Monday, January 24, 2005
The Blog will change the world
From today's LA Times... "Blogs are the only uncontrolled and totally free medium, so they have the potential to attract many people, even people who are apathetic." ~ Hossein Derakhshan, a 28-year-old IranianIran Attempts to Pull Plug on Web Dissidents
About 20 online journalists and bloggers have been jailed. Some say they were tortured and forced to publicly denounce their work.
By Megan K. Stack, Times Staff Writer
TEHRAN — The criminal seems younger than his 25 years. He is the quiet type, shy and lanky, peering solemnly through octagonal glasses.
He has no weapons, not in the traditional sense. His name is Hanif Mazroui, and the tools of his crime are a handful of ideas and skinny fingers flying over the keyboard. He is one of about 20 Iranian Web loggers and journalists who have been arrested and jailed in recent months.
Government prosecutors call Mazroui a violator of national security and an inciter of unrest. If you ask the nation's conservative mullahs, he's an acid eating away at the fabric of the Islamic revolution.
He has done time in solitary confinement, and reportedly weathered death threats from judiciary officials. Asked about his time in prison, Mazroui dropped his chin, studied his shoes and said, "I prefer not to talk about it."
Then, after a moment of awkward silence as he slumped at his father's side, he fished into the pocket of his peacoat, drew out a bundle of black cloth and handed it over. It was a frayed blindfold, cut from thick canvas, with a tiny triangular wedge sliced out for a nose.
He'd been forced to wear it in prison, he explained, and he'd smuggled the blindfold out with him as a keepsake.
"I just want to remember where I was," he said. "I'm grateful for my time in prison, because I realized how much we should pay for freedom, and that freedom can't be got easily. I'm a small drop of that."
After toiling for years to silence dissent within the Iranian republic, the mullahs have turned their war against free press to the last reserve of open political debate: the Internet.
Since the summer, Iran's Web loggers, or bloggers, and online journalists have been demonized as CIA collaborators, their work whitewashed from many Iranian computers with filters.
"They can't accept the free exchange of ideas and equality offered by the Internet," said Sayed Mustafa Taj-Zadeh, an advisor to reformist President Mohammad Khatami. "They had to crack down on it."
The Web logs hadn't been around for long. When they made their debut in Persian cyberspace in 2001, frustrated politicos hoped a new horizon had opened up. At last, repressed Iranians had found a space they could clutter up with words, ideas, flights of fancy.
The Internet was ubiquitous, anonymous. And for a short and glorious time, it was free from the censure of the mullahs.
In their first year, nearly 3,000 Persian blogs sprang to life ...
... "They suddenly felt that we were using the Internet as an alternative to the papers they'd shut down," said Hossein Derakhshan, a 28-year-old Iranian pioneer who took the groundbreaking step of publishing online instructions in Persian to teach Iranians how to post Web logs. He moved to Toronto five years ago with his wife, a Canadian citizen.
"Blogs are the only uncontrolled and totally free medium, so they have the potential to attract many people, even people who are apathetic."
The arrest of online journalists and bloggers began last fall. The writers say they were tortured and forced to publicly denounce their work. Even technicians who worked on Web pages have been imprisoned.
Read the full story here
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