Global Voices Advocacy » Yemen

The Second Decade of Middle East Internet

Tal Pavel — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:58:11 +0000

In its second decade in the Middle East, the Internet has been increasingly challenging many of the region's governments – specifically dictatorships that impose strict limitations on civil freedoms. It has brought about the formation of pressure groups for social and political change on FaceBook, allowed for real-time coverage of events through Twitter and YouTube and even hosted online campaigns in support of arrested bloggers.

The Internet reached the Middle East in the early 1990's, but its proliferation rate has really been booming since the turn of the millennia. During these years, Internet use in the Middle East (including Israel) grew by an astounding 1,648%, whereas the global average was just 380%. The penetration rate has reached 28% (higher than the global average of 26%). This is despite the fact that Internet users in the region constitute merely 3.3% of the world users. Interestingly, Iran and Syria boasted the highest rates of growth (12,780% and 11,783% respectively).

The Middle East, however, is quite diverse in this respect too; alongside the Gulf States, with a penetration rate of 50% or more, you find countries like Iraq and Yemen with just 1% penetration. The Internet and its social networks were certainly one of the most powerful influences on the Middle East in this decade, but not necessarily in terms of economic and commercial opportunities recognized by some governments in the region. The influence of Internet in the Middle East stems mostly from its very nature, namely, an immediate, wide-spread medium accessible to almost anyone through any mobile device, a means perfectly suited for information exchange by citizens under highly restrictive rule.

In its second decade in the Middle East, the Internet has been increasingly challenging many of the region's governments - dictatorships that impose strict limitations on civil freedoms. It has brought about the formation of pressure groups for social and political change on FaceBook, allowed for real-time coverage of events through Twitter and YouTube and even hosted online campaigns in support of arrested bloggers.

The recent pinnacle of this phenomenon was the presidential election in Iran in June 2009. The people of Iran have been known to crave information and communication for years - even since the time of Khomeini, who would spread his sermons throughout the country on audio tapes, and to this day, when satellite dishes adorn every rooftop in Teheran. All four presidential candidates employed the Internet vigorously, relying particularly on various social networks.

But the great power of the Internet in Iran and the stark defiance against governance it can harbor were fully revealed when the election results were made public. Hordes of people poured to the streets of Teheran and other cities in demonstrations of protest that were abetted online by Iranian bloggers and regular users who relayed the information to the world at large. Direct reports from the scene were posted on Twitter, hundreds of videos from the streets were uploaded to YouTube almost in real time, and a lot of images were uploaded to Flickr. This flow of information proved how strong the Internet can be in authoritarian countries and made known the aspirations of the Iranian public.

Hence, as far as I am concerned, the true hero of the decade is your run-of-the-mill Iranian Internet user – a user who has to cope with strict government constrictions, limiting laws, stern control, Internet police (in Iran and Syria), lack of adequate technological and communications infrastructure in certain places, and often deliberately high usage costs. The heroes are all those anonymous users and active bloggers who are willing to suffer the direst consequences, including incarceration and even execution.

The deeper the Internet penetrates our region, the wider information and criticism are spread and the call for change heard - and the bigger the problem that local regimes would be facing. Governments' interactions with their citizens will be altered. The Internet's role as soapbox for infringed sectors and suppressed voices in this part of the world will be enhanced, rendering it a spearhead of democratization processes.

This post by Tal Pavel has been published first in Hebrew.

Yemen: Editor of an opposition website kidnapped

Sami Ben Gharbia — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:05:18 +0000

On the night of Friday, September 18th, 2009, the Yemeni Editor of the opposition Socialist Party's website, Al Eshteraki, Mohammed al Maqaleh has been kidnapped in the capital Sana'a by security forces.

According to eyewitness reports cited by the International Federation of Journalists :

five gun wielding masked men in a minibus intercepted Mr. al Maqaleh's car on Taiz Street in Sana'a. They bundled him into another vehicle. In dozens of instances, plain clothes intelligence operatives driving vehicles with military plates have snatched journalists off the street who have then “disappeared” and often tortured.

Reports say that Mohammed al Maqaleh, has been abducted after writing about the humanitarian situation and the fighting in the northern province of Sa'ada between the army and Shia rebels.

The International Federation of Journalists (IJF) is calling for the release and safekeeping of the Abducted editor. A Facebook group has also been created in support of Mohammed al Maqaleh.

In May 2007, Yemen's Ministry of Telecommunications blocked access to Al Eshteraki website for its coverage of the armed clashes in Sa'ada province.

MENA: Introducing, “The Circumventer”

Eman AbdElRahman — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:42:30 +0000

Alexandra Sandels, from MENASSAT, writes her interview with Walid Al-Saqaf, a Sweden-based Yemeni Internet expert, regarding the launch of his new program Al-Kasir (means the circumventer in Arabic) - during a summit on blogging in Cairo which was entitled “Blogging for the Future“.
Al-Kasir, which is currently available in its Beta test version, is a new software aiming to circumvent web censorship in the Middle East and beyond, where it allows Internet users to access blocked websites.
You can also read Esra'a's post on Mideast Youth on why Al-Kasir is different from other similar tools, and how it’s beneficial to users in the Middle East.

Yemeni authorities prevents 6 newspapers from distribution

Walid Al-Saqaf — Mon, 04 May 2009 20:10:30 +0000

Fresh attacks on the press amidst growing protests in the south:

Yemeni authorities prevents 6 newspapers from distribution

Yemeni government ordered the confiscation of six national newspapers, whose copies were pulled from the news stands and markets across the country yesterday alleging their role in promoting secessionism and anti-unity rhetoric. The move, according to observers, is unprecedented in recent Yemeni history and marks a serious downturn in the country's level of press freedom, which had already suffered several blows in the recent past.

The six weeklies that were prevented from distribution are Al-Masdar, Al-Watani, Al-Diyar, Al-Nida, Al-Sharei and Al-Mustakilla are known to regularly publish critical articles targeting the authorities including recent articles condemning government actions against anti-government demonstrations that took place in the end of last month in the south of the country.

The government's measure comes on the heels of another incident in which a government appointed officer burnt and confiscated thousands of copies of Al-Ayyam, which is among Yemen's most widely-read dailies. Al-Ayyam is based in the southern city of Aden and is considered among the most active in reporting about the anti-government southern movement.

According to NewsYemen, the authorities pledged to continue to confiscate newspapers that ‘use the rhetoric secessionism and target national unity'.

It is worth noting that an ongoing peaceful movement in the southern governorates of Yemen have gained momentum over the past months and have increasingly become more visible in the national and international media, triggering the authorities to accuse the media of targeting the country's national interests.

Among the media organizations that covered the protests, which sometimes turned violence, was Al-Jazeera Satellite TV channel. The popular Doha-based channel recently dedicated several segments to discuss the rising tensions between citizens in southern states and the central government led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who last year celebrated thirty years in power.

Increasingly, many southern leaders are calling for ending unity that was established between former South and North Yemen in 1990 and reverting back to the pre-unity status in two independent countries. In their calls for ‘independence from occupation by the Yemen Arab Republic', they sight injustices occurring to the people of the south since a 3-month civil war that erupted in 1994 and that ended with the victory of the Saleh-led army that defeated the army led by Ali Salem Al-Bidh, who, prior to unity, was the President of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.

In 1994, Al-Bidh declared unilaterally the end of the –at the time- four-year old unity due to unfulfilled obligations on the part of President Saleh as per the regulations set forth for unity to be established. He currently lives in the neighboring Sultanate of Oman, where he was accepted for political asylum.

The confiscation of the six newspapers adds to an already bleak record for Yemen's freedom of the press. The Yemeni government had continuously been accused by human rights activists and freedom of expression advocates in Yemen and abroad of constant and worrying patterns of suppression against the press, particularly during times of crises and elections. The authorities have often prosecuted, beaten, kidnapped, and imprisoned journalists. They also closed down newspapers with court orders and sometimes prevented printing of others without court orders. The government also systematically targets online news sources and filters them through the government-operated internet service providing companies. Journalists, news website administrators and bloggers were also occasionally harassed and threatened. Journalists complain that attacks on the press are encouraged by the government's lack of action to prosecute the attackers, which indicates a state of impunity.

Among the many international organizations concerned about the media situation in Yemen is the New York-Based Committee to Protect Journalists, which has steadily and repeatedly called upon the regime to release its grip on freedom of expression in the country. In a recent report on Yemen, the CPJ ‘faulted Yemen for perpetuating a culture of impunity in attacks on the press.' (See: http://cpj.org/2009/02/attacks-on-the-press-in-2008-yemen.php) CPJ and other organizations continue to call upon the regime in Yemen to respect freedom of expression and the rule of law and stop attacking the press and bring attackers to justice.

So far, the authorities remain unresponsive to such calls.

Yemeni online journalist sends urgent appeal after death threats and hacking of his website

Walid Al-Saqaf — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:24:26 +0000

Mohamed Al-Jabali, the editor of Akhbaralasr news website is the latest casualty in a wave of intimidations targeting bloggers and online journalists in Yemen. In a statement made yesterday, Al-Jabali appealed for protection after receiving death threats in the capital Sanaa from the regime's security apparatus. This comes just after his website was also hacked. The hackers, whom Al-Jabali said are elements of the regime, published a sarcastic entry on the front page with a picture of a monkey and an insult on the owner of the website Al-Jabali.

Photo caption: An entry was placed on the front page of the hacked website entitled “The picture of the monkey Mohamed Al-Jabali”

Al-Jabali said the regime was angered by his online reports on peaceful anti-government political activities in the Tihama region in the West of the country. The website had articles critical of the regime's handling of the economy and a recent article highlighted a call to end the ‘national investment mafias' in the country.

In an email message, Al-Jabali said he feared for his life after being threatened near Al-Tahrir Square in the city center and accused a senior advisor of the President of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh for supporting those activities against him and his website:

I'm writing to you while feeling threatened by imprisonment… I appeal to you to help protect my life as I feel I'm in danger.” Al-Jabali said in an email statement today.

It is worth noting that Al-Jabali's case is not the first of its kind in Yemen. Several other online journalists and bloggers have also been exposed to similar acts of intimidation and the attackers remain at large. The journalist community had often expressed grave concerns about increasing attacks in number and intensity by the country's security apparatus to curb anti-regime writings.

Despite many appeals by the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate and international advocacy organizations such as the Committee to Protect Journalists, Article 19, and others, attacks against journalists including online journalists remained on the rise. It is widely believed that websites that contained content critical of the regime were attacked systematically by individuals paid for by the regime to so as to limit the oppositional voices on the Internet.

Among the frequent methods used to harass online journalists and websites is censorship of websites, physical attacks and death threats by phone or in person.

Yemeni blogger appeals to prevent possible assassination

Walid Al-Saqaf — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:16:25 +0000

As a reminder of a narrowing margin of freedom online

(Sana'a – Yemen) In a rather emotional entry posted on his blog, Nashwan Abdu Ali Ghanim, a Yemeni blogger with blogs on maktoobblogs.com and kitab.com called upon international advocacy groups and the Arab Bloggers Union to come for his rescue upon escaping ‘three failed assassination attempts'. Ghanim believes that his latest blog entry noting the involvement of senior Yemeni officials in the plotting of the attack carried out against the U.S. embassy in Sana'a on September 17, 2008 triggered a new wave of harassments and life-threatening acts.

“They want to kill me… So I urge you to immediately intervene” he said in a blog entry dated Tuesday November 18, 2008.

Support from ANHRI

A day later –Wednesday, November 19, 2008- the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) responded by releasing a strongly worded protest letter criticizing the Yemeni authorities.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information denounces this cruel campaign, which breaks all international laws and conventions, and even the Yemeni constitution. ANHRI consider this campaign a breach of democratic principles which the regime in Yemen claims to protect and adopt, and calls upon the Yemeni authorities to end the security persecution against Ali Ghanim and guarantee his integrity.” the organization said in its press release released on Wednesday, November 19, 2008.

A controversial article

Ghanim said he was chased by various elements in the country, threatened of being killed, besieged in his home, and exposed to other acts of harassment by government authorities after he had published a controversial article on the website of the Washington, DC-based Al-Hewar Center, which promotes online forum discussions and dialogue on matters of concern to the Arab world.

In his article, Ghanim accused the regime of being behind the attack on the U.S. Embassy which killed ten people and resulted, at the time, in the temporary suspension of the embassy's activities. He claimed that Yahya Al-Arasi, whom he said was the press secretary of the Vice President of Yemen, was directly involved in the attack and blame extremist elements for it in order to exploit the U.S. for financial aid and to achieve several other objectives.

It is worth noting this article was not the first that Ghanim mentioned Al-Arasi by name as he had frequently written in discussion forums and in his blog about Al-Arasi's involvement in various acts of intimidation and threats against him.

Attacks on Yemeni online media on the rise

Attacks against website owners, journalists and bloggers as well as censorship of websites in Yemen have been in a steady rise in recent years. Among the recent cases is the 70-day detention of Loui Al-Moayed, the editor of yemenhurr.net. His website, which was known to contain content critical of the government's handling of the war in Saadah, was also censored months before his arrest, which took place on June 30^th, 2008.

In another case, the director of Hewarye.com online forum was attacked by the guards of the premier office in Sana'a on September 22, 2008, yet the perpetrators were not questioned.

In a third of many other cases, the editor of Mukallapress.com, Salem ba Mudawwikh, had also complained about threats he received due to his website's emphasis on anti-government protests in the south of the country.

Furthermore, censorship of websites for their political content remains one of the most worrisome signs of a shrinking margin of online freedom of expression in Yemen. The authorities had banned or continue to ban dozens of websites containing criticism of state policies or covering activities of groups protesting against the regime.

Among the most renowned cases was the censorship of the news aggregator yemenportal.net on January 19, 2008. Upon its ban and in coordination with other banned websites, Yemen Portal started an anti-censorship campaign against the government in creating a portal containing fetched content from most blocked websites plus circumvention techniques to bypass government ban. The car belonging to the Yemen Portal office in Sana'a was vandalized by unknown men days after the anti-censorship campaign had started. No investigation was carried out to bring the culprits to justice.

Internet's impact growing

It is worth noting that government's actions against websites had contributed in raising awareness of the growing importance of the Internet in Yemen as an alternative means of expression and access of information. Given that the Yemeni regime continues to monopolize broadcast media and imposes various restrictions on print media, the Internet is increasingly appealing to a wider sector of the Yemeni community wishing to learn alterative news and opinion content without government intervention.

Many bloggers and website owners fear that the government may attempt to extend the restrictions imposed on press media to the online media, triggering a potential wave of mass censorship efforts and prosecution of bloggers and other online activists and writers.

Yemen: Loui Has Been Set Free!

Walid Al-Saqaf — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:14:38 +0000

Yemen Hurr website announced yesterday in a press release that its founder and editor-in-chief Loui Al-Moayed has been released from prison yesterday after about more than 70 days in detention. In a press release, the website thanked all those organizations and advocates who fought hard for his release from a detention that was and remains unjustified.

Posted on freeyemenportal.org

Yemen blocks Maktoob blogging platform

Sami Ben Gharbia — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:40:46 +0000

Maktoobblog.com, one of the most popular Arab blogging platform, has been recently blocked in Yemen cutting off Yemeni Internet users from the more than 46960 blogs the service hosts. According to MaktoobBlog, there are currently 1226 Yemeni blogs hosted by the service. All of them disappeared from the Yemeni Internet.

On the pan-Arabic Al Hayat newspaper, Mr. Yasser Al-Eimad, from the Public Telecommunication Corporation, has denied the information that Maktoobblog.com was blocked. But the OpenNet Initiative testing has confirmed yesterday, through technical investigation, that the blog hosting service has been blocked by Yemennet ISP, a service of the government's Public Telecommunication Corporation (PTC):

ONI technical investigation verified that the service has been blocked by Yemennet, Yemen’s government-run ISP. Access is blocked to the entire domain maktoobblog.com, effectively to every blog hosted by the service. Interestingly, users who attempt to access the site receive a network error message instead of the standard blockpage, which is served when users attempt to access sexual content.

This significant blocking is expected to hinder Internet users in Yemen from blogging and reading blogs because maktoobblog.com is home of one of the largest blogging communities in the Middle East and North Africa.

Yemen blocks independent news websites

Sami Ben Gharbia — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:44:06 +0000

Numerous Yemeni websites have been blocked recently by government-controlled ISPs. Among them is the popular YemenPortal (English version of the site here), Yemen’s first multi-source news crawler and search engine, which extracts headlines from news sites that are being blocked by the authorities. YemenPortal is inviting Yemeni internet users to access the website through a mirror they build at yemen.arabiaportal.net.

According to Reporters Without Borders access to at least seven other Yemeni websites have been blocked since October:

Access to YemenPortal from within Yemen was blocked two days after Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawar and other government officials accused the press on 17 January of “jeopardising the country’s national interest” and “promoting incitement to secession.”

In May of the last year, Yemen’s Ministry of Telecommunications blocked access to two opposition news websites (www.al-shoura.net and www.aleshteraki.net) because they reported on the humanitarian situation and the fighting between the army and Shia rebels in the northern province of Sa’ada.

In this interview I speak with YemenPortal.net administrator Walid Al-Saqaf, who talks about the threats to the freedom of online expression in his country:

Sami: what kind of websites that are being blocked in Yemen and how do you explain the recent move by Yemeni government-controlled ISP's to ban your website and others?

Walid: I believe RSF made an excellent and thoughtful assessment in their release when they said the regime is suffering from a number of setbacks and challenges and decided to target the media instead of resolving them. Indeed, news websites have started to gain popularity and influence public opinion more than any other time in the past. YouTube videos of the ruthless attacks by security forces against protesters in Aden were posted online in YemenPortal.net and news, views and discussions on the separatist movement in the south along with the rebel war in the north have all had strong influences on the local press, which are increasingly picking up and rerunning stories and news from online media sources.

In other words, the government is fearful of new media's influence on public opinion and would like to suppress it, just as it did for broadcast and print media through monopoly and licensing restrictions.

Sami: Who is responsible for the block? Was it a governmental decision to bar access to YemenPortal?

Walid: It is definitely the government, but it is not clear to me which part of it. I heard from reliable sources that it is the national security apparatus that prompted this ban. This also came after harsh comments by the Minister of Information (as reported in the above RSF release). But it is 100% clear that the government was the one behind the ban.

Sami: How would you assess the general filtering situation in Yemen?

Walid: One word: ‘alarming'. This is because we are supposed to be in a democratic country where freedom of the press and expression are guaranteed in the constitution. This is a serious blow to all the pledges the regime gave to the public and the world. It is particularly alarming to see that the government is careless about complaints from international advocacy groups and organizations in the face of such oppression. The more the world criticizes the regime, the more it insists on it, noting that it is a ‘domestic' issue that other nations or organizations should not interfere in. The censorship of pornographic websites has been tolerated by the society, but the government's resorting to censorship of websites merely for news and opinion marks a dangerous tendency towards dictatorship.

Sami: What has been the response of Yemeni Internet users to the the ban?

Walid: The response was positive to a very large extent. I received solidarity messages and hundreds of requests for membership. Readers are expecting the alternative domain (yemen.arabiaportal.net) to be blocked any time, so they would like to stay in touch and learn the second alternative domain that we will use if/when the first alternative domain is blocked.
There are however certain elements on the net that seem to support blocking websites. This is a minority and in my own opinion, they are either misguided or actually elements paid for by the authorities to give the impression that readers want this ban to ‘protect national interests' and other rubbish.

What I would like to point out here is that the nature of YemenPortal.net as an umbrella and source of information on thousand+ sources makes banning it equivalent to banning information coming from all those sources. The search engine had already tracked more than 200,000 items and is growing rapidly. It has an English section as well and strives to cover the widest array of sources on Yemen as possible. It started in Yemen but was planned to extend to the Arab world through the arabiaportal.net project. But this ban held us back.

The aim is to liberate people from restrictions on what they can see and read. In a solidarity meeting with more than a couple dozen news website managers and workers in Sana'a on Jan 23, a decision was taken to fight this ban by applying new technologies and techniques to allow blocked websites to have a prominent location on the front page of YemenPortal.net and renew the website's DNS whenever one is blocked. This way we hope to neutralize the impact of censorship because it is virtually impossible for the government to keep on blocking each and every website that has a link to the dynamic DNS that will be created.

Yemen: Censorship of tow opposition news websites

Sami Ben Gharbia — Thu, 24 May 2007 14:34:15 +0000

The Yemen's Ministry of Telecommunications has blocked access to two opposition news websites (www.al-shoura.net and www.aleshteraki.net) because they are reporting about the humanitarian situation and the fighting in the northern province of Sa'ada between the army and Shia rebels. According to aid workers the clashes “led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians and soldiers and the displacement of 30,000-35,000 people.”

On May 26th, we will witness the launch of Yemen’s first multi-source news crawler and search engine which, according to commentators, will be able “to extract headlines from news website that are being blocked by the authorities.”