That in Aleppo once...
This summer I tried something I’d never tried before: I lived without the internet for nearly a week when traveling across Turkey. For a couple of days, my mother’s bi-hourly missive – ‘Are you still alive?’ – went unread. The goings-on in the summer transfer window went unchecked, facebook friends went unpoked. Even the Nigerian gentleman who reminds me every week that he is the son of a deceased billionaire must have wondered what happened to me.
Most telling of all, I remember sitting drinking a coffee in Antakya while a man gestured at TV showing the Iraq war, angrily shouting ‘George’ (which I presumed meant George Bush) as I sipped my cappucino. Only some time later did I realise he was saying ‘Georgia’, and that in my little backpack bubble I had missed an entire war in the Caucasus (although I confess I did wonder how so many lime green shell-suits had found their way to Basra).
But then I landed in an internet cafe in Aleppo, Syria, found a computer, and prepared to come out of my social-coma. I typed in www.facebook.com. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I tried youtube… Only after calling over the assistant did I realise that I was trying to access websites that were illegal in Syria (I heard on the grapevine that facebook was banned because posts on the now-defunct Syria network page were a source of constant embarrassment to the government, but there are are other theories).
Over here, a dodgy html usually brings a helpful member of IT staff to your desk. In Syria, expect a beefy policeman. Think less thumbnails, more thumbscrews.
Major news sites were also heavily edited, and dissident sites – like Free Syria – were, of course, banned. But astonishingly this blog – which provides both news and critical analysis of Middle East goings on – was accessible. While few Syrians would even dream of voicing their opposition to the plans for demolishing parts of old Damascus in public, this once popular blog dares do exactly that.
Clearly, major newshubs can be identified, controlled and blocked. By contrast, the blogosphere serves as the modern day equivalent of the dissident pamphleteer. Blogs are versatile – serving to inform and to comment – created with a minimum of technical expertise, broadly dispersed and easily reassembled if ever dismantled.
Their sites can be easy to find, their authors difficult to trace. Clearly, Bashar Al-Assad (whose only previous management role before becoming President was as head of the Syrian Computer Society!) – has resigned himself to being undermined by a blogosphere with endless potential for proliferation. Even his own diplomats are in on the act.
Antony Loewenstein – author of ‘The Blogging Revolution’ – shares some interesting thoughts on blogging in the Middle East in a response to last week’s report on the repression of online journalists:
