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“China’s control of news and information
prevented people from receiving important
announcements about SARS and may have
worsened the epidemic. One cannot help
but wonder if the scale of the SARS crisis
might have been held down if the Chinese
had not been jamming our broadcasts and
blocking our web pages. As this disaster
reveals, Beijing still believes total control of
ideas is still vital to its national security.”
—Jay Henderson, director of the Voice of
America East Asia and Pacific Division
“Iran’s cleric-run government has declared
war on satellite television and allegedly
begun jammingAmerican-based channels,
blaming them for inciting the wave of
student-led protests which have brought
bloody battles to Teheran’s streets… Many
of the demonstrators first learned of the
protests from Persian-language satellite
channels, run by U.S.-based exile groups.”
—Damien McElroy, London
Telegraph
correspondent in Beirut
The celestial and cyberspace thought police
in east and west Asia have been busy at work
in the spring and summer of 2003.
China and Iran have expanded significantly
their blocking of news and comment from
abroad lately. Yet technical specialists and
programme makers in theWest have registered
some successes in breaching theGreat Firewalls
erected to prevent free speech and a free flow
of information into those countries. Here is a
summary:
Iran
In Iran, according to the
Nasim-e-Saba
newspaper, the government began filtering a
list of 187 Internet websites in early May,
including those of two U.S. government-
funded international broadcast services. They
are the VOA Persian Service and Radio Farda,
a relatively new joint project of RFE/RL and
VOA. Reuters reported that these two services
were among the first sites to be blocked, since
they attracted around a million visitors a month
before the crackdown. Estimates of the total
number of websites targeted by Teheran have
been as high as 15,000. Despite restrictions,
however, many people in Iran have been able
to circumvent the barriers and still access
Persian language news texts and other material
from external sources.
As anti-government and pro-reform
demonstrations in Iran gathered steam in June,
the authorities there stepped up the jamming
of radio and TVPersian language transmissions
from abroad. According to the Paris-based
Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), different
state agencies in the Iranian capital are using
hi-tech equipment that emit microwaves or
signal noise to contain what the regime
describes as “a cultural invasion.”
In addition to blocking websites and
broadcasts from abroad and opposition groups
at home and shutting down independent-
minded local newspapers, Iranian authorities
appear to be focusing on privately-funded
television and radio outlets in Los Angeles.
The stations are supported by the huge
community of Iranian immigrants in southern
California. Key among these 24/7 broadcasters
is the National Iranian Television Network
(NITV), which transmits a mixture of news,
politics, cooking programs, pop music and
videos, and pre-revolutionary romance films.
The
Los Angeles Times
described the scene
recently in the NITV studio: “Starting at 1l
p. m., Pacific coast time — midmorning in
Tehran — former Iranian pop singer Zia
Atabay appears on a set with a telephone and
fax machine for a program that has the look of
a public access TV show and the sound of
American-style talk radio.Atabay fields callers
from Iran speaking out against their
government as the fax machine churns out
letters in Farsi (Persian). One caller, a young
woman, is crying. Atabay translates her call,
saying her mother was taken away by police
several days earlier and she feared for her
safety.” Another around the clock station run
by Iranian immigrants in America is Radio
Sedaye Iran, on the air since 1988. Several of
the southern California stations are reported
to have received financial support from Reza
Pahlavi, the former Shah’s son who now lives
in exile in the United States.
Protest demonstrations in Iran spread to three
other cities besides Teheran in mid-June. “It’s
a sign, (like) those small and relatively minor
noises that can be heard when a dam is
cracking,” a Teheran university physics
professor told the
Christian Science Monitor
.
“The engineer (at the dam) knows that this is
not a joke, and could result in a major
catastrophe.”
In a recent Friday sermon in Teheran, former
PresidentAliAkbar Rafsanjani warned Iranians
to “be careful not to be trapped by the evil
television stations that America has
established.” The Iranian government has
arrested or beaten a number of journalists
covering the protest rallies, including Radio
Farda reporter Ensafali Hedayat. RFE/RL
President Thomas A. Dine condemned the
detention and mistreatment of journalists
“doing their job of providing news and
information to the Iranian public.”
The impact of the television broadcasts and
Iran’s escalating blockage of the Farda and
VOA Persian websites has aroused
Congressional interest in the United States.
Republican Senators Sam Brownback of
China, Iran and the Internet
Beijing and Iran continue to jam broadcasts from
theWest, despite repeated appeals from London and
Washington to cease, reports
Alan Heil
