cross-posted to Global Voices

Update: Here’s a briefing from Reporters Sans Frontiers on background on the Jeff Ooi “Islam Hadhari” controversy.

Global Voices ally and contributor Jeff Ooi was taken in for questioning this morning by Malaysia’s Criminal Investigation Division regarding a Septmeber 2004 post on his weblog, Screenshots. Jeff was questioned for two hours and released. It’s unclear whether the authorities will close the case regarding Jeff’s weblog, or whether he may be subject to future questioning and harrasment.

Since 2003, Jeff has been one of Malaysia’s most prolific, insightful and, often, controversial bloggers, posting in English, Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese. He’s a paradigmatic bridge blogger, explaining politics and everday life in Malaysia for outsiders while weighing in on key debates for a local audience.

The post that led to Jeff’s police questioning was posted on September 30th, 2004, titled “Islam Hadhari and Money Politics”. In the post, Jeff asserts that Islam Hadhari - an interpretation of Islam promoted by Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi focused on Islam’s compatibility with economic and technical development (the term means “civilizational Islam”) - is inconsistent with political bribery. Jeff describes the two forces as “water and oil which do not mix.”

In the first comment on Jeff’s post, a commenter who identifies himself only as “Anwar”, responds that “Islam hadari and money politics is just like shit and urine that’s how to make comparison.” Jeff responded by deleting the words “shit and urine” and posting the following immediately below the comment:

JEFF OOI: You didn’t realise that IF shit and urine come from human beings, they are in actual fact by-products of God’s creation that even God can’t absolve from. Don’t rob Him of this glory as every thing He does, He intends it in His divine way.

I try to be as open-minded as I can, but what you said affects and hurts me because you have twisted and hijacked my blog topic. What you said is also blasphemy as it hurts people who hold dear to their value system. And I am one of them.

He also blocked the IP for “Anwar”, preventing him from posting future comments.

Malaysian newspaper Berita Harian picked up the story on October 2nd, with a cover story that faulted Jeff for failing to control his forum and allowing “opinion that is regarded as ridiculing Islam to be published”. Jeff responds with questions about the journalistic ethics of Berita Harian, most notably their failure to contact him about the story and offer him an opportunity to comment or respond.

According to Jeff, the newspaper story led to an investigator by Malaysia’s Internet regulator, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), which filed a report with the Attorney General and closed their investigation.

Jeff was alerted on Friday that a criminal complaint had been filed regarding his blog on February 24th. The complaint was made under section 298(A) of Malaysia’s penal code, a section that prohibits causing “disharmony, disunity, or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will” on the basis of religion, and provides for 2-5 year periods of imprisonment for offenders. Jeff discovered this morning that the complaint had been filed by the police themselves, four months after the initial incident.

After two hours of questioning this morning, with his lawyer present, Jeff was released. It is unclear whether this completes the investigation, if Jeff will be questioned again, or if he will be charged. In an email this morning, Jeff told friends around the world “I AM FINE” and asked bloggers to post his version of the statement he gave to police, as well as some relevant questions he has about the arrest. This follows below.

I’m confident that police harrasment won’t prevent Jeff from being the outspoken and brave voice he’s been since he started blogging two years ago. Friends at Reporters Sans Frontiers, Committee to Protect Bloggers and Global Voices, as well as Jeff’s excellent lawyers in Malaysia, are standing at the ready should this case continue any further.

Jeff

One of the reasons I’ve found it hard to take the World Summit on the Information Society too seriously is the fact that the second half of the meeting is being held in Tunisia, a country that limits freedom of expression, has a history of harassing human rights activists and blocks access to international news websites. My friend Julien Pain of Reporters Sans Frontiers calls the decision to hold the summmit in such a repressive nation “ridiculous”, and I agree with him.

A group called IFEX - the International Freedom of Expression Exchange - a coalition of press freedom and human rights organizations from around the world - has started a “Tunisia Monitoring Group”, tasked with investigating Tunisia’s record on freedom of expression before the WSIS summit. Their report (unfortunately in .doc format) can be downloaded here, and there’s a press release summarizing the report available online.

The release of the report was timed to coincide with the second planning conference for the Tunis phase of WSIS, currently being held in Geneva. Unfortunately, many of those attendees won’t get to read the report. The Highway Africa news agency reports that the WSIS secretariat has blocked IFEX from distributing their report at the planning meeting, except in the “civil society” room of the conference. The Tunisian government’s response to the report, on the other hand, is being distributed as an official conference document. The official reason for the delay - IFEX is not an official conference attendee, though it’s a coalition of groups registered to attend the conference.

Right. That’s obviously the reason the report isn’t being made available.

Meanwhile, the Tunisian government has responded by calling the report “seriously flawed” and asserting that there’s no press censorship in Tunisia. Reuters has that story, though I’ve not been able to find coverage of the IFEX report itself on any mainstream news source other AllAfrica. Thanks, AllAfrica.

International mobilization in reaction to the December 26th tsunami has been inspirational and impressive. Sri Lanka’s social service minister recently announced that the nation had received so many more supplies than were needed that the government was now sending some of the donated material to programs for the elderly and disabled.

Unfortunately global generosity doesn’t apply equally to all the world’s crises. Oxfam International just issued a press release pointing out that, while the global reaction to the tsunami is impressive, the 15 world crises identified by the UN are receiving far less funding - roughly 4% of the money the UN believes is needed. According to the release, the international community has donated $500 for each person affected by the Asian tsunami, but roughly $0.50 for each person affected by the ongoing conflict in northern Uganda.

The UN’s appeal for Sudan has attempted to raise $1.5 billion - less than 5% has been committed, or roughly $16 per person. The locust-related famine in West Africa has received no funding at all in response to UN requests for aid. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Bangladeshi peacekeepers were recently killed in ongoing fighting in the Ituri region, the UN has received 0.4% of the money they’ve requested for aid.

The media student in me wants to offer possible explanations for the different levels of international commitment and media attention to these situations. Perhaps we’re more generous in responding to natural disasters than to manmade ones, like the ongoing conflicts in DRC, Sudan and Uganda. Or perhaps more people from the US and Europe have been to Southeast Asia as tourists than have been to Central Africa, and that they feel a personal connection to those countries. Perhaps there’s a cynical political explanation - countries like India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka have political and economic importance to the US and EU, while Central Africa doesn’t. Or perhaps it’s just a lot of work to explain the complexities and nuance of the conflicts in Central Africa, while a really big wave is easy for everyone to comprehend.

Even if you’re a UN skeptic - and I won’t deny that there are some good reasons to be skeptical - there are ways to have a positive, personal impact on these conflicts by supporting organizations that work on relief efforts in Uganda, DRC and Sudan. I support Doctors without Borders, who do consistently good work in countries that the media doesn’t pay much attention to, and urge you to do likewise.

“For so long Africa has had a bad image - this is eloquest testimony that Africa can create solutions to its own problems ” - Remi Oyo, spokesman for Nigerian president Olesegun Obasanjo

Faure Gnassingbe has stepped down as “interim” president of Togo, allowing speaker of parliament, Abass Bonfoh, to take the position as mandated by the constitution. Gnassingbe took power three weeks ago after the death of his father, Eyadema Gnassingbe, in a move widely viewed as an unconstitutional coup. Heavily pressured by the AU and the UN, Gnassingbe has stepped down, but plans to run as a candidate for the ruling party in forthcoming presidential elections.

The always insightful Head Heeb is less optimistic than Remi Oyo about Gnassingbe’s resignation, calling it “temporary”, and pointing out that Togo’s opposition is weak, at best, and that Gnassingbe will likely be back in power in April.

I’m a bad blogger. Between three weeks in India, followed immediately by travel to Boston and San Francisco, my aggregator is crowded with stories I’ve yet to read, and I’m way behind in my posting. So here’s a quick post of half a dozen African stories that caught my eye over the past few days.

Somalia’s President and Prime Minister in exile visit Somalia, and are received with banners and cheering crowds. It’s unclear whether the leaders will be able to visit Mogadishu, which is under the control of rival warlords and may be unsafe for the leaders to visit.

Jonathan Friedland visits South Africa and is dissapointed by the “glacial pace” of social change and economic progress:

If you saw a smart car, its driver was white. If you saw a smart house, its owner was white. Its cleaner and gardener were black. This was not “many” or “most”. This was all.

The Addis Ababa Daily Monitor reports that mobile phone theft, including robberies organized by taxi drivers and accomplices, is on the rise at the same time as mobile phone penetration increases.

BBC’s excellent Ghana correspondent, Kwayku Sakyi-Addo (read his journal from the 2004 election if you need convincing that he’s one of the best African journalists writing today), found it easy to cross into Togo on foot from Ghana, despite the political turmoil Togo is undergoing.

Keith Smith, a missionary in Burkina Faso who blogs as Voice in the Desert, points out that Burkina is facing a major refugee crisis. More than three hundred thousand refugees have fled violence in C™te d’Ivoire and resettled in Burkina. They’re technically Burkinabes, at least by the ludicrious definition of Ivoirite put forward by Gbagbo’s supporters, though they’ve never lived in Burkina Faso. The refugee influx has increased the nation’s population by 3%, an impact the world’s third-poorest nation is extremely ill-equipped to handle. IRIN has more information on the situation.

My favorite Kenyan blogger, Ory Okolloh, has a typically smart set of reflections on what John Githongo’s resignation as Kenya’s chief anti-corruption official means for the Kibaki government.

Real blogging resumes just as soon as my head stops spinning from jetlag.

I”m in San Francisco for about 36 hours, getting ready to give a talk to the Grantmakers in Health conference on social software. (I’m ignoring all the Friends of a Friend stuff and focusing on the stuff I think is most interesting for the social change sector: wikis, weblogs and folksonomy.) Then it’s back to the east coast, where the Global Voices gang is doing a workshop on blogging for a group visiting from Jamaica. So I’m busily trying to put together an introduction to blogging for a group of musicians, activists and prison administrators from our island neighbor to the south.

In the process, I discovered Blogsome, a blog hosting service that makes me very, very happy. In the workshops I’ve been offering in Africa, India and other far-flung corners of the globe, I’ve been pushing novice bloggers to Blogger.com, for the simple reason that it’s free (as in free beer, which is very important for African friends who don’t have credit cards, for instance.) But Blogger speaks Atom, not RSS, which makes it hard for me to aggregate these blogs, and handles comments oddly (only registered users can comment.)

Blogsome, on the other hand, gives away free accounts on a WordPress server. WordPress has become my platform of choice these days - open source, easy to use, elegantly designed. So now I’m able to give workshops where participants get RSS-compliant, comment-ready, professional looking blogs.. for free. If anyone has any insight on who the Blogsome folks are and how they plan to keep this service running, please do let me know.

9:30 am, February 14, 2005

In the back seat of an Ambassador auto, on the road from Jodhpur to Jaipur.

My digital camera can record 129 images on its memory card before running out of space. Then I have to dump the images to my laptop, erase the card and charge the battery before I shoot again. I carry a second, smaller memory card in case I find myself in a situation where I’ve filled the first card and want to shoot more images.

It’s never happened. Once I’ve taken eighty or ninety shots - yesterday, I made it to one hundred - my brain is full, and I, too, need to dump images and recharge my batteries.

The travel I choose to do involves going to places I’ve never been and absorbing as much data - sight, sound, smell, taste, texture - as I’m able to. I seldom use the term “vacation” to describe this sort of travel, as the word implies that I am creating a vacancy, a space in my brain that might otherwise be filled with worries about my work, my house, my relationships. This sort of travel leaves no vacancy - any space vacated by everyday concerns is filled to bursting with new impressions. And while it’s fulfilling - and addictive - it’s also exhausting. I sleep ten hours a night, and it’s not enough to keep me from feeling stretched and drained.

I tried to check my email yesterday and discovered that, while I could access the server, it was entirely useless for me to try to read the mail, all 8,000 new messages worth. This does not imply that I will need to read 8,000 or more messages when I return home in a few days - I’ll likely read less than 500.

At least 4,000 of those messages are generated by programs I run to collect data for my research. Rather than entering the commands everyday to run these programs, I use a Unix program called “cron” which runs the program at a fixed time every day. Each time one of these programs runs - “cron jobs”, as we call them - they send me an email, letting me know that they ran succesfully or, ocassionally, how they failed. When I check mail using my laptop, I have a filter set up that files these messages into a special folder, which I can consult should something go wrong with my scripts. In other words, in ordinary circumstances, I never see these 40 daily messages.

I also have a set of filters that eliminate most spam from my email inbox. Without these filters in place, I would get a hundred creatively spelled offers a day for Viagra, porn and wire fraud opportunities - with them in place, my universe is almost blissfully spam free. Finally, filters take traffic from the dozen mailing lists I’m on and sort it into folders, allowing me to read those lists when I have time (which is to say, never.)

With these filters in place, my day’s information processing is a faily easy task. About 50 meaningful messages come in every day - about 20 demand a response. If I can process those messages and issue responses, I am doing the baseline work required to keep me a functioning member of my personal, professional and intellectual communities. Without those filters, I get 500 messages a day, 90% of which are not meaningful, and I drown before I can even issue a response.

This, I think, explain why my brain fills up so fast when I’m travelling. The human body has a number of remarkably efficient input devices which gather petabytes of data each day. In ordinary circumstances, much of this data is redundant - my house and my office look much the same from day to day; the view from the window changes very slowly; the constant noises the house makes are largely the same today as they were yesterday.

In ordinary circumstances, we monitor our environment for changes. If I hear a truck in the driveway, perhaps the UPS man is here and I need to sign for a delivery. If I smell smoke, the toast is burning. The petabytes of data I’m absorbing can be efficiently stored as changes from the base (or “no burnt toast”) state. My brain processes those changes and reacts accordingly, but filters out the vast majority of inputs - that information which has not changed from previous experience.

The result is a very efficient form of compression. Video that changes a great deal frame to frame is difficult to compress - you need complete copies of each frame. Video that changes little compresses easily - you only need to store the first frame, then the ways the second frame differs from the first, and so on.

Walking in Jodhpur, Rajastan, from the massive fort above the town to the Clocktower market, through winding alleyways past havelis painted with whitewash and indigo, all the data is new. The smell of the cowshit, sewers, incense and cooking oil has no exact parallel in my previous experience, and so I’m forced to record it all, uncompressed. It’s possible that more new data comes in through my pathetically inadequate human nose during this two-hour walk than I encounter in a week of ordinary life.

Taking photos on a walk like this becomes a process of backing up data. By putting the images that catch my eye onto a chip, I’m freeing more space to process sound and texture. (The first day in Jaisalmer, a desert city near the Pakistan border, we arrived during a sandstorm. I was almost entirely dysfunctional, not because the sandstorm was incapacitating, but because the sensation of being coated, face and arms, with fine dust was so novel.) The photos, after the fact, are occasionally beautiful, and often help me remember what it sounded and smelled like years after the trip is done. But even if they didn’t, I would have to take them anyway, otherwise I couldn’t walk the whole way from fort to market.

Rachel and I repeated the walk down from the fort yesterday. It was less overwhelming. I retried a few dozen shots, looking for richer colors and better angles of light. As we’d reach a fork in the road, I’d say “Let’s try something new” and strike off in an apparently novel direction. Each time, a sign for the “Blue City Cyber Cafe” or the “Ganesh Ayurvedic Healing Center” would remind us that we had, in fact, been down this road before. After four “novel” turns down “new” streets, I felt like I’d entered one of Calvino’s cities, where only a single, long street exists no matter which way I “chose” to turn. It was as if the programmers who had built Jodhpur had only rendered a fixed quantity of scenes - wander the city far enough and the scenes would, neccesarily, repeat themselves.

As we walked on, a new theory: my brain, overwhelmed with data, was trying to optimize compression, taking me down the paths I’d walked three days prior in a desperate attempt to avoid being overwhelmed by input. The street would feel novel until I found a reference point - usually something I had photographed - that let me know I’d been here before. The impressions of that first walk were too indistinct to allow the brain to only save changes, but at least they’d begun wearing smooth some pathways, making them easier to travel than entirely new roads.

And this is, ultimately, why long airplane rides at the end of a trip are refreshing. The air is stale, the food bland, the seats cramped, the movies vapid. They’re entirely predictable and unchanging, which, to an overtaxed brain, is a cool towel on a hot, dusty face.

(If you’re interested in the photos I took in India, please take a look at some of them here.)

My mother was skeptical when I told her I didn’t know if I’d be able to email her from Bangalore. “Isn’t that India’s cybercapital? Shouldn’t you be able to get connectivity anywhere?”

Keep up with the US press, as my mom does, and you’ll probably have the perception that Bangalore is paved with bits. In this, the capital of the international outsourcing movement, you trip over fiberoptic cable laid in the streets and it’s hard to have a conversation over the great sucking sound of US jobs flowing from California to Karnataka.

Or not. Because Bangalore’s an Indian city, and the stylish tech park where Yahoo! keeps a team of programmers isn’t far from the rural camp we stayed at last week, where cows wander in the streets. Most of the time, Bangalore feels very much like cities I’ve been to in Indonesia or East Africa - maybe a little greener, maybe a little cleaner, but still crowded, noisy, busy and polluted. And, while Bangalore has rebranded itself around IT, it’s pretty clear that the vast majority of the people I’ve encountered on the streets or on motorcycle rickshaws aren’t working as computer programmers.

It’s not hard to see how some journalists have written pieces comparing Bangalore to Los Angeles. Have coffee at “Barrista”, an outdoor espresso bar, or dinner at the Park Hotel, where the restaurant “i-t.alia” tries to make a connection between excellent Italian food and the technology industry, and you can easily forget you’re in Southern India. But, unlike in Africa, where expat culture takes place behind high walls, these little pieces of LA bump right up against the other Bangalore, with chai stalls, roadside temples and a five-lane crush of ancient Ambassador cars, rickshaws and countless motorbikes.

I’ve been enjoying these juxtapositions, the global business world alongside the developing world. But now, trying to watch the Patriots put away the Eagles in the Superbowl, I’m wishing that my decidedly developing world hotel had managed to pirate a slightly more reliable ESPN feed. Say one with a picture, for instance. Go Pats!

Africa’s longest-serving dictator, Gnassingbe Eyadema, died a few hours ago while out of the country for medical treatment. Anyone hoping that this would end almost four decades of dominance of Togo by a man named Eyadema may need to wait a little longer. The military appointed one of Eyadema’s sons - Faure - his successor, counter to the Togolese constitution, which would appoint the speaker of Parliament as the successor.

Speaker of Parliament Fambare Natchaba Ouattara was trying to get back to Lom from Paris when his plane was diverted to Benin, because the Togolese army had closed the nation’s borders. This may be one of the reasons that the African Union has termed the move a “coup”.

The Economist ran an article in late December, titled “Toughs at the Top”, featuring Turkmenbashi, Eyadema and Kim Jong Il as the last great charismatic dictators. Let’s all hope that Faure is not positioning himself to fill the old man’s shoes.

A great story from Ory from her recent travels in Kenya: