The growing censorship in Sri Lanka

An order by Jayantha Wickramaratne, the Inspector General of Police in Sri Lanka and the same chowderhead who once said women could record themselves getting raped through mobile phones, to the Director General of Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to suspend the licenses of twelve websites exhibiting nude photographs is the first step in Sri Lanka’s post-war mono-cultural hegemony. In fact, this new mono-culture is far worse than one predominantly Sinhala-Buddhist. It is in form and spirit a prudish, self-serving, inauthentic variant expressed through a combination of paternalism and patriotism that effectively beguiles the ordinary voter.

The media notes the CID started the investigation into the pornographic sites following a written complaint lodged by the IGP. While this care and concern for Sri Lanka’s morals is quite touching, I fail to see why government (especially this government) should dictate what adults can view on the web, and what parents can determine is best suited for their children. In 1999 Australia tried to do much the same thing and it resulted in a huge public outcry against the rise of a nanny state. Unlike however subservient Sri Lankan ISPs, Australian ISPs made the case that it was simply not technically or economically feasible to block “pornographic sites”. It is also clear that the bans on these websites are in fact illegal. As noted telecoms expert Prof. Rohan Samarajiva avers online,

“It will be helpful for all if the TRC states the section of the enabling Act under which it issues banning orders to private schools. I have raised this issue before and had no response. To ban something the authority doing the banning must have the power to do so. Under which section is the DGT issuing these bans? And does the DGT know that he does not actually have any powers, that they are all vested in the Commission? So under which section of the 1991 Act is the Commission issuing these orders?”

Not unlike its totalitarian conduct of war, the Rajapakse regime’s set of puritan values and its manic promotion trump all other voices, cultures, identities and modes of expression. Divaina, a Sinhala newspaper essentially a sewer for Government propaganda, even went as far as to claim that these twelve websites were an international conspiracy to tarnish the image of Sri Lanka. Honestly, shouldn’t the Police be far more concerned about the dozens of dormant investigations into acts of murderous violence against journalists since this President took office, extending even to post war Sri Lanka? Shouldn’t the media itself be far more interested in debating these bans by a government that ad nauseum, ad infinitum proves through policies and action that it is violently against the freedom of expression? Who are the Police to determine our moral standards when in survey after survey, they are identified as the most corrupt public institution in our country? Who is this President to tell us how to bring up our children? His own enjoy the privileges of a deified father at taxpayers expense. Our children do not. This asymmetry is rendered far more sharply in the case of children in IDP camps. Children here languish in dire conditions the President, for all his avowed love for children, would not put his own through. The real violence and danger to children today comes not from the web, but the policies and practices of Government.

So this hypocrisy? What is the test of morality the government uses? And if it in fact concerned with our moral, how does it explain the violence of Mervyn Silva, protected by and a close of the President? How does it explain the behaviour of Mervyn’s brutish son, who treats Colombo’s nightclubs as his fiefdom? How does it explain the murder of seventeen aid workers, execution style, in an area under government control three years ago? How does it explain the continuing incarceration of journalist Tissainayagam, under the most spurious reasons? How does it explain Keheliya Rambukwella threatening the Principal of Royal College and coercing him to revoke an order instituting disciplinary action against the Minister’s son for committing robbery and mischief in the school premises? How is it that the government is not equally concerned about media reports that our Foreign Minister spent over 4.5 million rupees on a birthday bash for his daughter in the US? How is it that a government that keeps children languishing in IDP camps go on to censor websites and cultural production, far less harmful than conditions of internment?

Are these harsh questions to ask of government? Yes and no harsher than the ignominy of living under a regime that is increasingly and insufferably Victorian. There is another danger. This increasing censorship can, and given the nature of this government will extend very easily to other content the regime finds inconvenient. Evgeny Morozov, the Foreign Policy magazine’s new Net Policy blog’s chief contributor wrote earlier this year that,

“…the Chinese are using the “pornography” excuse — a government-sanctioned effort to crack down on online vulgarity — to shut down several sites offering highly critical opinions on political and social issues in modern China (the most prominent of them was an edgy Chinese group blog, bullog.cn). Now, other countries are getting the hang of China’s tricks. News site Menassat reports on a recent “anti-porn” campaign in Bahrain being used to target a wide spectrum of groups, including those working on human rights issues. Even more disturbingly, the campaign has now spread to social media sites like Facebook.”

There is already mounting evidence to suggest that Sinhala extremism protected and promoted by the Rajapakse administration and the prudery of the NFF and JHU is extending its reach and influence online. It is ironic that all these blocks and bans on information and communications technologies (ICTs) and content on the web are taking place in the Year of English and IT. When I interviewed recently the Minister of Minister of Science and Technology, he did not even know of any initiative to promote the use of mobiles as devices to deliver government services, and importantly, to use them to refashion government to become more responsive to the needs of citizens. Susil Premajayantha, the Minister of Education, recently demonstrated his own ignorance when he made suicide into a monocausal phenomenon and attributed it to a mobile phone. He then went on to ban mobile phones from schools. It was reported in the media that the President had mentioned that teachers must also be banned from carrying mobiles to schools. There is now a ban on adult movies and a ban on showing alcohol and cigarette consumption in tele-visual broadcast media, including film. Websites continue to be blocked by government, and there are disturbing signs that certain progressive websites in Sinhala are increasingly falling prey to prudish campaigns to censor their content.

Ignorance mixed with sententiousness and expressed through the argot of self-styled patriots is a bad recipe for good governance. It is based on a model of cultural domination, not diversity and tolerance. The dominant culture allows others to form and exist at its behest, and the frame is never so wide or porous as to allow free expression. This new morality suggested by the Rajapakse regime, that countenances Sri Lankan icons like Joe Abeywickrema blurred on-screen for smoking in scenes from classic Sinhala cinema, is as retrogressive as it is dangerous. It is now extending online, without any check from the law, civil society or the traditional media. By bullying us into accepting without question what is only defined by the Rajapakse’s as authentic, Sri Lankan and moral, we lose out on precisely what we want to see established, an identity able to define and constantly redefine itself as Sri Lankan, influenced by our own rich culture and traditions as well as our location in the world and connections to it, physical, religious, cultural and virtual. Ultimately, this imposed morality is absurd, for its basis is to assume that good parenting requires the intrusive intervention of the President. For those who feel this is fine, and that censorship, bans and blocks are the future, it would be useful to also redefine the official name of our country.

A censorious country can never be a democratic republic.

Published in Montage, August 2009.

Communicating for Peace

Communicating for Peace

Growing up in conflict does one of two things – it teaches you the limitations of violence to engender sustainable social change, or it compels you to enter the cycle of violence itself. Especially when the well-springs of hope have run dry, violence is often perceived to be an effective way to change the order of things. The internal logic of martyrdom and suicide terrorism may be inexplicable to those outside terrains of hopelessness, but easier to understand when juxtaposed against the backdrop of a perceived lack of alternatives and indoctrination. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), now often touted as a panacea for socio-economic development and part of the Western donor orthodoxy, fail to make any sense for those enmeshed in violent conflict, those touched by its long tail and those who fall outside our circumscribed vision or oftentimes, our urbane westernised bias.

This is why I have proposed a deep and meaningful exploration into the way ICT can help engender peace and conflict transformation. I am interested in how (and indeed, if) democracy and peace can be strengthened in countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Colombia, Timor Leste using ICT – how they could be made more resilient to the mercurial actions and policies of political leaders and non-state actors that often sow the seeds for more conflict, how they could give voice to the voiceless and marginalised, how they could strengthen the participation of youth, children and empower women in reconciliation.

Many mature theories of conflict transformation and peacebuilding were developed before the information age. Many of today’s leading peace theorists and practitioners are those who grew up in a generation markedly different from that which exists today, in terms of their access to information technology. Today’s world of connectivity enables the flow of information and knowledge in ways unimaginable even a few years ago. No longer are news services cut off from the frontlines of conflict. Citizens with mobile phones are the new reporters of our information age. The web is ubiquitous and multi-lingual. I was interested in how these developments could engender a radical revision in the way peace processes are designed and implemented.

The evolution, practice and theory of mediation in particular need to take note of developments in technology. As a non-expert outsider sans a legal background yet partial to the key tenets of Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), I have proposed for the past couple of years a multi-disciplinary approach to the development of systems to support online negotiation and mediation. These proposals have attempted to expand the interest of ODR to encompass the challenges of designing, deploying and training personnel to use systems in support of peacebuilding and peace negotiations. It is not an easy feat.

The world over, so-called ICT4D initiatives have demonstrably failed to foster justice, equitable distribution of resources and social transformation in countries with scant regard for human rights. In many regions, the lack of emphasis on the socio-political and economic foundations of violent conflict has led to assumptions in the conduct of mediation practices and the development of online systems that exacerbate conflict. We need to look at peacebuilding in all ICT initiatives, not as a passive after-thought, but as an active, committed and sustained attempt to flesh out the complex interplay between conflict transformation, human rights, peace, development and justice. This was recognised at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in November 2005 in Tunis. Paragraph 36 of the Tunis Commitment states that:

“We value the potential of ICTs to promote peace and to prevent conflict which, inter alia, negatively affects achieving development goals. ICTs can be used for identifying conflict situations through early warning systems preventing conflicts, promoting their peaceful resolution, supporting humanitarian action, including protection of civilians in armed conflicts, facilitating peacekeeping missions, and assisting post conflict peace-building and reconstruction.”

The recognition at a global policy level of the importance of ICT in engendering peace is a significant boost ICT4Peace, as was the publication of a report titled The Role of ICT in Preventing, Responding to and Recovering from Conflict by the UN ICT Task Force.

However, sustainable social transformation in the midst of violence is a difficult process to envision, harder implementing, even harder to sustain. Cognisant of these challenges and yet recognising the need to address them head on, in 2003 I helped form a small organisation based in Sri Lanka, called InfoShare, to help further the practice and theory of some of the ideas I had for the use of ICT in peace processes. Our work has no historical precedent. I have since conducted extensive and path-breaking research into the possibilities of using ICT for all aspects of peacebuilding, including ODR, the development of One-Text negotiations platform, human rights violations mapping, conflict early warning and prevention and the use of mobile phones for social activism. However, to paraphrase the brilliant American poet Robert Frost, I have miles to go before I sleep. Today, we are barely scratching the surface of what is possible in the use of technology to resolve some of humanity’s most disturbing and pressing problems – such as the continuing genocide in Darfur.

The future of ICT4Peace, however, is pegged to the availability of funding to explore ways that technology can best help communities transform violent conflict. To date, donors, international agencies and local bodies are reluctant, at best, to approach ICT4Peace initiatives. This needs to change, and soon.

Precisely because of its growing importance and global recognition, ICT4Peace is no longer the domain of geeks or early visionaries. From Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), inter-cultural mediation, and virtual secure spaces for international collaboration to decision support systems in peace negotiations and advanced information visualisation, ICT4Peace spans a gamut of technologies, theories and communities of practice. So much of ICT these days is about the use of big words. The core vision and raison d’etre of ICT4Peace however is quite simple.

It exists to generate hope, where little or none exists.

And that’s something truly worth supporting, for all our futures.

Technorati Tags: Conflict and Peace, ICT, ICT4Peace, Journalism and Media, Peacebuilding, Sri Lanka

Citizen Journalism: Bane or boon?

Citizen Journalism: Bane or boon?

Despite our best efforts, information available to citizens at times of crises – man-made or natural – is often inadequate, biased, incorrect and late. Studies show that the problem lies not with technology (or lack thereof), but with the culture of information sharing. Technology, while it can help address problems of access, dissemination and archival, cannot in and of itself overcome the oftentimes parochial interests of those who control it. Governments, humanitarian agencies, non-governmental institutions, civil society organisations and influential individuals are at once victims and perpetrators of this information secrecy. In controlling the flow of information – what gets out where, to whom, how and when – these stakeholders, often with the best of intentions but blithely unaware of the larger ripple effects & unintended consequences of their decisions, directly influence relief & aid work, humanitarian support and conflict transformation initiatives. Regrettably, information exchange best practices and international standards, though prevalent on paper and touted in academic studies, are still the exception on the ground. With no real incentive to change their ham-fisted approach to information sharing and its corollaries – collaboration and coordination – key stakeholders in charge of relief and peacebuilding continue to blame each other for the problems that bedevil effective, sustainable, timely and participatory post-disaster and conflict transformation initiatives. Obviously lost in this zero sum exchange is the fact that collectively, these stakeholders are themselves responsible for much that is wrong with present day responses to humanitarian crises in particular, and long term conflict transformation initiatives (that share similar characteristics of short term relief and aid efforts but are often far more multifarious) in general.

Publications such as this tome seek to bridge this divide between policy and practice. Necessarily, doing so requires an emphasis on a rights-based approach to information sharing. Seeing humanitarian relief and conflict transformation from a rights perspective affords a unique range of perspectives that give primacy to the needs and aspiration of citizens, as opposed to the provincial perspectives of key stakeholders including governments. We are acutely aware of the significant challenges of approaching disaster management & response through such a rights framework. Protracted conflict, especially complex political emergencies and deep-seated ethnic and communal violence, pose significant challenges to communication rights. Unimpeded communication and the free flow of information are cornerstones of any successful post-disaster relief framework and a peace process. However, the urgency of war usually augments the repression of mainstream print & electronic media. Censorship and threats to journalists invariably affect how news & information is selected, gathered, published and stored. Successive governments in Sri Lanka have grossly undermined the development of media responsive to citizen’s needs and aspirations.

Information, seen in this light, though a vital ingredient in a vibrant democracy, is often censored and restricted. Herein lies the shared challenge to both effective disaster response and peacebuilding – to secure and strengthen communications and the free-flow of information in the public interest. It is argued here that the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web (seen here primarily as networks that facilitate communication) augments the potential for such progressive and pervasive communications architectures.

Citizens as watchdogs of democracy take a new twist with new media and the increasing accessibility of the web and Internet. Using technologies such as mobile phones that over the past five to ten years have taken root in every tier of society even in Sri Lanka, citizens are increasingly “speaking” out against the systemic failures of governance, and in support of rights. With new tools that help citizens create, consume, store and distribute information – such as SMS on mobile phones, podcasts and video editing on every PC, and the advent of blogs on the web – we are witnessing the democratisation of content production, and with it, the emergence of a new timbre of communications & media more attuned to needs and aspirations of all citizens. Multi-million rupee studios and equipment worth hundreds of thousands of rupees, available only to large corporations and media organisations, have hitherto packaged the news & information we consume. Today, even illiterate citizens living below the poverty line can record for posterity – for example through podcasts facilitated by NGOs – their ideas for pro-poor growth which often run counter to the equally reprehensible neo-conservative and neo-liberal notions of development. Text, audio and video production is now a standard feature in mobile devices including mobile phones, PC’s and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA’s). The web and Internet are accessible almost anywhere with the footprints of mobile telephony & wireless Internet nearly coast-to-coast. Accordingly, initiatives such as Witness that seek to document gross human rights violations and strengthen the Rule of Law and democracy now have new human rights monitors in their service – ordinary citizens, using ordinary devices to record extra-ordinary events .

Much has already been written on the potential of new technologies, ICT, new media and the latest buzzword, citizen journalism. Citizen journalism is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information” according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information . As is noted in this report “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.” However, we are acutely aware of the limits of technology, both in the design of and access to the technology itself, and in the manner of they are used in countries with a growing democratic deficit, such as Sri Lanka. As I note in an article published recently on the import of citizen journalism on anti-terrorism measures :

Often, this new age of citizen journalism lacks the grammar of age-old diplomacy and socio-political norms – the conversation is raw, visceral, impatient, irreverent, pithy, provocative. In Sri Lanka, it is a conversation that’s largely still in English, and also limited to urban centres.

The potential of citizen journalism, however, is its ability to provide a forum for all citizens – male and female, of all ethnicities, castes, classes and religions – to express themselves freely, society will better accommodate ideas and measures that engender peace.

As we have witnessed in countries such as the Philippines, information in the hands of a public equipped with mobile phones can be a powerful democratic imperative that brings down an authoritarian and corrupt governments . We also note stories, even from China – notorious for its media and Internet censorship – of mobiles used to warn populations of disasters, hold mass demonstrations organised via SMS, and even the emergence of m-government. However, success stories such as this run the risk of romanticising the gravity of problems that bedevil post-conflict democratic reform. The deep-rooted power of politicians in rigid social structures, casteism, a clientelist political architecture, rampant nepotism and corruption, among others, temper the progressive social transformation promised by the New Media and Citizen Journalism in particular. Scalability is another problem – projects that show great potential when funded often join a graveyard of well-intentioned initiatives when the funding dries up. Countries such as Sri Lanka are still bedevilled by the lack of standards based swabhasha data input frameworks that in turn strangle the awareness and growth of new media content, such as blogs, in Sinhala and Tamil. As a result, contrary to its moniker, citizen journalism today shows an urban bias, is mediated in English and, inescapably, elite. This will need to change and soon.

There are other significant challenges, not unique to citizen journalism and new media, but certainly augmented by the very nature of the media that they rest on. In a conversation with the author, Dan Gillmor, Director of the Centre for Citizen Media based in the US and widely regarding as a leading expert in Citizen Journalism averred, “… we must also be careful that citizen media that is irresponsible, unprofessional, partial and inaccurate – does not hinder the growth of free voices on the web.” The early experience with citizen journalism in Sri Lanka clearly brings out the tendency for slander, bitter personal invective and polemics that are strengthened in part because of the conventions of anonymity that citizen journalism as it exists today rests on. And as an article by Julien Pain, Head of the Internet Freedom desk at Reporters Sans Frontiers, suggests , the very technologies of liberation and democracy such as those which power citizen journalism are those now used by dictatorships and repressive regimes to clamp down even more on citizens.

Clearly however, new media and citizen journalism are emerging as powerful new ways through which citizens – even victims of protracted conflict, or of natural disasters – can access and create content that sheds light on their lives their viewpoints and their ideas. The litmus test for new media and citizen journalism, in the service of strengthening democracy and securing conflict transformation, is to mirror the same professional ethics and standards that underpin professional journalism in the content produced by citizens. The central challenge, and a very difficult one at that, is celebrating the personal, insider-partial, raw perspectives of citizens and balancing this commentary and opinion with context and analysis . The challenge to established print and electronic media today is quite simply to respond to the growing “impertinence” of citizens keen to know more than what reporters have traditionally handed out to them as news & information.

This article continually referred to information as a public good, as a human right, and as a central pillar of a vibrant democracy. Information in the hands of citizens continues to instil fear and loathing in the minds of those who wish to manufacture public opinion to their benefit by the careful selection and publication of information. New media and citizen journalism don’t, in and of themselves, promise a stronger democracy. Used for advocating the rights of all citizens and especially those affected by disasters, however, these technologies create new ways for citizens to be heard, governments to be held accountable and the State to answer to failures of governance. Ordinary citizens, trained journalists, civil rights activists, youth and more are increasingly using technology, though devices such as mobile phones, to support powerful frameworks of transparency and accountability that citizens can use to hold decision makers responsible for their action and indeed, inaction.

It’s an irreversible trend. Our challenge is to temper the euphoria and ensure the best of new media and citizen journalism is used to alleviate the continuing suffering of communities embroiled in conflict, or faced with the sudden wrath of nature.

Technorati Tags: Conflict and Peace, ICT, ICT4Peace, Peacebuilding, Sri Lanka