A Crash Course On Press Oppression

By: Mark Fitzgerald Back in January, Mark Bench, the executive director of the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), saw firsthand in the streets and Internet cafes of Tunis the many ways that Tunisia keeps its press tame, and its pledges of freedom of expression empty platitudes.

But even Bench expected that as some 15,000 journalists, free-press advocates, diplomats and government officials converged on Tunis to attend the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that the government would loosen the screws a bit.

Guess again.

In an interview Monday afternoon as he literally packed for the flight to Tunisia, Bench said he had just received an e-mail from WPFC's European representative at the summit, Ronald Koven, who had earlier in the day witness plainclothes police grabbing a "Belgian TV cameraman's equipment from his hands, through the open window of the car as he was arriving (at) a meeting that the cops were trying to prevent."

Koven said he screamed "Stop! Thieves," which "seemed to vex the cops." They later returned the camera--minus its video cassette.

"There's been more, too," Bench said. "There was a meeting scheduled of the Tunisia Monitoring Group, a group of 14 to 15 (free-press and free expression) non-government organizations (NGOs). They were to meet at Goethe Institute, and they were all prohibited from attending by plainclothes police who simply blocked access.

"This is all very normal in Tunisia," added Bench, who is a member of the U.S. delegation to the summit.

Tunisia has been ruled since 1987 by Gen. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who was installed in a bloodless coup promising to democratize the nation. By the early 1990s, however, he eh was cracking down on human rights, especially freedom of expression. "Opposition and independent papers were closed down and journalists and hundreds of political activists, most of them Islamists, were imprisoned following unfair trials, particularly in the early 1990s," a pre-summit WPFC report said in February. "Many of them, including Hamadi Jebali, editor of the Islamist weekly Al-Fajr (the Dawn), are still serving lengthy prison sentences."

In the run-up to the WSIS almost all of the press attention in the U.S. has centered on what, if any, consensus the international delegations can reach on how the Internet should be governed.

There's a widespread feeling worldwide that the present system of unilateral American control of the Internet through Icann (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a private company under contract to the U.S. Department of Commerce, cannot continue forever. But there's also strong disagreement on how--or whether--to "internationalize" Internet governance.

China, which controls its citizens' access to the Web with strong firewalls, is leading an effort to put control under U.N. auspices. The European Union, too, wants some form of international involvement, has suggested an international forum that includes both private and government representatives.

But to free-press NGOs such as the WPFC, it's a chilling prospect, indeed, to allow nations with a record of jailing and otherwise suppressing "cyber-dissidents" to have formal input on how to control the Internet.

And the fact that summit-goers will be making their decisions in a nation hostile to the press and free expression makes them doubly wary of the WSIS outcome.

"There's always at least a hint of the host country in the final documents," Bench said. "If that ever occurs here, it will be a terrible shame. There should be no bowing to Tunisian officials or Tunisian 'principles.' They can talk until cows fly about how much they favor free expression, but their actions speak louder than their words."

WPFC argues that any new international system should keep a role for Icann, which it says has allocated Internet domain names "on a neutral, technical basis."

"Supporters of a free and open Internet should be able, with the backing of allies like the UN Department of Information and Communications and the UNESCO Secretariat, to resist any changes that threaten the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet," it said in a March position paper. "'Governance' must not be allowed to become a code word for government regulation of Internet content."

The Paris-based free-press NGO, Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its French abbreviation) says that the Icann control "can certainly be criticized, but the proposed remedies seem much worse. China, Cuba and the world's other most repressive countries want to hand over control of the Internet to an independent supra-national body such as the United Nations. But the UN's clumsy record on human rights-- its Human Rights Commission was recently chaired by Libya--make the prospect a chilling one."

RSF's executive director, Robert Menard, has been barred by Tunisia from entering the country for the summit, the WPFC's Bench noted.

"I suspect the issue of Internet governance...no, I am positive, the issue of Internet governance will not be determined at this meeting, but it will (lead to) ongoing discussion," Bench said. "We just cannot agree to restrictive governments having anything to do with content. If that results in regional Internets to the detriment of their people, we'll just have to live with that."