A tortured blogger in Syria says he owes his release to a pressure group which marks its first birthday this week
Observer World
David Smith
For two months he was imprisoned underground. His hands were cuffed behind his back. A leather strap was tied around his head to force his eyes shut. He was told to lie on his stomach and raise his legs in order to be beaten on his feet.
Ali Sayed al-Shihabi says he paid the price for expressing his political beliefs on the internet. Now released by the Syrian government, he paid tribute last week to Irrepressible.info, the joint campaign run by Amnesty International and The Observer which calls for an end to the persecution of bloggers by repressive regimes. 'This always made me stronger,' he said. 'I no longer felt that I had been a mere straw in the wind.'
Irrepressible.info has just turned one year old. Its impact will be debated on Wednesday when an event, 'Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression in Cyberspace', is held at Amnesty's headquarters in Shoreditch, east London, and webcast around the world. Among the speakers will be Martha Lane Fox, the pioneering dotcom entrepreneur.
The campaign - launched 45 years after a powerful article in this newspaper led to the founding of Amnesty - recognises the internet as a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. It demands that governments stop censoring websites, blocking emails and imprisoning bloggers, and calls on major corporations such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to stop colluding with them. Nearly 68,000 people have pledged their support so far, including Bob Geldof, Chris Martin and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
It was last August that The Observer reported on the plight of Shihabi, an English-language teacher detained in Syria for activities including posting pro-democracy articles online. Amnesty warned that Shihabi was at risk of torture and, according to his testimony, the fear proved well founded.
'I was incarcerated in a cell in a basement for two months,' the 52-year-old said via email. 'The cell was 2x1 metres. I never got out, except to WC [and] for investigation and torture. After that, I was moved to Adra Prison in Damascus. I was put in a collective cell, with about 40 criminals. Fresh air was very fine, but the food was always disgusting.
'My eyes were shut with a piece of leather round my head and my hands were cuffed behind my back. Almost every 10 days, when I was in the cell, they got me out, ordered me to lie down on my belly and raised my legs up. They set to hitting me on my feet in an attempt to compel me to co-operate with them, ie to be an informer. Every time they hit me about 25 hits.'
Shihabi said the support of the Irrepressible.info campaign had been a source of strength throughout his ordeal, which ended with a presidential amnesty in January. 'The campaign was something else, it was great,' he continued. 'Every time my family came to meet me in prison, my wife or my sister used to tell me that Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, The Observer and the Guardian are saying so and so, and calling on the Syrian regime to release all of you. I narrated every bit my family told me about this subject to the other prisoners. Though they had never heard of those organisations or papers, they listened with open eyes.
'After my release, many intellectuals came to me and talked about the importance of the above campaign, especially your article, as it was published not only on the internet. One of them had a copy and took it out of his pocket. They assured me that campaign had compromised the Syrian junta.'
The importance of the internet in defending human rights has inspired Martha Lane Fox to lend her support. The co-founder of Lastminute.com, now a board member at Marks & Spencer and trustee of the anti-death penalty charity Reprieve, said: 'Freedom of expression and freedom of speech are fundamental, and the technology that's enabled it more than any other is the internet, so it's very important to keep fighting to make the internet what it was originally intended to be, which is disruptive and chaotic and about people being empowered to do amazing things.'
She added: 'The things that strike me now as so extraordinary about this technology is that it gives an outlet to people in the most extreme situations. Whether they can write their own blogs or communicate by email, it can be a channel through which people have a voice in an otherwise repressive country, and that's fantastic and worth preserving at the highest cost.'
The challenge facing Irrepressible.info is spelled out by a new report from the OpenNet Initiative, an international university consortium, which found that online censorship is growing around the world. Of 41 countries surveyed, 25 showed evidence of content filtering by governments: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Burma, China, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, UAE, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.
Professor Ron Deibert of the OpenNet Initiative said: 'We can't take the internet for granted. Most people think of it as a seamless web, but our research shows it's being carved up and controlled..'
A new Irrepressible.info website launches at Wednesday's event, incorporating a news aggregator enabling people to 'tag' items about internet freedom and repression and post them to the site. Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International, whose article in The Observer ignited the campaign a year ago, said: 'We think it's been a brilliant success. We'd only set out to get 30,000 people to sign the petition and we've got over 65,000. We presented that to the UN's Internet Governance Forum, and I think all the commentators on that forum were clear that human rights had a central part to bear. One of my colleagues told me that when the Chinese government representatives got to their feet and said there was no internet repression in China, everybody just laughed.'
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