By T, Staffer of De Birhan Media
28 April 2012
The blockage/jamming of radio and Television media has
been highly practised until the end of the cold war and fall of the German Wall
by states and agencies. While most of the world has now respected freedom of
expression, adopted democracy and openness, few despotic and tyrannous countries
have escalated their censorship on freedom of expression beyond their borders. De Birhan staff member, T offers a short analysis as follows.
Ethiopia
In the past couple of weeks, a bunch of Ethiopian focused
Diaspora media have been blocked such as Abe Tokichaw’s wordpress and this one,
De Birhan. In its blocking and banning spree of media outlets that it considers
critical, the regime had banned over two dozens of websites, blogs and radio
and television stations since the 2005 election.
Some cases in which the
government blocked infiltrated or interrupted Diaspora based Ethiopian media. According
to a CPJ, May 24, 2006 report the blocking of Blogs and Websites
started then These included Ethio-Zagol’s own Web
site, www.seminawork.blogspot.com, Andrew Heavens, Meskel
Square, ethiopundit.blogspot.com,ethiopianpolitics.blogspot.com; the
Web site of the rebel Oromo Liberation Front; and several antigovernment sites
run by the Ethiopian Diaspora including the well-known Ethiopian
Review. Jamming of foreign-based broadcasting amounts to a violation
of Article 35 of the International Telecommunications Convention (ITC), which
prevents radio jamming even when a nation claims it has a right to protect its
sovereignty.
Starting
from 2010, the regime began to intensively block almost all news media and
websites of rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty
International and Committee to Protect Journalists. It went as far as an
attempt of chastising the administrations of Voice of America and Dutch Velle
Amharic services.
Since its launch in April 2010, The
Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT) has faced intense and persistent signal
interference that has disrupted its transmissions over seven times in its short
span of life. Its radio waves and other similar Party radios have been all
blocked.
Ogaden Online reported on 03 March 2012 that the London
based “independently functioning” Ogaden focused media, Universal TV (1st
private satellite Somali TV) had been pressurised, co-opted and infiltrated by
the Ethiopian regime. Reportedly, Universal Tv was made to recruit a Somali
speaking journalist from Ethiopia who promoted the Ethiopian regime’s propaganda
and the media was granted a hundred thousand USD ($100,000) fee for every
quarter of the year as they are to broadcast government-edited video clips as
news coverage or special program at least per week.
“The IlaysTV of SomaliChannel TV who were popular among the Somali community were approached by the Ethiopian regime to be paid hundreds of thousands and as the TV refused the soliciting the Ethiopian regime Communications Ministers went to the Far East country that hosted the channel and pressurised to finally get it off the air. As the Meles regime pressurised neighbouring countires like Djbouti, Somaliland and Puntland not to host the Channle, Ilays Tv went to Eritrea’s Eri Tv. The Ethiopian regime then fully attacked Eritrean satellite base of Arabsat from Arab Satellite.
“In parallel with those jamming practices, Addis Ababa regime had been maintaining its close watching and intimidation policies towards any other media outlet which covers Ogaden stories or events.” Ogaden Online reports.
The Hargaisa-based Horn cable TV that reported
on Oganden issues as the Somaliland’s
president, Ahmed Silanyo had told while in parliament just ahead of raiding the
station “Horn Cable TV had stepped beyond the border (redline)”. Ogaal
newspaper that reported that ONLF forces are crossing to Ethiopia was later
arrested due to pressure from Ethiopia. A Committee to Protect Journalist’s
report on February 29, 2012, another reporter from Subulahanews.com was
detained and tortured in the north-western town – Borama for writing similar
article to that of Ogaal newspaper. De
Birhan Media wants to remind other fellow media to
intensively report on human rights abuses and incidents in Ogaden.
Bahrain
The following information is retrieved from the Website of Article 19. Around the hightimes of the
Arab Spirng last year, 15
members of the Bahraini opposition, after being repeatedly been denied
permission to broadcast out of Bahrain, and so relocated to London, from where
the channel continues to operate, launched LuaLua TV. The Television
station London-based Bahraini current affairs station had its satellite signal
jammed only four hours after the channel was launched on 17 July 2011.
“Jamming and
blocking is a practice thought to be confined to the cold war having
disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall. LuaLua TV is in clear violation
of international human rights law regarding freedom of expression and
interferes with both the rights of individuals and broadcasters to receive and
impart information, as provided by Article 19 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)” Says Article 19. The station broadcasts in Arabic and is aimed at members of the
opposition inside Bahrain, beaming via the satellite service Hotbird. The
satellite jamming of LuaLua TV is taking place despite the channel changing its
frequency regularly. To circumvent the channel’s satellite jamming, LuaLua TV
started a partnership with the online streaming service, Livestation, on 12
August 2011. However, after only two weeks, LuaLua TV received reports that the
website that carries their live stream was also being blocked within Bahrain.
The incidents on LuaLua Tv bear huge similarity with ESAT TV
and Radio. Although, ESAT is not solely established by opposition members and
merely focused on opposition groups in Ethiopia, it has gone through much
censorship that the Bahraini station has gone through. Another Washington based entertainment and social issues TV Station, EBS followed the footsteps of ESAT. The Ethiopian regime has not blocked, banned or jammed the channel. In 1950, the General Assembly
Resolution 424 V) Freedom of Information: Interference with Radio Signals, stated that deliberate interference by duly authorised radio operating agencies of
radio
signals originating
beyond their territory constitutes a violation of the accepted principle of freedom of information. The Resolution
also condemned the measure, such as radio jamming, as “a denial of the right of
all persons to be fully
informed concerning news, opinions and ideas regardless of frontiers”.
Great Firewall of China
“China has
intensified online censorship by
closing 16 websites, taking the toughest steps yet against major microblogs and
detaining six people for spreading rumours of a coup amid Beijing's most
serious political crisis for years.”
The Guardian reported on Sunday 1 April 2012.
China
is the leading country in Internet media censorship; therefore the system has
won the label “Great Firewall of China”. The system of The
Great Firewall of China is a massive and complicated
system that blocks all types of content that the Chinese government deems
improper. It features firewalls and proxy servers at the Internet gateways,
engages in selective DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested, and
leverages various other methods to censor the Internet, including Connection
resets, DNS filtering and redirection, IP blocking, Packet filtering, and URL
filtering, according to zdnet.com. At
times this huge system has gone to the level of blocking all foreign sites and
reopening them again. “China's draconian internet censorship system - known as
'the Great Firewall of China' - intensified briefly today, blocking ALL foreign
websites.” Dailymail.com reported on 12 April 2012. According to a 2006 Harvard study, at least 18,000 websites are blocked from
within mainland China.[
According
to the internet watchdog, GreatFireWallofChina.Org, “It is estimated that some 30,000 Chinese civil servants
are monitoring Internet traffic and blocking content that is deemed
undesirable. Typing in sensitive keywords such as ‘democracy’, ‘Falun
Gong’ or ‘porno’ in a search engine results in an error message. Websites
of a sensitive nature are being blocked. Internet service providers also (self)
censor, as do individuals: many people do not express their real thoughts
because they know these will be censored anyway. ”
Similarly,
the watchdog says due to the growth of blogs and regime’s non anonymity regulations;
young Chinese created an anonymous blog “According
to state media, by the end of 2006 there were 20.8 million bloggers in China.
Blogging, which implies venting your own opinions, has become immensely popular
in China. In order to control the phenomenon the government wants blog users to
register under their real name. A resourceful Chinese individual created this
loophole: www.adoptablog.org. Adopt a Chinese blog, and help keep these
bloggers online - anonymously.”
Such
a strategy is one aspect that IT expert Ethiopians should consider in
unblocking and increasing reachablity of the Ethiopian mass.
How you can test if your website or
blog is blocked in China?
A watchdog and keep
track of which and how many or how many times sites are censored, http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php,
enables website and blog owners to test if their url addresses are blocked or censored in
China. Most Ethiopian websites are
blocked or censored by Chinese experts and technology sometimes from China and
mostly from Addis Abeba. I have just made
a trail test of a couple of Ethiopian and one International website hosted
outside Ethiopia: Ethiomedia (http://www.ethiomedia.com/), De Birhan (http://www.debirhan.com/)
and Amnesty International (http://www.amnesty.org/). The following was the
result found: No servers were able to reach your site. This means that
your site is most likely NOT accessible from within mainland China.
I
have also made an attempt of testing if other foreign based critical Ethiopian websites
and blogs were accessible in China and most were while the some other were
inaccessible. This is an interesting discovery and calls for more research and
study into why critical Ethiopian websites and blogs have been in accessible in
China: because the blocking was done from main land China, with Chinese technology
or because Ethiopian IT security recruits also filtered our sites from Chinese audience
?
You
can also insert your url (web addresses) into the search space here (http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/index.php) and test if your site is also blocked in China.
So far no Ethiopian authority or institution
came out and publicly stated the reasons why the sites and channels and radio
and Televise waves were blocked or jammed. The Ethiopian regime should be perused
by the international community and freedom of speech upholding organisations to
explain their justifications for the blockages.
According
to Article 19, international human rights standards allow, under Article 19(3),
for narrowly defined restrictions to freedom of expression: first, the interference
must be in accordance with a law; second, the legally sanctioned restriction
must protect or promote an aim deemed legitimate in international law; and
third, the restriction must be necessary for the protection or promotion of the
legitimate aim. This is known as the three-part test.
For
jamming to be legitimate it should therefore be:
1.
Prescribed by law. The law should
specify who, how and in what cases can jam frequencies. The law should include
safeguards against abuse of power. For example, independent courts or bodies
should authorise the jamming and supervise how it is performed
2.
Pursue legitimate purposes; for
example, national security, protection of public order, etc
3.
Be strictly necessary to achieve
these purposes. The authorities should provide relevant and sufficient reasons
demonstrating that without jamming it will not be possible to protect national
security or public order. The context is important to justify jamming.
Therefore it is difficult to justify jamming per se.
However, none of the above conditions have been explained or
the court was involved in the practice of jamming. The Ethio-Chinese jammers
and banners don’t take a due consideration of the three-part test nor do they
care to explain or validate why they have banned Ethiopian focused critical
news media.
I advise readers in
Ethiopia to use/download Tor website
to access blocked sites in conjunction with Privoxy servers. We are also conducting studies on how we
can circumvent the blockage of Ethiopian media/sites in Ethiopia- we will notify the
findings soon.
After
blocking, jamming, interfering and banning foreign based Ethiopian media,
Ethiopian regime’s censorship has now moved on the local press. The sole state
owned printing press in Ethiopia, Berhan ena Selam, has informed publishers in
Ethiopia that it would introduce a new agreement that may censor printing of “contents’’
deemed to be “unprintable” by the Printing press.
We
can then call the Ethiopian empire of blocking sites and media taking the phrase
from the Chinese “Great Firewall of China”, The Internet FireObelisk of
Ethiopia.
