Bahrain, Tunisia Filtering Individual Twitter Pages

By BHRP

From Open Net Initiative’s Blog:

Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami Ben Gharbia (@ifikra), engineer @Ma7moud, and popular independent news source Nawaat (@nawaat) have been confirmed inaccessible, while in Bahrain @FreeBahrain was allegedly blocked on New Year’s Day, but has since become accessible.

Twitter is no stranger to being blocked: Both China and Iran have blocked the social networking/microblogging site in the past, and Saudi Arabia reportedly blocked two individual Twitter users’ pages in mid-2009. What is particularly interesting is that the governments of Tunisia and Bahrain have now demonstrated capability to block individual Twitter pages, thus silencing certain voices while still keeping a major communication platform open. Only time will tell if this is to become a trend globally.

A Saudi Gamble to See if Seeds of Change Will Grow

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | Andre Gustavo

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN | Thuwal Journal | New York Times | November 19, 2009

THUWAL, Saudi Arabia — The $12.5 billion question is this: Can Ben Frevert change Saudi Arabia?

Mr. Frevert is 22 years old. He is from Minneapolis. He had never set foot outside the United States until the day he flew to Saudi Arabia, where he became one of the first 400 graduate students to start classes at the sparkling new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on the Red Sea.

Mr. Frevert’s presence in this conservative kingdom represents a bold, pricey gamble by Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Abdullah, who allocated about $10 billion to endow the university. The stated goal is to take a country that consistently ranks among the poorest performing nations in education and, with all the brain power and high-tech equipment oil money can buy, build a world-class research center and university.

But there is a less discussed, yet no less consequential, objective: Can the university help this tradition-bound society become more open to new ideas? Can it help Saudi Arabia stamp out the kind of homegrown extremism that has spawned terrorism?

“We wouldn’t see change without having more things like this,” said Awadh al-Badi, a political scientist at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. “My thought is that they are trying to create a parallel system, that with time would take from others or balance what exists.”

The first 400 students and 74 faculty members began studies in September, even as construction crews labored to ready the multibillion-dollar campus. In time, the university will be a small town of 20,000, cloistered behind three layers of security, in isolated luxury on the banks of the Red Sea. There will be a yacht club, a golf course, a movie theater (there are no theaters allowed in the kingdom), a town center with fast food and shops — and there will be no rules against men and women working, studying and socializing together. On campus, women do not have to cover up and wear the baggy black gown, called an abaya, mandatory everywhere else in Saudi Arabia.

Because of this, the university is in a rush, hoping to establish itself as a source of pride — and perhaps revenue — before conservative forces beyond its walls try to rein it in.

Not long after the lavish opening ceremony with thousands of guests and dozens of heads of state, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, an official body appointed by the king, criticized the university. Most of the uproar focused on his condemnation of “mingling,” which he called “a great depravity.” But the critic, Sheik Saad al-Shathry, also called for the creation of a religious committee to ensure that the curriculum was consistent with Islam.

King Abdullah promptly, and with great effect, fired Sheik Shathry from the council. But at the university, some staff members and students said they were wondering how long they had before the king decided, for political expediency, that he must bow to the nation’s powerful religious forces.

And what happens when the king is gone? He is 85, and it appears that the next in line is not Crown Prince Sultan, who has been out of the country for months after cancer treatment, but the interior minister, Prince Naif, whose political base has been the nation’s conservative religious community.

“We have a leader who is willing to take the furthest step, but is it a policy of the country or just the leader?” asked Mr. Badi, the political scientist. “That issue is not resolved.”

And there is reason for concern. Even though the king fired Sheik Shathry, demonstrating his commitment to the university, his critics have not been silenced.

“Those voices calling for opening up are strange voices that do not represent public opinion,” said Soliman al-Duwaish, a Saudi preacher who said that the mingling of men and women at the university was a “blemish” on the king’s “dream.”

The idea of trying to foster change by building enclaves like the university is not new. Even in an absolute monarchy, public sensitivities and political alliances cannot be ignored. So the leadership tries to promote change from the outside in. The royal family has relied on the outside-in approach for years. It has two pan-Arab newspapers in London and a satellite television station, Al Arabiya, in Dubai. Not far from the university, crews are building the King Abdullah Economic City, which like the university will allow residents to live a more Western life — behind a cordon of security. And there is Aramco, the nation’s oil company, which operates almost as another state and has been credited with liberalizing and modernizing eastern Saudi Arabia.

But that, many people here say, is exactly the problem. Aramco changed its community but had little effect beyond that.

“You cannot bring change from the outside, you have to build it from within,” said Saleha M. Abedin, vice dean of a women’s college, Dar al-Hekma, in Jidda, 50 miles away. “All our programs and our curricula have sensitivity to local needs. It is not a totally foreign institution that doesn’t realize the reality on the ground.”

On campus at the university recently, Mr. Frevert, the student from Minneapolis, was in the library curled around his laptop. He had been there, he said, exactly two months and three days and had visited Jidda a few times. But when he had the chance to take time off, he said, he flew to Dubai.

His parents, he said “were a little freaked out” when he decided to study in Saudi Arabia. But he was enticed by the financial aid and the adventure. The kingdom paid for the last two years of his undergraduate education and, as it does for all its students, waived tuition, provided free room and board and gave him a stipend. Mr. Frevert said he was studying solid state optics, and while obligated to complete his master’s degree, he said he had already decided that he would be heading back to the United States for his Ph.D.

“My mother will sleep better, at last,” he wrote in a recent blog entry.

Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.

Arab Winds of Change

By BHRP

Flickr Creative Commons | FaceMePLS

Guardian | Brian Whitaker | October 22, 2009

“Women, bloggers and gays lead change in the Arab world.” That is the headline of an article by Octavia Nasr for CNN’s blog AC360°. “Several new lines are being drawn in the Middle East’s desert sand simultaneously,” she writes. “If they continue to be drawn at this rate longer and thicker, it’s hard to foresee any governments, censors or jails being able to stop them.”

Though Nasr sounds a bit overexcited about the existence of a feminist mag in Arabic in which “no one dares to advertise” and a few other developments which are interesting straws in the wind but scarcely signs of an imminent revolution, I think she has a point. If asked where change is likely to come from in the Arab countries, I would not put much faith in “reformist” politicians and opposition parties – they’re mostly no-hopers – but I would definitely put feminists, gay men, lesbians and bloggers very high on my list.

It’s important not to exaggerate what they are actually achieving at the moment, but let’s consider their potential as challengers of the status quo and drivers of change. The “Arab problem” is mostly perceived in terms of the regimes: the lack of democracy, authoritarian rulers who trample over people’s rights, and so on. That was the perception of the Bush administration in particular and it led to the simplistic idea that regime change was the solution.

It’s now very clear (as I explain in my new book, What’s Really Wrong With the Middle East) that this was a mistake. You can overthrow dictators, you can force countries to have elections and you can even insist on voting procedures that are reasonably fair, but that doesn’t bring freedom unless it forms part of a much bigger social transformation.

What has emerged in Iraq, for example, is not so much a model for the rest of the Middle East (as originally intended by Bush and the neocons) but a model of it. As the smoke drifts away, Iraq is emerging as a fairly typical Arab state with most of their usual negative characteristics – a government with authoritarian aspirations, institutionalised corruption and nepotism, pervasive social discrimination and a rentier economy that produces little besides oil – plus, for good measure, resurgent tribalism and sectarianism.

Arab regimes, by and large, are products of the societies they govern and it is often the society, as much as the government itself, that stands in the way of progress. In Kuwait, for instance, it was not the hereditary emir who resisted granting votes to women, but reactionary elements in the elected parliament – and there are plenty of similar examples.

Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who contributes regularly to Cif, summed it up pithily when he told me: “Egypt has a million Mubaraks.” In other words, the Mubarak way of doing things is not confined to the country’s president; it is found throughout Egyptian society, in business and in families too. The Arab family as traditionally conceived – patriarchal and authoritarian, suppressing individuality and imposing conformity, protecting its members so long as they comply with its wishes – is a microcosm of the Arab state.

Changing the power structures within families (and in many parts of the Arab world this is already happening) will also gradually change the way people view other power structures that replicate those of the traditional family, whether in schools and universities, the workplace, or in government. This is where women come in. In an Arab context, demanding the same rights as men is a first step towards change. Asserting their rights doesn’t mean that all women have to be activists for feminism. Even something as simple as going out to work – if enough people do it – can start to make a difference.

Contrary to popular opinion, most human rights abuses in the Arab countries are perpetrated by society rather than regimes. Yes, ordinary people are oppressed by their rulers, but they are also participants themselves in a system of oppression that includes systematic denial of rights on a grand scale.

In these highly stratified societies, people are discriminated for and against largely according to accidents of birth: by gender, by family, by tribe, by sect. Women, as the largest disadvantaged group, can play a major role in overcoming this and helping smaller disadvantaged groups to do the same. Once the equality principle is accepted for women it becomes easier to apply it to others.

Discrimination against gay people has only begun to be challenged in the Arab countries during the last few years. In a patriarchal system, where masculinity is highly prized, any deviation from the sexual “norms” and expected gender roles is not only subversive but is regarded as extremely threatening. The vigilante killings in Iraq are the nastiest example – not just of men who are thought to be gay, but others who simply don’t dress and behave “as men should”.

The third group driving change are the bloggers. A recent survey found 35,000 people blogging in Arabic, plus countless others who use Facebook, Twitter, etc, to communicate over the internet. There has been much debate about the extent to which this is reshaping public discourse and undermining censorship, but that is not really the main significance of blogging and the internet in the Middle East. The traditional “ideal” of an Arab society is one that is strictly ordered, where everyone knows their place and nobody speaks out of turn. Basically, you do what is required of you and no more. You keep your head down, don’t make waves and let those who supposedly know better get on with running things.

The point about bloggers is that they want none of that. They are engaged, they are alive, and they’ll speak out of turn as much as they like. Put all these elements together and you can see how, sooner or later, the edifice could start to crumble.

Using the Internet to Empower Women in Yemen

By Ebele Okobi-Harris | Director, Yahoo! BHRP

Rising Voices | EWAMT Workshop

I love stories about how the Internet and technology are being used as platforms for free expression around the world, so every once in a while, I’ll share them with you. I read a very interesting series of reports in Rising Voices about a really inspirational project.  Rising Voices is an outreach initiative of Global Voices, and their goal is to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the global conversation.  They do this by providing resources and funding to communities whose points of view are under-represented in global media.

In Yemen, Rising Voices is partnering with the Hand in Hand Initiative and Ghaida’a al-Absi to present  new media training courses for female politicians, activists, and human rights workers to diversify the Arabic-language blogosphere and to build an online network of Yemeni gender activists.

According to Rising Voices’ blogger Rezwan, the most recent workshop was held on October 15th, and participants blogged about a range of topics, from the spread of HIV/AIDS to poetry to the increase in the rate of drug addiction in Yemen.

To learn more about this fascinating project, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/projects/empowerment-of-women-activists-in-media-techniques-yemen/

For Rezwan’s story about the most recent workshop, including links to the participants’ blogs, go to: http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2009/10/20/ewamt-blogging-and-social-networking-energizes-women-in-yemen/.

Yahoo’s bold advance into the Middle East

By BHRP

By Douglas MacMillan

Businessweek, August 26, 2009

On the pages of Arabic-language Web site Bentelhalal, men and women from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa list personal details and describe the qualities they’re looking for in a mate, such as “polite,” “stylish,” and “God-fearing.” It’s reminiscent of an American dating site, except for one big twist: All of these singles are ready to marry.

Bentelhalal is one popular site within Maktoob, the large Jordanian Internet property Yahoo! (YHOO) said it was acquiring on Aug. 25 for what the Web site TechCrunch reported to be $85 million. It’s also a sign that Yahoo, which trades in tech news and celebrity gossip to assemble its audience at home, has entered a different world.

The purchase gives Yahoo command of one of the most visited online news portals in the Arab world, with business, finance, games, blogging, and other sites that reach an estimated 16.5 million people. Yahoo says it will translate its home page, e-mail, and instant messaging services into Arabic but plans to keep Maktoob’s local flavor mostly intact.

While rivals Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have waded cautiously into the emerging Middle East, Yahoo will be the first major Internet company from the West to run a full online content business in the region. How the company navigates the cultural and legal norms of the Arab world will be watched closely by competitors back home. So will its approach to Internet censorship.

Maktoob: Supported by Online Ads

The relatively tiny market for online ads in Arab countries has companies stepping carefully into the market. Microsoft partners with an Egyptian ISP for its MSN Arabia site, and Google offers an Arabic-language version of its search engine. But neither has entered the Middle East with as much conviction as Yahoo. “Many of the emerging markets are very similar. You have nascent penetration of online users and ad dollars,” says Keith Nilsson, Yahoo’s senior vice-president for emerging markets. “The Middle East is unique because you have a contiguous language which a very large population speaks—one of the reasons we were interested in this acquisition.”

The market for online advertising and transactions in the Middle East may be tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but experts say the potential is huge. Maktoob is largely supported by online ads, which are expected to make up a $142 million market among Arabic-speaking countries by 2011, according to Dubai-based Madar Research.

“The Arab citizen is hungry for local content in their local language, and this is something that has enormous potential” for Internet companies, says Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Paris business school INSEAD. Dutta says the Middle East has improved its technology competitiveness faster than any region in the world over the past five years, according to a study he conducted with researchers from the World Economic Forum. Technology companies that include Cisco Systems (CSCO) and SAP (SAP) are seeing fast growth in the region, and Cisco has been investing aggressively there.

Yahoo sees its success in the region dependent on catering to local markets. “We have to have a team in place that understands the nuances between each country,” says Nilsson. While Maktoob currently has a sales force in five countries, Nilsson says the plan is to develop local sales forces in all countries the site reaches.

“Political Filtering” in the Region

As it expands to the Middle East, Yahoo is taking pains to avoid the kinds of government complications it has encountered in Asia. In 2004 the company was criticized for providing information to the Chinese government that critics say led to a 10-year prison sentence for journalist Shi Tao. Since then, Yahoo has helped form the Global Network Initiative, a symposium of Web companies and advocacy groups that share advice about dealing with foreign governmental requests. So far, the efforts appear to be paying off in Vietnam, where the company is expanding despite government restrictions on blogging and other online activities.

The Arab world will be another test. A March report from Paris-based Reporters Without Borders listed a number of regional states—including Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—on its annual list of countries it considers “enemies” of the Internet for jailing bloggers and otherwise preventing free speech on the Web. “Political filtering is strong in the region,” says Rob Faris, research director for Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Yahoo says it plans to abide by local laws while operating Maktoob but will also protect users’ freedom of speech. Yahoo Deputy General Counsel Michael Samway says when the company was performing its due diligence, it studied “the potential intersection points with human-rights challenges.”

One cautionary measure was already in place: Maktoob keeps its users’ private information stored on servers “outside the region,” which would prevent them from being subject to local governments’ demands.