Arresting Bloggers Who Speak Truth to Lies

You might remember my reports on the monk’s, nun’s and Burmese people’s protests in September of last year, how my contacts in Yangon (Rangoon) dried up within days as cpu’s were confiscated, cell phones smashed, communications wires cut, and various deeply good souls arrested, many children, men, women beaten, many murdered by Than Shwe’s evil orders. It was agony and remains so, not to know the fates of those specific contacts/blogger/photographers who were bravely and desperately funneling information and photos out of Burma to literally anyone who would receive them.

I pray for highly endangered bloggers and journalists and radio and broadcast press people everyday. But after such brutal crackdowns as the smug dictator Shwe’s in Burma, for instance, I dont know the storytellers’ whereabouts, if I should pray for them on earth, or perhaps they have been killed and are in heaven. So I pray for them wherever they might be, that they be given all mercy possible, that they be made invisible at just the right moments, that they somehow know we know; that they can be assured that their courage work did not fall on stones.

I would like a monument to The Unknown Bloggers of the World. I would. I am deadly serious. Those who risked their lives to tell the story. Those who gave their lives to tell the story before they were cut down.

Here is more on the hugely disturbing free-form arresting and harming of bloggers, a practice that despite public knowlege, continues without effective intervention… In this report from University of Washington, a reported 64 bloggers arrested for publishing their views in 2003, to a 192 bloggers reported arrested in 2007, the numbers only increase. It is poignant to note that ‘reported’ numbers does not include those who are maimed, disappeared, murdered. Nor does it include, as the article states, those arrested in place just like Burma where the government gives the evil eye to anyone who asks after the welfare of any citizen.

From BBC

…A University of Washington annual report….

More than half of all the arrests since 2003 have been made in China, Egypt and Iran, said the report.

Citizens have faced arrest and jail for blogging about many different topics, said the World Information Access (WIA) report.

Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights or suppression of protests. They criticised public policies and took political figures to task.

The report said the rising number of arrests was testament to the “growing” political importance of blogging. It noted that arrests tended to increase during times of “political uncertainty”, such as around general elections or during large scale protests.

Jail time followed arrest for many bloggers, said the report, which found that the average prison sentence for blogging was 15 months. The longest sentence found by the WIA was eight years.

It acknowledged that the true number of bloggers arrested could be far higher than the total it found as, in some cases, it proved hard to verify if an arrest had taken place and on what grounds.

For instance, it said the Committee to Protect Bloggers has published information about 344 people arrested in Burma – many of whom are thought to be be bloggers – but the WIA could not verify all the reports.

It also noted that many nations, perhaps as many as 30, imposed technological restrictions on what people can do online. In nations such as China this made it difficult for people to use a blog as a means of protest.

The report pointed out that it is not just governments in the Middle East and East Asia that have taken steps against those publishing their opinions online. In the last four years, British, French, Canadian and American bloggers have also been arrested…

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h/t Helaine