9- and 10-year-olds to teach them HTML, to use Blogger, and then to update the school blog by FTP. One Cambodian organisation builds on the interests of young students - finding scholarships to study, developing the skills to create a website - by helping them use blogs initially as a productivity and project management tool, and then to share their own content.

But it's not just about encouraging younger bloggers. When you look at your family, says Preetam, it's usually your grandparents who talk the most - they generally have more time on their hands… Friends of Yesterday of Singapore ran a blogging workshop for senior citizens in Singapore, as a way of capturing and sharing their memories. There aren't that many contributing at the moment, but they expect this to increase.

Bloggers of all ages need guidance and training on, for example, how to avoid legal and copyright pitfalls when blogging, and Preetam suggests mini BlogCamps as one way of offering bloggers this kind of assistance.

Blogging101.com?

As well as conducting face-to-face training on how to blog, Salam asks whether it makes sense to build a central repository for blogging resources, with tutorials, and technical and other resources - but who will build it, and who will use it? It could be hosted at GV, as it sees traffic from areas that might find such a resource useful.

Simple web searches can lead to a bewildering amount of information, but building a repository would help direct potential bloggers to resources on more advanced topics like making multimedia content. There Salam could share resources on vlogging, with step-by-step tutorials on how to capture, encode and upload video and to CC Publisher, which helps users assign different levels of Creative Commons Licenses to the videos they upload. Preetam mentions that platforms like YouTube are now beginning to incorporate tools that allow users to record direct into the site from a webcam, making the process even simpler.

Jose Murilo Junior offers an alternative view from Brazil's Cultural Hotspots program, in which he says that, rather than making the kids participating in the project follow a set of resources on blogging, the project leaders encouraged the kids to customise the tools they wanted to use. Whether this might lead some of that content to be left out of global conversations because the platform it's produced on doesn't integrate with global content aggregators, as Jen Brea observes about some West African Francophone blogs, might be addressed by Ben Paarmann's call for services like popular global tools like Wordpress to roll out in more local languages, such as Russian.

Ethan Zuckerman mentions the excellent In A Box series from the Tactical Technology Collaborative, which offers a set of ready-to-go tools, starting with NGO In A Box, and now including Security In A Box and Audio/Video In A Box. All packages use open source software and are already or can be localised into various languages.

Getting your blog noticed – or how Salam became famous

Once you have a blog, how do you get it noticed? In Salam’s case, he started blogging because his friends already had blogs, but his site was pretty much personal until he sparred with other bloggers, got trackbacks, and got picked up by Iraq Blog Count. His readership went through the roof, and the rest is history… After a particularly heated exchange between some Iraqi bloggers, Salam also created a space where Iraqi bloggers could share news, discussions and debate – a GoogleGroup called the Iraqi Blogodrome. This, and other groups like it, could prove a useful model for other ‘spheres.

A print edition?

Throughout the GV community, bloggers are trying to reach out not only to those who aren’t already blogging and want to, but to those who might want to read blogs and can’t, for technical or other reasons. Could a print edition be the answer?

Some of the very countries where local networks of bloggers or GV might want to publish print editions of blog content, are the same countries where it might be most difficult to do so. Preetam suggests that samizdat publishing (print, photocopy and pass on) might be a way to stay under any Ministry of Information’s radar.

In countries where publishing openly is less problematic, magazine-style print editions of local blog content might be able to attract income from local advertisers to cover production and distribution costs. People in the room also seem to feel that books of GV and other blog content could reach a very different and valuable audience. Could GV publish a book like the recent WorldChanging effort? But GV is a very different beast to WorldChanging, and Ethan feels that any GV book would need to define its audience pretty clearly before committing to such a potentially costly exercise.

But with a growing willingness among publishers to bring together content from around the world, as with the Sage Keywords Series from India, might there now be an audience to cater to? Tactical Tech's Open Publishing In A Box offers a comprehensive open-source solution for publishers. And could POD or print-on-demand technology play a role, allowing users to create their own books of GV content?

Ndesanjo Macha and Ethan remind us that mass media, particularly radio, are still by far how the majority of people consume their media worldwide, and that helping local newspapers and radio stations around the world connect with and cover their local blogosphere might generate more local interest and traffic – and eventually lead more people to blog themselves.

And if none of that works? Broadcast your podcast yourself…

Staying safe, secure and anonymous

Many bloggers in the GV network do not blog under their real name, whether because they are blogging about sensitive matters, or it might compromise their professional position. But writing under a pseudonym is rarely enough. Quinn Norton, at the Summit for Wired Magazine, says that, rather than not having the tools to protect their identity online, the biggest problem for most users is not knowing that you should do so at all. Sites like ShowMyIP.com can give you a pretty good idea of what people can see about you (in fact, click the link to find out what you're leaking as you read this). If bloggers genuinely want to stay anonymous, at the very least, says Salam, they need to avoid posting personal pictures that might lead back to them, comments that might identify their workplace, and writing in a way that invites charges of libel.

There are plenty of examples of bloggers suffering from leaking privacy. One Iraqi blogger didn’t get into trouble for what he had written on his blog, but was picked up by the police after they read the comments under his posts… Another blogger writing about a political scandal in the face of a press blackout, was gagged by his Ministry of Information. After international pressure, he was allowed to write again, but only after he agreed to delete the offending posts. In the process, a whole group of his fellow bloggers were taught how to bypass censors.

Free and simple tools to help more bloggers do this are readily available. Salam suggests using TOR and proxies to conceal your work and home IP address. This helps bloggers to conceal their identity not just for what they post, but where they comment too. TOR is a relatively painless install, just download the installer, double-click the file, and it’s added to your browser, from where you can turn it on and off. Here’s an explanation of how it works. Privoxy works well as an additional layer of protection to TOR. It stops sites extracting information about you, and allows users to choose what to show and what to hide. Priyanka, a local blogger, suggests HTTP Tunnel, although this might be one for the more advanced user.

Ethan rounds up by reiterating that GV will soon have someone employed to do the advocacy on this exact issue, and part of their remit will be to develop guides on how to get around censorship.

And that meaty session took us through to the end of the day…

Now in Egypt, bloggers have struck a blow against police torture, by publicising videos shot by police officers of their colleagues beating suspects, and of police cadets receiving training. Add to this articles in the independent press and protests by civil society organisations, what's fast becoming a national campaign is gathering momentum.

Demagh Mak and Wael Abbas writing in Arabic, and others writing in English, such as Hossam e-Hamalawy, have consistently sought out and brought to light videos of incidents of police brutality on their blogs over the past few months. It's videos like this one - uploaded by Wael Abbas - that appear to be shifting the debate:

As reported by Hossam el-Hamalawy, an investigation has been launched into the conduct of the officer shown slapping the suspect in the above video, although it has now emerged that the officer in question has not yet been suspended from duty.

The brutality of Egypt's police is not a new story - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights have regularly documented and condemned police brutality in briefings and reports.

But sustained pressure from the bloggers, and the publication of an investigative piece into the police torture video in the independent Egyptian weekly newspaper, El-Fagr, have forced the story into the mainstream. On 27th November 2006, El-Fagr published an expose on violence against suspects in the country's police stations, identifying the officers in the video above, and describing a second, much more brutal video.

That second video (which I won't show here) shows a group of officers torturing a suspect - handcuffed, stripped from the waist down, and on the ground - by inserting a stick into his anus. Now Wael Abdel Fattah, the journalist who wrote the 27th November piece in El-Fagr, has published the names of the officers who carried out the torture, and tracked down and interviewed the victim, a bus driver. Sharqawi and Hossam el-Hamalawy cover the story and relay the victim's account of how he came to be arrested, and of the horrific acts of torture perpetrated by the police. Both bloggers publish the victim's name, which, although it's in the public domain in El-Fagr, has caused debate, with one blogger, Elijah Zarwan, wondering at The Skeptic, whether this was the right thing to do.

With Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood) now alleging police torture of one of its activists, and lawyers threatening a national strike in protest against police harassment, the anti-torture campaign in Egypt is growing in confidence and pace.

One YouTube user has now posted a video tribute to the bloggers here (3′42):

If bloggers like Wael Abbas, Demagh Mak, Misr el-Horra can continue to cover and make unignorable the stories that the traditional media find harder to publish, as with the Eid sexual harassment incidents, then it may open the door for the media to enter the debate - which might finally make Egypt's Interior Ministry take the problem seriously.

Backing up to China late last month, students at one technical college in East China's Jiangxi province found out from a television show that they wouldn't be getting the four-year university diplomas they had been promised, and some started rioting. There was bloggage here, here and camera footage posted here, but the story didn't hit YouTube until a few days later. Video clips of the two thousand-strong team of police and soldiers arriving at the school, moving in, inspecting dorms, chasing students and attacking them here: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.

To give you a taste, here's video number 7, showing the police dispersing protesters:

While we're on the subject of China and video, you might remember this video (shot by a Romanian TV cameraman) of a Tibetan pilgrim being shot dead by a Chinese police unit at Nangpa La Pass on China's border with Nepal:

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Human Rights Watch, which called for an independent investigation into the killing, has now released interviews with two survivors.

In the meantime, the Chinese government has got its own video plans - it's going to install video cameras in every Beijing internet cafe in an effort to “stop spam”.

What shall we do to face challenges of discrimination, extremism and religious fanaticism?

It's a vexing question - and one to which women back home in Egypt would have a very specific answer: stop ignoring violence against women even when it's become an international scandal thanks to citizen video and the internet.

In her speech, Mrs Mubarak failed to make even a passing reference to what had happened to tens of women in her home city of Cairo just a couple of weeks before. A wave of attacks on women in downtown Cairo erupted on the Muslim feast day of Eid Al Fitr, October 24th 2006, when large groups of men attacked several women in the street, as Manal and Alaa's bit bucket relates. But this wasn't a one-off - in January 2006, on Eid al Adha, film-maker Sherif Sadek was back in Cairo, when he heard a commotion on the street outside his downtown apartment. Sherif grabbed his camera and leaned out the window to film the video presented below.

Synopsis

Initially it's a little difficult to tell what is going on in the video - there are crowds in the middle of the street, which looks unusual - but after about 25 seconds, you will see two or three men leading four or five girls down the street past the building from which Sherif is filming. The crowd behind them is extremely large, a couple of hundred strong, and soon surrounds the girls (around 1′20). They then pass down a side-street, partially out of view, which gives Sherif time to spot a man in uniform - a police officer? - looking down the street at the commotion, who then gets back in his vehicle (1′50). Sections of the crowd then come running back round the corner, although it's not clear whether they have the girls with them or not.

The October attacks took a similar form. GV's Amira al Hussaini rounds up the best blog coverage of the October attacks, including Forsoothsayer's translation of blogger Wael Abbas's eye-witness account, and Mechanical Crowds' attempt to pull together the key facts.

Most strikingly, one of the victims of the Eid al Fitr attacks seems to have found a voice through the medium of blogging. Wounded Girl From Cairo appears to be by one of the women attacked on Eid al Fitr, and her description of her ordeal is required reading.

Official media remain silent in “Black Hole of the Internet”

In most countries this would dominate the national media for days, but much of Egypt's official and semi-official media remained conspicuously silent for many days after the events of Eid al Fitr. These stories would probably have died but for Egyptian bloggers such as Wael Abbas, Arabist, 3arabawy and Sandmonkey, who wrote both in Arabic and in English, publicising the video of the incident. Even as international attention grew, Egyptian media maintained their silence, only broken by government-aligned magazine Rose al Yousef, which attacked Wael Abbas for besmirching Egypt's name. The government eventually responded, saying that these events could not have occurred, since there had been no reports of crimes of that kind. In a society where, activists say, women are forced to take the blame for attacks on them, and where police do not take such reports of sexual harassment seriously, is it so surprising that there were no reports of harassment crimes on those nights?

Egypt is listed by Reporters Sans Frontieres as one of the 13 Enemies of the Internet, a Black Hole of information, yet, since the Eid al Fitr attacks, discussion and debate has erupted online about what could have caused this outburst of violence against women. On Al-Ahram Weekly, one commentator see this as part of a larger pattern of frustration at economic and social divisions in Egypt, while another speculates that young men see “women's bodies as the only battleground between Islam and the West.” Bloggers female and male have speculated on whether it's down to sexual frustration among young men. Sandmonkey even points to a TV interview with a man he says is a convicted rapist on Egypt's Death Row, in an attempt to “make some sense of the Eid attacks”.

Women face widespread sexual harassment

Whatever the complex causes of this violence, public sexual harassment is a human rights problem that, according to some female Egyptian bloggers, every woman in Egypt has experienced, but about which there is apparently little public debate.

The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights runs a campaign (Arabic here) to collect and document testimonies about sexual harassment of women and plans to take the evidence of widespread harassment to the government to get them to take the problem seriously. The ECWR campaign aims to raise awareness and debate in the media about harassment, which, if the blogs are anything to go by, affects thousands of women on the streets of Cairo and Egypt's other cities every single day.

How successful the ECWR's campaign has been or could be is unclear, but since the Eid al Fitr attacks, female bloggers such as Mademoiselle HH, Ghawayesh, Zeinobia, and MaryInEgypt, and many commenters on their blogs, have related their own experiences of sexual harassment, and even sexual abuse, to a wider world.

If blogs and citizen video are finally breaking the official and semi-official media's silence on this issue, that is to be welcomed, but the government's attitude may have some distance to travel.

Shutting down women's rights demonstrations at home…

Two demonstrations against sexual harassment in the street have been held in Cairo near the site of the October attacks, on 9th and 14th November. Blogger Mademoiselle HH attended the demonstration on 9th November, and “got home in one piece and did not have to use either my pepper spray or my telescope baton which was a relief”. Her trepidation was understandable, given how women activists and journalists were treated during a protest against a referendum in May 2006 - sexually assaulted by supporters of the ruling party as police looked on, without intervening. Two excellent photo slideshows of the 9th November protest are on Flickr, by Nora Younis and by Nasser Nouri, a Reuters photographer.

On 14th November Magda Ally, Director of the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, led a demonstration, at which speakers called for the government to take action against sexual harassment in public spaces. The 50 protestors from The Street Is Ours were surrounded by hundreds of police and security services personnel, and were pushed away from the Metro Cinema, where the Eid al Fitr attacks began, into the Excelsior Cafe, where they remained for an hour. Foreign journalists complained to Reporters Sans Frontieres that they were being prevented from reporting on the protest, in the course of which eight activists were detained.

Mohamed Gamal, a blogger who witnessed the Eid al Fitr attacks and attended the 14th November protest, sums up in The Daily Star what many Egyptians are thinking:

“It is the duty of our government to provide security to all Egyptian citizens,” he says. “The security forces are only protecting the regime instead of the Egyptian people.”

Attempts to foster the public debate continue in the face of intimidation. There's a meeting planned for 4th December at the American University in Cairo, AUC, at which speakers will debate a range of key issues emerging out of the Eid al Fitr attacks.

… while championing women's rights abroad

Recommendations for protecting and respecting the rights of Egypt's women have come regularly from many quarters - the Egypt Human Development Report (PDF), the National Council of Women, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. President Hosni Mubarak's government was cracking down on protests by its female citizens at the same time as the President's wife, Suzanne Mubarak, leading the Egyptian delegation at the Bahrain meeting of the Arab Women's Organisation, issued a challenge to Arab states and societies:

“The development of women cannot be separated from the development of Arab society as a whole. Development requires social, political and economic reform. The Arab world faces globalisation challenges and must be able to partner with developed countries. In order to meet these challenges, the role of women must be activated.”

But to Egypt's women, appealing in vain to Hosni Mubarak's government to tackle the problem of public sexual harassment and humiliation, his wife's challenge must seem like a distant dream.

For more background and reaction, take a look at Iranian group blog Iranian Truth's coverage of this story. There may be more coverage in the Persian-language blogosphere - Los Angeles has such a significant Iranian population that it's sometime humorously called Tehrangeles…

The UCLA incident is one of three videos of different incidents showing police in Los Angeles appearing to use excessive force when arresting suspects. All three videos were shot by ordinary citizens. The first video of the three emerged on YouTube, and showed an LAPD officer punching a handcuffed suspect repeatedly in the face after a foot chase. The second video, which has not appeared online yet, but was shown as evidence to the L.A. Times by the victim's lawyer on Monday 13th November, involved a homeless, handcuffed suspect being doused in pepper spray by the arresting officer. The officer has since been cleared of wrongdoing, citing the officer's restraint in the face of the victim's “belligerent, threatening and combative behavior”.

Emily at PicturePhoning.com provides links to other incidents involving police captured on video by citizens both in the USA and elsewhere. This seems to testify to a trend that can only grow as more and more people get access to videophones. Some groups are encouraging citizens to use their phones and cameras to record abuses by the police and to upload the clips to video-sharing sites. Sherman Austin, a founder of Cop Watch L.A., a police watchdog website, told a Yahoo! reporter that:

We urge everyone to have a camera on them at all times so if anything happens it can be documented. The concept of patrolling the police is something we are trying to push as a form of direct action.

Do you think this could be an effective form of scrutiny of the police?

The latest tragic example of this came on Friday 27th October, in the southern state of Oaxaca, with the shooting of Brad Will. Brad was in Oaxaca as a journalist for New York City Indymedia, trying to get stories out about the protests in Oaxaca (for up-to-date accounts and context of the crisis in Oaxaca, read my GV colleague David Sasaki's latest post). While filming skirmishes between paramilitaries and protestors in Santa Lucia on Friday afternoon, Brad was shot in the abdomen and neck, and died from his injuries, prompting the CPJ to call on the government to investigate Will's death. Now Indymedia has released the tape that was in Brad's video camera when he was shot.

It's a sixteen-minute video with English subtitles, and beware, the last minute (from 15′30) is very difficult to watch. Click the picture below to launch the Quicktime video (there's a YouTube version without subtitles here).

There's more footage at Mexican opposition blog Hoy PG, which points to a piece of unidentified news footage of Brad Will shortly after he was shot - not for the faint-hearted.

It's a moot point whether these are human rights videos per se, but Brad's tape in particular ends so shockingly, and depicts with such brutal suddenness the risks run by those determined to bring human rights stories to light, that it demands to be seen. But as one of the blogs David Sasaki quotes had it, there's a balance to be struck between outrage at the killing of Brad Will, and at the mounting number of local deaths and injuries.

Part of the reason that Brad was in Oaxaca was because there has been scant international attention paid to the growing crisis there. But while cases like Brad's - involving attacks on journalists and human rights activists from information-rich societies - gain huge amounts of traction in global media, in this case bringing Oaxaca to the top of the news agenda, the far greater number of local journalists and human rights activists affected in similar ways rarely receive the same level of coverage.

Think back to Alive In Baghdad, which brought us the Iraqi Torture story a few weeks back, and which finds that its correspondents can receive harassment and intimidation, if not worse. One correspondent, Marwan, was recently kidnapped by a militia group, possibly the Mahdi Army. Iraq is an extreme example, but it's by no means the only example.

At the end of the information chain, all over the world, there are people working to bring to light human rights abuses, oppression, torture, genocide. They are often working under difficult, extreme conditions, whether alone or in a group, undercover or in public, and often without a safety net. They might be journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, doctors, mothers. They often live in fear of repercussions, for themselves, or their families. Most of the time, it's these people - the locals - who are threatened, attacked and imprisoned, rather than foreign correspondents or international human rights workers. Brad Will was working with these people to tell their stories, and suffered a tragically similar fate.

Anyone already doing or supporting this kind of work should take note, and prepare accordingly. The WITNESS manual Video For Change has a chapter on safety and security (PDF, 1.28 MB), an essential read for anyone going into similar situations. The Rory Peck Trust, mentioned in the chapter, offers support to “the families of freelance newsgatherers killed whilst on assignment [and] to freelancers who are unable to continue their work due to severe injury, disablement or imprisonment”, and works in Mexico, as well as South Asia and the Middle East. Feel free to add other useful resources via the comments box.

As for Oaxaca, if you're interested in the background on the protests, in addition to David Sasaki's latest post, you could do worse than read previous updates:

David Sasaki on the original teachers' protest in June 2006 | Liza Sabater shows 8 videos from the June protests | October 10th: APPO says “Stay away from Oaxaca” | October 12th: More updates from Oaxaca-based bloggers | October 19th: More death in Oaxaca | October 27th: APPO locks down the city

I was researching a possible post about child-soldiers, when I found a video on a video-sharing site, said to be an interview with a teenage former child-soldier. In the video, the youth makes a number of allegations against the rebel organisation that he claims abducted him, sexually abused him, and sent him out on military operations - allegations broadly consistent with research conducted in his country by respected international human rights organisations.

But unusually for a video carrying this kind of allegation, the youth involved is identified by name, and in the accompanying text, by location. Human rights organisations (and media) would almost always advise protecting the identity of a minor in such a situation (see pages 16 and 17 in this document, for example) - whether by pixellating or obscuring his/her face, by shooting the video so that their face cannot be seen, e.g from behind or in silhouette, or possibly disguising their voice or re-voicing the audio. The photograph below shows how easy it is to pixellate an image to conceal someone's identity.

In the case of the video I had found, none of these protocols was followed. I wondered for quite a few days whether to post this video, which I felt brought out many important issues within a conflict where the recruitment of child-soldiers is common. It's horrifying testimony (and by no means rare), and the youth's story deserves to be heard - but the video raises a huge number of questions. Therefore I've decided against showing you the video itself.

The video is quite short, and in it the youth seems to be giving a prepared statement - there's no one asking questions for clarification, as there was by contrast in the Alive In Baghdad video a couple of weeks ago. The text accompanying the video states that the army found the boy after he escaped from his abductors, so I have assumed that the army shot the video.

Did the army explain to him clearly and adequately what the video was for, and how it would be used? At no point in the video or in the accompanying text is it made clear whether the boy in question has given his consent to the use of this video online. Was he given a choice of whether to take part, or of when, where and how it would be filmed? He mentions his parents in the video - were they asked for their consent? If we assume that his alleged abduction and subsequent sexual abuse caused him trauma, what support and follow-up was offered to him? How informed can his consent be considered?

As video has become an increasingly accessible technology, it has become easier to use video as a weapon in the information war. In the recent conflict in Lebanon, for example, the Israeli army, Hizbollah and citizens in Lebanon and in Israel used video to collect evidence of alleged atrocities and human rights violations. Whichever organisations collect and release footage and testimonies in conflict situations, they need to be able to answer questions about the origin of testimonies and footage satisfactorily - otherwise they run the risk of seeming exploitative, and perhaps unreliable.

So who released the video I found, and why did they decide not to protect the youth's identity?

I did a simple search for the youth's name and easily found the site where the original video is hosted. It's an official government site. I emailed the editor of the site to ask how they came by this video, and what guidelines they followed in uploading it. As yet I have not received a response to my questions, although I did get an acknowledgement of my email, with the following warning showing just how sensitive an issue this is, both for governments and other entities:

“If you are willing to undertake a research on Child Soldiering, let us say [this country] is the best place. But of course if you do so, you will surely get in to lot of troubles, including threats on your life.”

Troubles aside, it’s clear that in this particular case, the government concerned has clearly not followed the best-practice guidelines that should be employed by any organisation engaged in the welfare of former child-soldiers. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, a group of organisations working to promote a ban on the recruitment of children under the age of 18 into the armed forces, and to support the demobilisation, rehabilitation and reintegration of child-soldiers into their societies, offers links to international standards for this kind of work that should serve as a useful model.

I have written again to this government website outlining these concerns, and to the person who uploaded the video onto the video-sharing site, asking them to consider removing the video, until they can apply relevant guidelines to it, and I'll report back on what I hear.

The editor also said that

“It is a pity that none of the former government could use the technology to reveal the truth of our country to the world.”

Whatever the truth of that country's conflict, the government is accountable for the implementation of international human rights standards and international humanitarian law within their own borders - and on their own websites.

Governments contemplating the use of children's testimony in similar situations, should ensure that they protect children and respect human rights norms on posting sensitive content of this nature. That way they can avoid accusations of exploitation and propaganda.

If you're interested in reading more about children and armed conflict, here are a couple of excellent resources:

Choike has pulled together an array of reports, research, tools and articles on the issue. The Human Security Gateway pages on Children and Armed Conflict point to a huge range of reports. Page 113 in the Human Security Report covers child-soldiers. And the Watchlist's Country Reports on the use of child-soldiers give useful background on countries where this is a particular problem.

It includes footage of the Zimbabwean police and security intelligence services breaking up a peaceful demonstration by members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU) on September 13th. The police repeatedly beat the demonstrators, who are calling for the provision of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for the treatment of HIV, a minimum wage, and stabilisation in the prices of certain basic commodities. The bulk of the video involves interviews with the ZCTU members describing the events of the day, and the actions of the police. Ethan and Rachel Rawlins have kindly provided a transcript.

When news of the beatings originally leaked out, trades unions in other countries strongly condemned Robert Mugabe's hardline approach with legitimate and peaceful demonstrations. Last week a court dismissed the police report on the incident, and postponed the trial of the ZCTU protestors until October 17th, to give the Criminal Investigation Department time to conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations of police torture. When footage of the protests was smuggled out of Zimbabwe on DVD to South Africa this week, it prompted the head of one of South Africa's labour unions to say that she would give President Thabo Mbeki a copy of the DVD of the beatings in a meeting with him on Friday.

More as and when it emerges…

Click on the image to play video

The man in the video, referred to as “Majed”, talks of being arrested without charge by members of the Iraqi National Guard - now known as the New Iraqi Army - on 13 July 2006. The abuses he alleges include arbitrary detention, persistent beating and kicking, and whipping with an electric cable. He shows the camera the physical scars of his ordeal.

There are some questions about this case that the video interview doesn’t answer: did Majed make a complaint to any official authorities? If he did complain, did the Iraqi Security Forces deny the allegations or agree to investigate them? If the allegations are true, and the perpetrators are identified, is there any prospect that they will be punished? What about the US officer whom Majed refers to?

Nonetheless the alleged maltreatment described in the interview should be enough to make us all sit up and take notice.

Majed's testimony also gives an insight into the unpredictability and insecurity of life in Iraq, and particularly in Ramadi, which lies about an hour west of Baghdad and is reported to be one of the cities most beset by violence in post-Saddam Iraq. Brian Conley himself reported in June that large parts of Ramadi had become no-go areas. Later that month, the American military adopted a new tactic to try and take back control of the town. According to Majed, he was p