text:
Russian opposition divided over online ‘smart voting’ campaign · Global Voices
Maxim Edwards

“The Kremlin and United Russia are sly and sophisticated. To win, we need to get smart,” said Alexey Navalny in his November 2018 video launching the Smart Voting campaign.
An influential Russian activist’s call to “vote smart” in upcoming local elections has left the country’s opposition bitterly divided — again.
On September 8, 19 regions of Russia go to the polls to elect local governors and parliamentarians. The mood is particularly tense in Moscow, where the electoral commission has barred independent opposition candidates from running. Mass protests have been held in the Russian capital every weekend since the commission’s controversial ruling in July. Police have violently detained thousands of people and repeatedly arrested opposition politicians.
Many of the rejected candidates are linked to the Anti-Corruption Foundation led by Alexey Navalny, whose YouTube videos detailing the misdeeds of powerful politicians regularly rack up thousands of views. In one video from November 2018 Navalny outlined his “smart voting” strategy, urging compatriots to challenge pro-Kremlin candidates by voting for the strongest alternative, regardless of what party they represent. Russia’s opposition has called for tactical voting before: in 2011’s parliamentary elections, Navalny called on Russians to vote for “anyone [else]” besides the ruling United Russia party.
But this time, Navalny’s drive for tactical voting is driven by big data.
Last year, Navalny and his colleagues launched a website which allows users to enter the address where they are registered to vote. It then calculates which candidate is most capable of beating United Russia in the given constituency. A Telegram bot offers the same service. The tool appears to be popular, or at least popular enough for a Moscow court to block the website on December 19, 2018, on the grounds that it did not provide users with the ability to opt out of processing their personal data.
“In some places there are better candidates,” Navalny explained in the 2018 video. “In other places there are more oppositional candidates. In some places there are single-member constituencies, in others there are multiple member constituencies. Some have one round, others have two. Most people don’t want to deal with all that. So we’ll deal with it for you; we’ll do the analysis […] and you vote for the candidate most likely to weaken United Russia and its monopoly.”
Navalny argued that any attempt at a formal alliance between opposition parties would quickly be crushed by the Kremlin. But as the opposition vote was still divided between several parties, he continued, United Russia or pro-Kremlin candidates are often able to win constituencies with just 35% of the vote or less. For example, while the ruling party took 38 of the 45 seats in the last elections to Moscow’s City Duma, only 16 of them were won with more than 50% of the vote.
Those statistics matter in light of the Russian authorities’ falling popularity in recent years. By January 2019, United Russia’ approval rating fell to 32.2%, its lowest in 14 years. Observers were quick to point out that not only did Putin choose to run as an independent during presidential elections in 2018, but United Russia’s approved candidates in the forthcoming local elections have done the same.
So while no Russian disillusioned with the country’s rulers has any qualms with voting against United Russia, many are deeply uneasy about whom that means they must vote for.
In most cases, those other candidates are from A Just Russia, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), the three other parties represented in the Duma, or Russia’s parliament. They are known as the “systemic opposition,” and are widely viewed as compromised, helping the authorities maintain a facade of competitiveness in an increasingly authoritarian political setup.
What do Russians do if they want change? Some join the “systemic” parties anyway, hoping to change them into genuine opposition forces from within (particularly noticeable in the KPRF’s case). Others vote for Russia’s many extra-parliamentary parties, which are sometimes permitted to run but are viewed as less tainted. Older dissidents prefer the time-honoured tactic of a boycott, noted the independent journalist Yevgeniya Albats during a recent radio debate with Navalny about smart voting. Many Russians simply ignore the entire spectacle.
The journalist and musician Artemy Troitsky summed up the dilemma neatly:
“Умное голосование” – прагматично, но аморально; “голосовать по совести” – благородно, но бесполезно; бойкотировать выборы – приятно, но голос может уйти врагам; портить бюллетени непристойностями – ещё приятнее, но повышает явку… КАКОЙ ВЫБОР! Вот это демократия.
— Артемий Троицкий (@aktroitsky) August 28, 2019
“Smart voting” is pragmatic but amoral. “Voting according to one’s conscience” is noble but useless. Boycotting elections feels good but your vote could be given in support of another candidate. Spoiling ballots with obscenities feels even better, but still raises the turnout… WHAT A CHOICE! What a democracy.
— Artemy Troitsky, Twitter (@aktroitsky) August 28, 2019
It is an unenviable choice. As opposition activist Maxim Katz wrote Telegram on August 14, it may be a fundamentally unresolvable one. Any attempt to force others to choose, wrote Katz, would only accelerate counterproductive schisms in the opposition.
Meanwhile Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian oligarch who runs the opposition Open Russia Foundation from exile, categorically stated in a Telegram post on August 22 that voting for any candidate who did not publicly denounce repressions and the abuse of judicial independence would be an act of treachery against protesters and political prisoners.
When it comes to the systemic opposition, that is a widely shared view. Indeed, Boris Vishnevsky, an opposition lawmaker on St Petersburg’s city council, expressed his opposition to smart voting in a column for Novaya Gazeta on August 20. Vishnevsky reflected that in 2011, “we sent a huge number of communists and ‘Just Russia’ deputies to parliament, who quickly became indistinguishable from United Russia and LDPR deputies,” supporting repressive legislation proposed by the government. This much was even admitted by Leonid Volkov, a close associate of Navalny, who told Meduza in an interview in August that the smart voting drive would only lead to “a couple of decent people” being elected, while most of the new parliamentarians would be “a rabble.”
If it pays off, “smart voting” could put some of this “rabble” in an uncomfortable position. After all, elections in Russia frequently feature “technical candidates,” who contest rigged votes fully expecting to lose. In St Petersburg, the KPRF nominated the well-known film director Vladimir Bortko as its candidate for governor, facing off against the unpopular acting governor Alexander Beglov. When Bortko made a surprise announcement on August 30 that he would withdraw from the race, commentators wondered whether he had ever been in it to win:
Дезертирство Бортко лучшая иллюстрация того, зачем нужно умное голосование. Его боятся даже технические кандидаты. Путинские настолько уверены в поражении, что больше не могут себе позволить даже фасад соревновательности.
— Mikhail Svetov (@msvetov) August 30, 2019
Bortko’s desertion is the best illustration of why we need smart voting. Even technical candidates fear it. Putin’s allies are so certain of defeat that they cannot even permit themselves the façade of competitiveness.
— Mikhail Svetov, Twitter, August 30, 2019
Given the communists’ increasingly bold criticism of Russia’s socio-economic woes, candidates like Bortko were destined to do well. Political analyst Fedor Krashennikov wrote that smart voting was bound to mostly benefit the KPRF.
“In modern Russian politics, everything is arranged so that it is worse for a systemic player to win than to lose. [Party leader Gennady] Zyuganov knows that communist deputies will only remain loyal to him if they know that their seats have been bargained for with the Kremlin and not handed to them by Navalny,” concluded Krashennikov in his August 21 column for Vedomosti, a popular Russian newspaper.
The authorities could also simply annul any unexpected surprises at the polls, as they did in elections for the governor of the Primorye region last September. After KPRF candidate Andrey Ishchenko nearly won the first round of the race to become governor of the far eastern region, he was barred from contesting a run-off vote in December.
Then again, perhaps such a heavy handed response from the Kremlin is exactly what Russia’s opposition is counting on:
да господи как вы все заебали хаять умное голосование.
вы рилли не понимаете зачем нужен движ с ним?
чтобы спровоцировать власти на масштабные фальсификации выборов, тем самым привлечь внимание к событиям, тем самым окончательно лишить всё легитимности и вследствие митинги.
— swetlana chromowskaja (@chromowskaja) August 26, 2019
For God’s sake, you’re all so fucking determined to find fault with smart voting.
Do you really not understand why it’s necessary to go along with it?
In order to provoke the authorities into large scale electoral falsifications, thereby drawing attention to these events, finally removing any legitimacy [from them], culminating in protests.
— swetlana chromowskaja, Twitter, August 26, 2019

author: Maxim Edwards


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Unified under one font system as Myanmar prepares to migrate from Zawgyi to Unicode · Global Voices
Juan Cebu

Ancient Myanmar script at the entrance of a temple. Photo from Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-4.0
On 1 October 2019, Myanmar hopes to begin its migration from its use of the nationally developed Zawgyi computer font to the adoption of a unified system that conforms to the international standard called Unicode.
Major stakeholders such as mobile service providers, media and content producers, civil society organizations, and developers from the tech community have been told by the government to prepare measures for the adoption of the Unicode. All government ministries have already fully migrated to Unicode in April 2019.
Despite the convenience of using the popular local Zawgyi font, it is not compatible with new information technologies.
With less than a month left before the scheduled migration date, more and more ordinary users are starting to change the settings of their digital devices by installing new Myanmar Unicode keyboards. On Facebook, there are groups such as Myanmar Unicode Area and Myanmar Unicode Font Users; and pages that include Unicode and Myanmar Unicode Migration, where users are actively discussing their experience and the challenges they encounter in migrating to a new font.
Myanmar was slapped with international sanctions during the rule of the junta which grabbed power in the early 1960s and lasted for more than five decades. Under such isolation, it was not surprising to see a local font system like Zawgyi invented to easily accommodate the need for computer communication in Myanmar.
During the early 2000s, the earlier versions of Myanmar fonts were difficult to use and learn, which explains why they were mainly activated in office settings. Installing Myanmar characters on computers also required specialized technical skills since the earlier versions of Windows and Macintosh operating systems did not support the Myanmar language.
Most Myanmar users in internet chat rooms used the available Roman letters to write Myanmar sounds, an earlier typing style popularly known as Myanglish or Burglish.
In 2005, a Myanmar Unicode Font called Myanmar1 was introduced by Myanmar Unicode and NLP Research Centre, but it was not fully developed. Improved and updated versions of this font were released the following years. At the same time, a partially Unicode compliant Myazedi font was available to read Myanmar text on the internet. However, it was patented by its developer which made it inaccessible to the wider public.
When the Zawgyi keyboard and font was invented by Myanmar developers in 2006, it made use of the visual typing and encoding method as one would write it on paper, rather than using logical linguistics and computer encoding conventions of Unicode. For many users, visual typing order was relatively easier to learn compared to earlier fonts.
Standard Myanmar Unicode fonts were never mainstreamed unlike the private and partially Unicode compliant Zawgyi font.
Under international sanctions, native Myanmar language support in Windows computers was not available. The easiest fix was to manually install the free Zawgyi fonts and keyboards.
This coincided with the rising popularity of internet cafes in urban areas around the late 2000s when more and more ordinary people could communicate in Myanmar using Google Talk and learn to type faster and better with Zawgyi. At the same time, blogging on Google Blogspot became a popular activity with many writers publishing content using Zawgyi. When Facebook became popular in 2010, Zawgyi was naturally chosen to communicate.
After the democratic transition in 2010, Myanmar became the newest opportunity for the tech market. This was followed by a huge drop in SIM card prices which caused the sudden boom in mobile phone users starting around 2013-14.
When a fully functioning Unicode Myanmar text was to be supported in Windows and MacOS in 2011, many users were still reverting back to Zawgyi font and keyboard on their computers as by that time Zawgyi was already the most accepted Myanmar font by the population.
Since 2013, earlier Android OS versions had built-in native Unicode font to read Myanmar texts, but they lack a Myanmar keyboard. Thus, Zawgyi still remained a popular fix. Local mobile phone shops installed Zawgyi fonts and keyboards on new phones as part of their services to a vast majority of the population during the mobile phone boom in 2014. Meanwhile, some of the Android phones produced by China for the Myanmar market installed Zawgyi as the main font to supply popular demand.
As there were no native keyboards to type Myanmar Unicode in the beginning for both Android and iPhones, many local developers have produced a variety of popular Zawgyi keyboards to install on them.
For many users, having to adapt two different fonts system that are not compatible with each other on an everyday basis is a big burden. Unless one is a tech-savvy person who is able to switch fonts, ordinary users are automatically excluded from accessing content written in one font or the other (i.e. Unicode users cannot correctly see a large amount of Zawgyi contents or messages and vice versa). Therefore, for most users using just one font, in most cases Zawgyi, is the easiest way to fit into society by being able to communicate in the correct font with everyone. The tech community in Myanmar dubbed this situation as the civil war between Myanmar fonts.
One of the most apparent examples of font rendering problem is Myanmar Wikipedia, where all articles are written in Unicode for long term benefit. That means a large majority of the population is unable to read Wikipedia in their first language.
An example of a Wikipedia Article in Myanmar. Left is on a Zawgyi phone where the article text was rendered incorrectly, compared to the right with correct texts on a Unicode supported phone. Screenshots by the author.
Although Zawgyi was based on Unicode's code points, it does not completely conform to the Unicode's standardization for Myanmar script. It also disregarded and bypassed the code points reserved for ethnic languages. [Read the detailed explanation of the problem of Zawgyi's encoding method here].
The technical problem with Zawgyi's encoding method (i.e. encoding in visual order), at first glance, is that alphanumerical sorting will not make sense as vowels are written first instead of consonants most of the time. That means searching and indexing for search engines would never bring accurate results in Zawgyi.
The next problem for such a flawed system is an incompatibility with machine learning. For such messy information storage, it was nearly impossible for computer programs to make sense of its encoding order.
Lack of AI (artificial intelligence) for the language means many language services such as text recognition, text voice reading, spellcheck, and machine translation cannot be developed.
Tech activist Nyein Chan Ko Ko wrote how a lot of institutions found it cumbersome to accommodate incompatibility of two-character systems.
A lot of Burmese contents were proliferating on the internet. But, as you know, data [Zawgyi] was messy without any systematic order and structure because most of them were not correctly encoded. The government began to realize the importance of Unicode when they tried to change to E-Government system. Every IT project developed in Myanmar always faced that issue between Zawgyi and Unicode. They had to invest more time to solve that language problem. And developers as well. They want to end this war.
The most apparent benefit of standard character encoding in the local language is that many institutions that store a large amount of information in Myanmar will be able to overcome the burden of cleaning up the messy database of Zawgyi and speed up the computer-assisted information processing.
In addition, effective implementation of the e-government system will become possible with a unified and standard language encoding, and data storage and access.
For years, the tech civil society has been asking the government about Unicode adoption during digital rights forums to create a more socially inclusive internet environment.
One of the most important aspects that Unicode has developed for Myanmar scripts is that its code points cover additional characters for ethnic languages written in Myanmar script so that all minority languages can be digitized on computers. Of the Unicode system, the government recommends the use of Pyidaungsu (ပြည်ထောင်စု) Font. As the name of the font suggests (Union in Myanmar language), it will allow users to type Myanmar as well as other ethnic languages in Myanmar script within one font.
In addition, Unicode will improve natural language processing and enable features such as text to voice reading and voice typing, so that people with disability can have better access to computer communication with the Myanmar language.
One of the reasons for the resistance to shifting to a new font system comes from the perception that Unicode keyboard would take a long time to relearn to type in a new keyboard.
The most challenging aspect of the migration is that a large volume of Myanmar information and data have been stored on the internet in Zawgyi. Also, a majority of Myanmar social media content are all produced in Zawgyi. An abrupt migration overnight would cause chaos, and therefore, it needs step by step adoption of a new system with a lot of technical help.
Tech companies have already signified support for the Unicode migration efforts. For example, Facebook said it will help in the shift from Zawgyi to Unicode by auto converting between two fonts so that users can see each other texts without noticing the difference. Myanmar's influential mobile phones provider Huawei said it will set up a hotline in support of the migration. Telecommunication service providers like Telenor also announced, as per government instruction, that they will be switching to Unicode effective 1 October. Myanmar Computer Federation has also tapped the help of celebrities and influencers to become Unicode ambassadors and teach the public about the migration. It has also established a Unicode Migration website, hotline and Facebook page.
Earlier in August, Myanmar press, media, and content producers were also instructed to switch to Unicode.
Now that the government is fully supporting the adoption of Unicode after many years of advocacy by the tech sector, public education will be the next challenge in mobilizing the whole nation to become unified under a single digital font system.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Juan Cebu


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Global Voices is seeking a Finance & Administrative manager · Global Voices
Georgia Popplewell

Screen grab from a video taken on January 25, 2015 at the Global Voices 2015 Summit in Cebu, Philippines. Video by Global Voices and PR Works.
We are a global, virtual, nonprofit organization (read about our Mission here) with no office or physical headquarters, so there is no geographic requirement associated with this position. Candidates must be comfortable setting their own schedules and working in a wholly virtual environment.
The Finance & Admin manager is responsible for the overall direction of Global Voices’ financial, administrative and human resources work. Responsibilities include strategic analysis and oversight of financial and administrative systems, legal standards, contracts and forms, other relevant processes, and participation in strategic planning for the health of the organization. The Finance & Admin manager is responsible for finance and administration for both Stichting Global Voices (SGV), a Dutch nonprofit, and Friends of Global Voices (FGV), a US 501(c)3.
The job involves the following:
Other duties as assigned.
To apply:
Submit a résumé and a cover letter in English that highlights your work and explains why you would be a good fit for Global Voices to jobs@globalvoices.org. Please include your name and “Finance & Admin Manager” in the subject line.
We strongly welcome candidates from outside North America and Western Europe and encourage people currently contributing to the Global Voices project to apply.

author: Georgia Popplewell


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Hong Kong students bring protests back to school · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Statue of Democracy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Image from Hong Kong public broadcaster, RTHK.
The summer holiday ended on 2 September and students in Hong Kong have returned to schools and universities. Many pro-establishment supporters were expecting that this would mark a gradual die down of the disruptive protests that have taken over the city.
However, they may have underestimated the determination of Hong Kong’s young generation as thousands of university and secondary school students have brought street protests to the school campus.
On 31 August, a “Statue of Democracy” was erected at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The statue, a work sponsored by online crowdfunding, depicts a protester in the front line equipped in full gear with a helmet, goggles and gas mask, holding an umbrella in their right hand and a flag with the slogan, “Reclaim Hong Kong. Revolution of our Time”.
Earlier in June, The Chinese University of Hong Kong was labeled (in Chinese) “The University of the Rioters” on Google map as a part of a smear campaign against university students’ participation in the anti-extradition protests. But both the students and alumni of CUHK gladly took on the label with pride.
During the university student union’s orientation with the incoming students, black t-shirts and typical protest gear became the dress code:
What freshers’ orientation in Hong Kong looks like this year
Photo from CUHK Local Society#antiELAB #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/soNO4X7shR
— Victor Ting (@VictorTing7) August 28, 2019
On the first day of the new school term, the campus was the main site for the university class boycott assembly:
Incredibly long banners at today’s #antielab class boycott assembly at the Chinese University of #HongKong (CUHK) on the first day of new school term. Photos by MP Weekly. https://t.co/3XXPyLYrRY pic.twitter.com/6cFVJDmXoc
— Carmen Ng 吳嘉文 (@Carmen_NgKaMan) September 2, 2019
About 180 high schools have students joining class boycott action as well. As the majority of the secondary schools are sponsored by the government’s education bureau, high school students have to face a lot more pressure as they participate in protest actions. Before the school term started, the education bureau handed down a notice demanding that school administrators discourage class boycotts, mute political discussion in classrooms, and submit protest reports to the bureau. Yet, the students have not backed off.
On the first day of school, thousands of high school students gathered in Central to attend a class boycott assembly:
HK school students strike rally underway in Central, the crowd dressed in either white school uniforms or black resistance uniforms, chanting slogans of the movement. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/KCxXaL7Wc2
— Antony Dapiran (@antd) September 2, 2019
On the second day, they returned back to school and formed a human chain, reciting the five major demands of the anti-extradition protests, including complete withdrawal of the bill, an independent investigation of the incident, democratic political reform, etc…:
Children are our future.
Why are these HK students holding demonstrations at school? All because they know too well: Freedom is Priceless! Democracy must not be abused!
.#HongKongProtests #antiEALB #FreedomHK pic.twitter.com/Gkfebn7pTR
— Jennifer HY Chan ??⛱ (@Jennifer_hk2019) September 3, 2019
Some of the protests are very creative and touching. In one school, when the school authorities played the Chinese national anthem during the inauguration ceremony, students sang “Do you hear the people sing?” instead:
#TearjerkerAlert Secondary students singing “Do You Hear The People Sing” instead of the Chinese national anthem during the school Inauguration ceremony. They remained silent when the school anthem was played & chanted slogans afterwards. #BackToSchool #HongKongProtests #antiELAB pic.twitter.com/HWxtUXsSk0
— Freedom HK (@FreedomHKG) September 4, 2019
Only a few schools allowed students to take collective action inside the campus:
Secondary school students gathered at the basketball court and the corridors on each floor, chanting “there are no rioters, only tyranny” and “#Hongkongers, add oil!”
video clip from telegram yesterday#FreedomHK #antiELAB #HongKongProtests #ClassBoycott #HongKong pic.twitter.com/ligvTSabC4
— Freedom HK (@FreedomHKG) September 3, 2019
Freedom is not a given. In some high schools, pro-establishment alumni gathered outside the campus to intimidate students. Even worse, a number of school administrators called up police officers to stop the students from protesting. A school boy was hurt rather badly and hospitalized as a police officer chased after him inside the campus:
A high school in TaiPo, the Principal refused to let anti-government students get inside the school area this morning. Police came and recorded ID no. of some students. A boy was hurt when taking down by police. #HongKong #HKPoliceState #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/2QHnNO9olD
— Freedom HK (@FreedomHKG) September 3, 2019
Instead of reflecting upon China’s policy in Hong Kong, Beijing's Hong Kong and Macau Affair Office recited the need to strengthen patriotic education in Hong Kong. The proposal of a compulsory moral and national education curriculum in Hong Kong in 2012 nurtured Joshua Wong and his cohort of student activists. Currently, the anti-extradition protests have brought up a more resilient generation of student protesters. Repressive policies may control the present, but not the future.

author: Oiwan Lam


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Millions in India’s north-eastern Assam state at risk of losing citizenship · Global Voices
Rezwan

Huge crowds at a polling booth in 2nd phase of Assam Assembly Election-2006 at Rupahi, Nowgaon, Assam on April 10, 2006. Image via Flickr by Public.Resource.Org CC BY 2.0.
Approximately 1.9 million people are now facing the possibility of becoming stateless in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam after being excluded from the updated National Register of Citizens (NRC).
According to the Assam government, the exercise of updating 33 million citizen records in Assam is to detect and deport undocumented immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. As tensions and emotions continue to run high, the consequences of this process have already become fatal after one 60-year old women jumped into a well upon hearing a rumour that she had been excluded from the list.
Last June, a draft version of the registry was released, which left out 4.1 million applicants. The latest publication has drawn criticism from within the government's own party and has left the fate of excluded Assam residents up in the air.
The National Register of Citizens (NRC) is a government register containing the names and relevant information for the identification of all Indian citizens. The register was initiated after the 1951 Census of India and, until recently, it has not been updated. The north-eastern state of Assam is the first state in India to update the NRC.
To apply for the NRC, people in Assam had to show documentary evidence that they or their ancestors were born in Assam before March 25, 1971, the official cut-off date. Politicians say the solution for the ethnic and religious clashes will come through the citizens’ register as the state has two-thirds of the Bengalis who are also predominantly Muslim.
Overcrowded train transferring refugees during the partition of India, 1947. This was considered to be the largest migration in human history. Image via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
Anti-Bengali sentiment runs deep in the state of Assam. After the 1947 partition of India on the basis of religion, a mass migration took place as Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh moved to neighbouring Indian states, such as West Bengal and Assam among others, while Muslims from those places migrated to Bangladesh. However, this mass migration created tension among the local inhabitants and the indigenous Assamese people which led to the creation of anti-Bengali movements like Bongal Kheda (kick the Bengalis out).
The anti-immigrant movement was bolstered in Assam in the 1970s after the liberation war of Bangladesh which saw another influx of refugees from Bangladesh. In 1980, the All Assam Students Union (AASU) submitted the first memorandum demanding an update to the NRC in order to expel “foreigners”. In 1983, more than 2000 Bengalis were killed in Assam in a racial massacre as fallout after then-Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's decision to give immigrants from Bangladesh the right to vote. Not a single perpetrator was convicted. Within India, the label of “Bangladeshi” is often used as a slur, and Bangladeshi migrants are often automatically thought of as Muslim and illegal.
The process of updating Assam's NRC started in 2013 when the Supreme Court of India passed an order on a petition by an NGO called Assam Public Works. As the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government steps ahead with the registry, many Bengali Muslims in Assam feel they are the primary targets of exclusion.
There are a lot of allegations and criticisms against this final NRC list, among these criticisms are the irregularities in the chosen names — some family members have been added to the list while others were left out. Even the ruling BJP has criticised the final NRC.
A former member of parliament and minister Jyotiraditya M. Scindia tweeted:
Parents included, daughters left out. Sisters included, brothers left out. Families of ex-employees of the govt (and even the ex-president of the country!) being excluded.
The irregularities emerging out from the #NRC exercise are appalling.
— Jyotiraditya M. Scindia (@JM_Scindia) September 2, 2019
Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister of the State of Bengal tweeted:
Earlier I was not aware of the full NRC fiasco. As more and more information is coming in, we are shocked to see that names of more than 1 lakh Gorkha people have been excluded from the list. (1/3)
— Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) September 1, 2019
An editorial at the Indian Express stated:
Instead of blaming the process, political parties need to recognise, perhaps, the flaw that lies in the imagination that produced the NRC. Modern societies are shaped by migration and it may be futile to engage in costly exercises to identify “outsiders”.
Those who are excluded from the NRC will get 120 days to appeal and to prove their citizenship at regional quasi-judicial bodies named foreigner's tribunals, some of which are already at work. The tribunals will decide on the cases within six months from the date of the appeal. According to reports, up to 400 tribunals are expected to be set up to deal with the list.
Imagine making 1.3 billion Indians stand in the queue to identify a few lakhs [a lakh refers to 100,000] alleged Bangladeshi Muslims. The NRC is not to identify illegal Pakistanis etc in India but to victimise, mainly Bengali Hindus of East Pakistan who have been fleeing since 1905 division of Bengal. https://t.co/DJyqdmt6eA
— Suhas Chakma (@ChakmaSuhas) September 3, 2019
It is being reported that out of the 1.9 million who were excluded in the list, 1.3 million are Hindus of which 1.1 million are Bangladeshi Hindus. The BJP government had promised that they will provide refuge for persecuted Hindus from all over the world. So it remains to be seen how they deal with the outcome of the list after the judicial process.
According to reports, after all the remedies available under the law have been exhausted, those identified as “illegal” migrants will be locked-up in detention camps until they are deported.
Assam's Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma is optimistic that “India's friend” Bangladesh will take these people back.
However, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen reacted to the news by saying that the NRC is India's internal issue. He doesn't think that those left out of the list were from Bangladesh:
There is no reason why Bangladeshis should move to India. Bangladesh is doing much better and therefore it does not look like there is any interest in any Bangladeshi to go to India.
Human rights organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) is helping people in distress by opening a toll-free helpline in four languages to provide people with correct information about the process.
However, for millions of people excluded from the list, the future looks bleak.
Read our special coverage: Who is paying the cost of India’s declining democracy? for more details on the protests against the citizenship laws in India.

author: Rezwan


text:
Bangladeshi brides will no longer be questioned about their virginity for marriage certificates · Global Voices
Samaya Anjum

A Bangladeshi bride in a wedding dress. Image via Flickr by MD. Hasibul Haque Sakib. CC BY NC 2.0
On 25 August 2019, a High Court in Bangladesh ordered the country's government to replace the word kumari’(virgin) with obibahito (unmarried) on marriage certificates. The verdict came after a five-year-long legal battle, and have been hailed a landmark victory for the equal rights campaigners.
In the South Asian country, the solemnization of Muslim couples in a ceremony of Nikah (meaning Muslim marriages) are performed by government-assigned Marriage Registrars keeping in accordance with the Muslim Marriages and Divorces (Registration) Act, 1974. Apart from a few amendments made to the Act, the rituals have been carried out in a similar the same manner over the years.
Gender equality in Bangladesh… The High court ruled Sunday that Virgin — or Kumari in Bengali – will be replaced with ” unmarried “
Other 2 options on form, ” divorced and widow will remain…..welcome judgement
— TK Rangarajan (@tkrcpim) August 28, 2019
In 2014, three civil rights organizations — Bangladesh Legal Aids and Services Trust (BLAST), Naripokkho and Bangladesh Mohila Parishad — filed a writ petition that challenged clause no. 5 of the prescribed marriage registration form, also known as Kabin-nama. The Kabin-nama is a written document that is signed by two Muslim partners that, under the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance 1961, is legal evidence of their civil union and lays out the rights and obligations of the bride and groom. Clause no. 5 of the form requires a bride to specify whether she is kumari, widowed or divorced. The groom is not required to make a similar statement. In the writ submitted to the High Court, the campaigners stated that the clause “perpetuates discrimination between women and men and results in violation of Articles 27, 28, 31 and 32 of the Constitution.”
They further proposed the replacement of kumari with the term obibahito. In the old Bangla language, kumari signifies the state of being unmarried; however, it also connotes the alternate meaning of being a virgin. The commonly used ‘obibahito’ is a very specific term meaning unmarried. On 14 September 2014, the High Court bench of Justice Naima Haider and Justice Md. Jahangir Hossain made an official inquiry to the government in order to ask why the use of kumari should not be deemed discriminatory against women, and the amendments mentioned in the petition be implemented. After holding the hearing, the verdict was given by the High Court on 25th of August 2019.
The verdict is hailed as a landmark victory for the organizations that campaigned for the deliverance of the lawsuit. On the authority of the new law, the groom also has to state if he is unmarried, widowed or divorced.
After the verdict, Aynun Nahar Siddiqua of Bangladesh Legal Aids and Services Trust (BLAST) spoke with the Daily Start about how there were no changes brought about to the Kabin-nama (which was designed during the Pakistan regime in the 1960s) even after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971.
In another interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, she said, “It's a ruling that gives us the belief that we can fight and create more changes for women in the future.”
Netizens took to social media to comment on this latest decision. Rahat Mustafiz at Women Chapter blog writes about the common desire of some Bangladeshi men to marry virgins:
বর্তমানে কিছুটা শিক্ষার আলো পাওয়া বাঙালি মুসলমান এখন সাদা কাপড় বিছিয়ে রক্তের পরীক্ষা নিতে শরম পায়, কিন্তু মনে মনে আশা করে অল্প বয়সী কুমারী, যার যোনি পর্দা নিশ্ছিদ্র ও অটুট আছে। এবং যে তরুণীর ভেতর আর কোনো পুরুষ প্রবেশ করেনি। মূলত এই টাইপের চরম আধিপত্যবাদী পুরুষতান্ত্রিক রাজনৈতিক সেন্স ও কনশাসনেস থেকে আমাদের মেলশোভিনিস্ট আইনপ্রণেতারা “কুমারী” শব্দটা কাবিননামায় অপরিহার্য করে তুলেছিলেন।
Now a days educated Bengali Muslim men do not dare to test brides (like old days) whether she is a virgin using a white cloth, but they secretly desire his bride to be a young virgin whose hymen is still intact. Mainly out of this male chauvinistic sense and consciousness our patriarchal lawmakers made the word “kumari” essential in Kabin-Nama.
Samina Anwar gives the examples of Prophet Muhammad on Facebook:
(in those days) Prophet Muhammad (SAW) did not go after “virgins”. He was after rescuing (widowed) women and taking care of them. This was how broad-minded Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was.
How many Muslim men these days would marry a widow or a divorcee? If one is to follow the real sunnah – are men not supposed to follow what Prophet Muhammad (SAW) practised?
Some people raised the question of whether it was necessary since kumari generally only held the old meaning of being unmarried in the Kabin-nama.
Mohammad Ali Akbar Sarker, a Muslim marriage registrar from Dhaka, told the media:
I have conducted many marriages in Dhaka and I have often been asked why men have the liberty to not disclose their status but women don't. I always told them this wasn't in my hands. I guess I won't be asked that question anymore.
The changes are due to come in effect starting mid-October.

author: Samaya Anjum


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Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold first ever Pride parade in Sarajevo on September 8 · Global Voices
Filip Stojanovski

Cover image of the social media presence of the first Bosnian-Herzegovinian Pride March. Source Twitter profile @BHpovorkaponosa, Fair Use.
The first ever Bosnian-Herzegovinia (BiH) Pride parade is scheduled to take place in the capital, Sarajevo, on Sunday, September 8.
The event will also function as a protest against inequality and violations of the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer people in the country. Its main demands are an end to widespread violence against LGBTQ+ people, and equal access to public spaces that they are entitled to as citizens.
After North Macedonia held their first Skopje Pride event on 30 June, Bosnia and Herzegovina remained the only Balkan country where a pride parade had not taken place.
As elsewhere in the region, the event has been organized under the shadow of threats of violence and in an atmosphere of homophobic backlash in the traditional and social media, formally lead by organizations advocating for ‘traditional family values.’ The police have announced increased security measures.
In the past, Sarajevo authorities have denied permission for similar marches and protests. This time, cantonal government institutions again asked for the parade to be postponed, citing security concerns, but the organizers have been adamant it will take place as planned.
Povorka ponosa ne promovira ekstremističke stavoce, ne podstiče na nasilje, ne ugrožava bilo koje pravo drugih. Nema osnova da se zabrani ili da se organizatore prisiljava da je otkažu. #bhpovorkaponosa
Iz presuda Evropskog suda Plattform “Ärzte für das Leben” v. Austria (1988): pic.twitter.com/l3Ly6Ojhsy
— Sevima Sali-Terzic (@SaliSevima) August 23, 2019
The Pride March doesn't promote extremist positions, doesn't incite violence, and doesn't infringe on any right of other people. There's no legal ground to forbid it or to pressure the organizers to cancel it. Check the verdict of the European Court of Human Rights in the case Plattform “Ärzte für das Leben” v. Austria (1988).
The campaign in support of the march has been in effect since the spring under the slogan “Ima izać”—a local slang expression commonly used by passengers to address bus or tramway drivers meaning literally “there's someone who wants to go out,” and loosely translated by the March organizers as “[Open the] door, please!”:
…It also refers to opening the door of the proverbial closet when LGBTIQ people come out—that is when they reveal their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or sex characteristics to themselves or others.
Low visibility is still among the biggest problems of the LGBTIQ community in BiH. By coming out and participating in the Pride March we empower ourselves and other LGBTIQ individuals who still don’t have the courage to take that step. That’s why we say “Door, please!”, because this is a march of LGBTIQ people who deserve the chance to come out of the closet and proudly claim their place in the society.
Several civil society groups fighting for human rights expressed support for the March from the moment it was announced. The annual Political Accountability and New Technologies – POINT Conference, for instance, incorporated a rainbow flag into the visual elements of its 8th edition held in May, to help promote the March.
It’s amazing to see the ?? at #point80 at the #disinformation session. Especially thinking about Poland and how much #fakenews we have about #lgbt community. Also great support for the first #pride to happen in #Sarajevo pic.twitter.com/jw76eflASc
— Anna Kuliberda (@adrebiluka) May 16, 2019
The March is also being strongly promoted online with the hashtags  #bhpovorkaponosa (Bosnian-Herzegovinian Pride March) and #imaizac (“Door, please!”). Organizational channels such as the Twitter account @BHpovorkaponosa have been posting messages of affirmation, such as testimonials from people from different walks of life who support the event, including many non-LGBTI+ allies who simply wish to live in a society free of discrimination of any kind.
?? Vidimo se 8. septembra, jer #imaizac za slobodu svih! ??
✊✊✊✊✊
Danas sa vama dijelimo poruku od profesorice sa Ekonomskog fakulteta Selma Kadic-Maglajlic, blogerke Quantum of Science-Društvo za promociju prirodnih nauka “Nauka i svijet” Jelena Kalinic. pic.twitter.com/3LbCGwZgsg
— BH. povorka ponosa (@BHpovorkaponosa) August 26, 2019
Tweet: See you on 8 September because we need to go out for freedom of all!
Today we share the messages from the professor of Faculty of Economics Professor Selma Kadić – Maglajuć, and Jelena Kalinić a blogger at Quantum of Science, blog run by Association for promotion of natural sciences “Science and the world.”
Video:  SKM: “…I don't want to live in a Medieval society where someone claims right to determine who should be allowed to love someone else and whom, and in what way… Precisely because of that I shall walk for human rights!”
JK: “We are not free unless everybody is free. Science doesn't support discrimination. Open the door please!”
Some of the messages are provided in English translation, a proven tactic used by similar events in the region to attract participants from abroad.
?? Povorka ponosa je za sve nas ??
“Ja ću 8. septembra šetati za LGBTIQ osobe, ali i za radnike i radnice, Rome i Romkinje, osobe sa invaliditetom, i sve druge marginalizirane skupine čije se postojanje ne vidi ili se želi zabraniti ili ograničiti.” Masha Durkalić
Vidimo se 8.9.! pic.twitter.com/w3CpzvNlab
— BH. povorka ponosa (@BHpovorkaponosa) September 3, 2019
“I will go out on 8 September and walk for the [rights of] LGBTIQ persons, and also for the male and female workers, male and female Roma people, persons with disabilities, and all other marginalized groups whose existence is invisible or someone wants to forbid it or limit it.” – Masha Durkalić.
See you on 8 September!
Influential activists from other countries, such as Mona Eltahawy, and individuals such as UN Women representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina David Saunders have sent messages of support. In general, the intiative has received robust support from the international community.
Some event supporters have addressed the homophobia that has become part of the public discourse within Bosnia and Herzegovina ahead of the Pride March. The Facebook page “They are all witches” (Sve su to vještice), for example, had been posting memes quoting the ‘greatest hits’.
“The most impressive thing for me is that those who are the loudest in opposition to the Pride March think that it will be all about latex, naked butts, sadomasochism, and things like that.
Oh brothers of mine, how have you been suffering!”
The organization BH Journalists, a member of the Association of European Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists, has condemned the media's violation of the human rights and jeopardzing of the safety of LGBTQ persons by spreading hate speech and inflammatory rhetoric about the Pride March.
They called upon the journalists and editors of online portals to also pay attention to user comments which have the same effect, and to moderate those that “oppose freedom of expression, acknowledgment of diversity, pluralism of opinions and preventing all forms of discrimination.”

author: Filip Stojanovski


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Hong Kong Reddit-like LIHKG faces unprecedented DDoS attacks redirected from Chinese Internet companies · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Screen capture from LIHKG during DDoS attack.
LIHKG, a Reddit-like forum in Hong Kong has been under the attack of China’s great cannon, a tool used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) by inserting script that intercepts massive amounts of web traffic and redirects them to targeted websites.
LIHKG has been a major forum for distributing information and discussing strategy about Hong Kong's anti-extradition protests since March. The attack was launched ahead of an August 31 rally, flagged as “illegal” by Hong Kong police.
According to an official statement published by the forum, between 08:00 to 23:59 on August 31, the website received 1.5 billion total requests. At the peak of the attack, the forum received 260 thousand requests per second and 6.5 million unique visitors per hour. As the scale of attack was unprecedented, the forum administrator believe it was state-backed:
We have reasons to believe that there is a power, or even a national level power behind such attacks as botnet from all over the world were manipulated in launching this attack.
The security team has quickly restored the website with protective measure – a CAPTCHA on the anchoring page. However, LIHKG's mobile app was disrupted for a few days and is still unstable.
As the news spread, local and overseas tech circles reached out to help the forum to find out where is the attack coming from. As anticipated, the DDoS was redirected by a script from Chinese companies:
China wrote a script that is made for DDoSing LIHKG.
In the script they included a feedback adress (116.255.226.154).
If you look up who is that, you will find Chinese companies.
This explains who caused the downage today.
Script: https://t.co/pyyl12bFCx#HongKong #LIHKG pic.twitter.com/RzIEVRV1LT
— throwawayconstant (@throwawayconst) August 31, 2019
According to LIHK massive traffic to the forum was redirected through Chinese Internet companies Qihucdn.com and Baidu.
Domain information record shows that Qihucdn.com’s Registrant State/Province is Beijing and name server is 360safe.com, same with Qihoo 360, a leading Chinese Internet platform company which claims to “protect users’ computers and mobile devices against malware and malicious websites”. The company has been notorious for whitelisting malwares.
Since Qihoo’s security protection product is widely used by mainland Chinese netizens and small companies, users from LIHKG accused the company of staging the DDoS attack by inserting feedback script through their “security service”.
Likewise, Baidu, the biggest search engine in China was redirecting traffic to LIHKG. The website was also involved in another massive DDoS attack targeting Github back in 2015.
Technical reports about the 2015 Github DDoS incident explained that the attack was launched through some man-in-the-middle device which intercepted web requests coming into China from elsewhere in the world, and then replaced the content with JavaScript code that would attack the targeted site. Specifically in the case of Github, it intercepted Baidu's analytics and redirected traffic to Github and hence the attack appears to be coming “from everywhere”.
Such kind of aggressive attack has been termed as “the Great Cannon” by Citizen Lab, a human rights-based research center on Information and Communication Technology at the University of Toronto.
The research center found out in 2015 that the Great Cannon can “manipulate the traffic of ‘bystander’ systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack”. The attack is similar to NSA's QUANTUM system, capable of “targeting any foreign computer that communicates with any China-based website not fully utilizing HTTPS.”
Cybersecurity expert Chris Doman reviewed the java script of LIHKG's attack and pointed out on Twitter:
It looks like the attackers upgraded the code during the attack to check for Cloudflare and target more URLs: pic.twitter.com/2wqP9gj7pR
— chris doman (@chrisdoman) September 2, 2019
While LIHKG has blocked all IPs from mainland China, when someone from overseas visited Baidu or Qihoo360 hosted in mainland China, the script would point them to LIHKG and hence the forum faced a massive DDoS attack coming from all over the world:
LIHKG enduring DDOS attack on a global scale. #followbackhk #FreeHK pic.twitter.com/FKxFJNrEEf
— The Chap?? (@DudeChapDude) August 31, 2019
In 2015 when Github was attacked, Baidu denied its involvement and responsibility as the attack was launched through a man-in-the-middle device. Who is capable of controlling the device that is capable of inserting script to redirect web-traffic from China to the target? The finger is pointed at the mainland Chinese government which is also in control of the Great Fire Wall that blocks sensitive websites and filters sensitive keywords.
What happened to LIHKG is not a single incident, a majority of independent media outlets and citizen forums in Hong Kong are subjected to state-level DDoS attacks from mainland China. In 2014, citizen-led voting site and news site Apple Daily were subjected to DDoS attacks, in an attempt to silence voices supporting the Occupy Central Campaign and a civil referendum that sought to bring about change to the local election system. However, the local authorities had not conducted any investigation into attacks directed at civilians. Now a majority of local independent media outlets and activist sites have to block IPs from mainland China and subscribe to expensive security plans to keep themselves accessible to internet users.
As for the latest round of attacks on LIHKG, very likely, no entity would be made accountable for the malicious act. Netizens can only take very passive protective measure to prevent assisting similar kind of attacks:
Have seen DDoS attacks on @lihkg_forum originating from US devices. People need to be vigilant about cyber security. Don't download/install anything from unknown sources, avoid visiting China-affiliated websites (includes shopping, comics, etc.) #StandWithHongKong #LIHKG
— Humanity First (@alittletyrant) September 4, 2019


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How Turkey’s broadcast regulator is taking over the supervision of online content · Global Voices
Arzu Geybullayeva

Under new rules, streaming services like Netflix are subject to the supervision of Turkey's broadcast regulator. Photo by user Robin Dogan on Behance (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Turkey's broadcast regulator, the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK), has been granted sweeping oversight over all online content.
Under a new regulation approved by the parliament before it went into effect on August 1, online content providers will be subject to the broadcaster’s supervision. All online content providers must obtain broadcasting licenses from RTÜK. The new regulation applies to international and local streaming services like Netflix and BluTV, content providers that deliver audiovisual journalistic content via Periscope or Youtube Live, and news websites that run ads.
In addition to granting permissions, RTÜK will supervise the content put out by the providers. In case of violations, services could face fines or the loss of their licenses. Content providers that do not comply with the regulation and RTÜK’s guidelines would be given 30 days to adjust their content to the required standards.
Turkish audiences are well accustomed to blurred or deleted scenes in films and television series. Sex scenes and kissing is considered obscene and against moral values while alcohol and smoking scenes have been blurred for years. Some television series have been fined for overstepping these regulations, while others thought to move to YouTube in order to bypass the requirements. Turkish Airlines also censors the films it puts on its entertainment system.
The authorities claim that the aim of the new regulation is to establish “the methods and principles to regulate the presentation and provision of radio, television and on-demand broadcast services,” as well as “the handing of broadcast licenses to media service providers, the granting of broadcasting authorities to platform administrators and the supervision of the broadcasts in question.”
Critics say the new regulation only strengthens the government's control over online content while leaving the content providers in question little room to evade censorship, especially with vague legislation that criminalizes a wide range of speech offenses such as “insulting” the president or the “Turkish nation,” or producing “propaganda for terror organizations.”
A law professor and cybersecurity expert at Istanbul Bilgi University, Yaman Akdeniz, told the LA Times in an interview that this was “a new and additional control and censorship regime” that would only make it easier to block online content critical of the government, including foreign media.
In an interview with Bianet, Kerem Altiparmak, an associate professor in human rights law and constitutional law notes:
If the RTÜK applies the rules it applies to the television channels, it becomes impossible for Netflix to broadcast in Turkey. Netflix would have to remove all its series to broadcast. With RTÜK standards, you can't save Netflix with ‘bleeping’.
Altiparmak sees this step as the greatest moment yet in the history of censorship in Turkey.
The new regulation has been on the books since February 2018, when the government proposed the bill for the first time. Even then, many feared the potential scale of censorship. At the time, in an opinion piece for Turkish Daily News, Melike Karakartal wrote that the new regulation should be evaluated not individually, but rather as part of the bigger picture of ongoing media censorship in Turkey.
Any news about a political trial or coverage of a journalist […] could easily be considered as “terrorist propaganda” by government authorities, so the mass media has begun to exercise serious caution in covering the trials of journalists and politicians. A journalist may write the truth, but in our kind of democracy, nobody can promise what happens afterwards.
Karakartal also noted how many independent journalists migrated to online platforms to continue their work after being let go from more traditional media organizations. Her projections of RTÜK moving toward silencing critical voices in online spaces have come true, seriously impacting freedom of expression and freedom of the media.
Even before the addition of this new regulation, censorship was already rife in Turkey.
According to a report by the Freedom of Expression Association on blocked websites in Turkey, over 245 thousand websites and over 150 thousand URLs were blocked by the end of 2018. These are blocked based on the Law on Regulation of Publications on the Internet and Suppression of Crimes Committed by means of Such Publication (known as Law No. 5651). Specifically, Article 8/A of the law allows for the blocking of websites on vague grounds of protection of the right to life and security of people and property, national security and public order, prevention of crimes or protection of general health on the request of relevant ministries or the presidency.
And the list of blocked websites and URLs keeps growing.
Citing Article 8/A of Law No.5651, on August 6, a court in Ankara ruled to block access to 136 websites including social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Chief among the list was the independent, bilingual online news platform Bianet and the left-leaning news agency, ETHA (Etkin Haber Ajansı).
The following day, the same court reversed its decision to unblock Bianet. Whether a result of an international outcry, or an actual mistake, Bianet is once again accessible in the country. But the overall decision to block the rest of the platforms raises questions.
In a statement, Amnesty International described the court's decision as a ”full-frontal attack” on freedom of expression which ”signals a deepening of an already restrictive state of censorship.”  The human rights group pointed out that ”the decision does not provide any justification as to how any of the addresses listed in the decision fall under this provision.”
Similarly, Reporters Without Borders, in their statement, said that while ”the order says they [blocked websites] “threaten national security” there is no specific explanation for this decision or supporting evidence.”
The new RTÜK regulations and the mass blocking of web addresses go against what president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in May when introducing the new Judicial Reform Strategy package. At the time, Erdoğan said that it would no longer be possible to block an entire website because of a single item. Chief among the key aims listed in the package are strengthening the rule of law, effective promotion of rights and freedoms, transparency, access to a fair trial and more.
So far, much of those words remain on paper. A good place to start would be to unblock scores of websites and URLs, not to mention lifting the ban on Wikipedia and allow media to thrive online and offline. In September, platforms like BlueTV will have to apply to obtain their licenses. Netflix has already applied for its license to broadcast in the country, despite censorship fears from activists.

author: Arzu Geybullayeva


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‘I want a chance to prove my innocence’: Formerly jailed Macedonian journalist denied retrial · Global Voices
Metamorphosis Foundation

Tomislav Kezarovski at a protest in solidarity with him after his release on probation. The sign in the background reads “We want justice, not mercy!” In Skopje, 20 Jan 2015. Photo by Vančo Džambaski, CC BY-NC-SA.
This story originally appeared on Meta.mk News Agency, a project of Metamorphosis Foundation. An edited version is published below as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Due to the statute of limitations for felony of revealing the identity of a protected witness, journalist Tomislav Kezarovski will not be granted a retrial in a case that resulted in his detention and conviction on trumped-up charges.
The case dates back to 2013 when Kezarovski was arrested, put on trial and convicted for ‘endangering’ a witness over an article he wrote in 2008 about a murder that took place in 2005. However, the journalist was only arrested in May 2013, after his investigative work that raised questions about the death of a fellow journalist.
At a hearing in Skopje on 3 September, prosecutor Marija Gjorgjeva announced that the majority of the criminal acts for which the accused were pursued are a subject to a statute of limitations and denied him a retrial.
Statute of limitations means that there is legal deadline for the judiciary to prosecute a case. When a statute of limitations expires, the courts no longer have jurisdiction.
Tomislav Kezarovski (sometimes written as Kežarovski or Kezharovski) is a Macedonian journalist whose case is one of most prominent examples of miscarriage of justice during the period of backsliding from democracy during the rule of right-wing populist party VMRO-DPMNE from 2006 to 2017. In 2013, he became famous as the only journalist in a European country (with the exception of Russia, Belarus and Turkey) to be put into prison for his writings.
The case against Kezarovski has been considered an example of the corruption of the judiciary in North Macedonia. In May 2013, while investigating the death of journalist Nikola Mladenov earlier that same year, Kezarovski was arrested and prosecuted for an article he had written in 2008, about a high-profile murder that took place in 2005.
Subsequent leaks of illegal wiretaps made by the secret service run by the cousin of then-prime minister Gruevski indicated that minister of interior Gordana Jankuloska and her deputy Ivo Kotevski were annoyed after Kezarovski published evidence ‘overlooked’ by CSI team and prosecutors that declared that Mladenov perished in a ‘mundane car accident.’ Within days SWAT team burst into Kezarovski's home and arrested him in front of his family, which sparked protests.
The journalist spent the better part of the next three years as a political prisoner, first in pre-trial detention and then in prison under poor conditions, in a cramped insect-infested cell with three other people with only basic hygiene standards, or under house arrest. In October 2013, Kezarovski was convicted for allegedly revealing the identity of a protected witness in the 2005 murder case code-named Oreshe and he was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison for allegedly endangering a witness’ life.
Professional journalists’ organizations, human rights organizations and the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media all condemned the arrest and prosecution of the journalist. The European Commission also addressed it within the context of a wider decline of freedom of expression in the country.
On 15 January 2015, an appeal court shortened his sentence to two years in prison. After a series of protests and legal wrangling, Kezarovski was released from prison on probation due to health reasons in January 2015.
On 20 January 2015 the court allowed Kezarovski to get out of prison on health grounds at the same time of protest demanding his release was taking place. He was able to join the protesters, carrying a banner “Freedom for Kežo.” Photo by Vančo Džambaski, CC BY-NC-SA.
In October 2017, the final verdict for the 2005 murder case showed that Kezarovski's claims were true. The verdict stated that the ‘protected’ witness was neither protected nor endangered, but was a false witness who was testifying after being instructed by the police, as the journalist originally reported.
However, while this verdict gave Kezarovski moral satisfaction, he was not legally vindicated. Formally the sentence against him still stood. There was no new investigation into the death of Nikola Mladenov, which would also take into account the possible cover-up attempts including the removal of Kezarovski from his investigative work in 2013.
Instead, in May 2019 the Supreme Court annulled the sentence in the case brought up against him and ordered a retrial. The Association of Journalists of Macedonia reacted with an appeal for the withdrawal of the indictment instead of a retrial, and asked the chief prosecutor to drop the charges because it was clear that Kezarovski was wrongfully convicted.
The retrial was supposed to take place in July, but was postponed to September. At the time, Kezarovski was not happy that he would go through the whole process from the start, but at least considered it a chance to clear his name once for all.
However, at the latest hearing held on 3 September, the prosecutor invoked the statute of limitations. Kezarovski was revolted and after the hearing he said to the media (and on Facebook) that this way “he has been sentenced for life” for a second time, and that he is asking for ”a chance to prove his innocence”:
„Сакам шанса да докажам дека сум невин и судот да ме ослободи, односно да добијам ослободителна пресуда, а не поради застарување или примена на поблага законска одредба, судењето тука да запре. Го замолувам судот, да ги погледне доказите и да види дека никогаш не го открив идентитетот на заштитениот сведок и не го открив неговиот телефонски број. Барам шанса да ја докажам вистината“, рече Кежаровски во судница.
I want a chance to prove my innocence and to receive acquittal from the court, not an end of the trial on the basis of statute of limitations or leniency. I ask the court to take into consideration the evidence and determine that I have never revealed the identity of the protected witness, nor his telephone number. I demand a chance to prove the truth,” Kezarovski said in the courthouse.
In a statement to Voice of America, Kezarovski slammed the prosecutors accusing them of providing protection for all the criminal acts related to this case “in a deeply insidious way,” allowing impunity for those who ordered the abuse of justice and their “executors” henchmen. While noting that he now feels “more threatened than ever”, he also stated that he will continue fighting for the truth, and for freedom from the corrupt judiciary:
I will prove the truth, for myself, for my family and for all those people who unselfishly supported me, and still support me. I am a free man (…) and my fight for justice is, or must become, our common fight. Fight for justice is a state of mind! (…) I don't fight for my rights only, but for the rights of all others as well. We need justice! Enough is enough!
Activist Jasmina Golubovska was one of many social media users who joined Kezarovski in the outrage. She wrote on Facebook:
Tomislav Kezarovski има право на фер судење, а не на застарување на многу сериозен случај и негово конечно заташкување!
Tomislav Kezarovski has the right to a fair trial, as the statute of limitations expiration of this very serious case means that it would be hushed up for good!

author: Metamorphosis Foundation


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Netizen Report: Two years after fleeing military attacks in Myanmar, Rohingya refugees face mobile blackout in Bangladesh · Global Voices
Ellery Roberts Biddle

Image licensed to public domain, without attribution.
The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in technology and human rights around the world. This report covers news and events from August 30 – September 6, 2019.
On September 2, the Bangladeshi government ordered telecommunications companies to block mobile phone networks at refugee camps that are home to nearly one million people, most of them Rohingya Muslims.
Roughly three quarters of these refugees have lived in camps in southern Bangladesh since 2017, after fleeing military attacks in their homeland, Myanmar. Officials say the mobile network block is intended to protect national security, citing incidents of violence that have broken out in the camps.
The order came after tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees staged a mass protest at the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, where they demanded citizenship from the Myanmar government. Authorities do not grant citizenship to Rohingya people born in Myanmar territory.
Although authorities from Bangladesh have worked with the UN to repatriate some of these people, many have refused to return, pending a guarantee of citizenship by the Myanmar government.
“We have asked the Burmese government for dialogue. But we haven't got any response from them yet,” said Rohingya leader Mohib Ullah at the demonstration.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission was also ordered to verify the mobile users in the camps within a week’s time, by confirming names and addresses used to register each SIM card. Telecommunications operators have also been asked to throttle or weaken their networks in the border areas with Myanmar and curtail the sale of mobile phone products and services to Rohingya refugees.
Meanwhile, back in Myanmar, filmmaker and human rights advocate Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison by a Yangon court for publishing statements — on Facebook — that the court found “likely to cause any officer, soldier, sailor or airman, in the Army, Navy or Air Force to mutiny or otherwise disregard or fail in his duty…”
The Facebook posts were critical of Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution and the role it gives the military in government. As the founder of the Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival, Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi is known for his openly critical views on Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s first civilian leader after 49 years of military rule.
The Hong Kong-based Reddit-like forum LIHKG has come under attack by China’s great cannon, a tool used to run distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by deploying a computer script that intercepts massive amounts of web traffic and redirects them to targeted websites.
LIHKG has been a major forum for distributing information and discussing strategy about Hong Kong's anti-extradition protests since March. The attack was launched ahead of an August 31 rally, flagged as “illegal” by Hong Kong police.
Agba Jalingo, the publisher of CrossRiverWatch, an online newspaper, was arrested at his home by Nigerian federal police on August 22. Jalingo is also the state chairman for the African Action Congress, a political party founded by Omoyele Sowore, the currently detained leader of Nigeria’s #RevolutionNow protest movement.
Jalingo has been charged with treason, terrorism, cultism and public disturbance in a Federal High Court in Abuja for “working with the #RevolutionNow movement” to “undemocratically’ force the government of Ayade to end through violent means.” If convicted, Jalingo risks life imprisonment, fine or both.
In Turkey, a new regulation took effect on August 1 requiring all online content providers to obtain broadcasting licenses from the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK). The directive applies to international and local streaming services like Netflix and BluTV, content providers that deliver audiovisual journalistic content via Periscope or YouTube Live, and news websites that run ads.
In addition to granting permissions, RTÜK will monitor providers’ content for violations of local media laws, which are extensive. Online content can be censored for obscenity or contravening “moral values”, disturbing public order, or threatening national security.
A group of UN experts led by David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, condemned the Indian government’s media and internet shutdown in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been ongoing since the evening of August 4. “The blackout is a form of collective punishment of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, without even a pretext of a precipitating offence,” they wrote.
A separate joint statement, signed 66 human rights and digital rights groups, has also criticized the blackout on human rights and humanitarian grounds.
Pushing Politics, Picking Pockets: The Business of Misinformation – Judit Szakács, Central European University
China’s New Media Dilemma: The Profit in Online Dissent – Louisa Chiang, Center for International Media Assistance
Nwachukwu Egbunike, Arzu Geybullayeva, Hija Kamran, Oiwan Lam, Zara Rahman, Juke Carolina Rumuat, Taisa Sganzerla contributed to this report.

author: Ellery Roberts Biddle


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Serbian journalists expose anonymous doxing site’s ties to pro-government media coterie · Global Voices
Filip Stojanovski

Frame from the promotional video for the website Istraga.rs. Fair use.
It took over half a year for the identity of the owner of a website that became notorious for doxing voices critical of the regime of Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić or their relatives to become known to the public.
The website called Istraga, which translates as ‘investigation’, launched in early 2019. It has become known for its smear attacks targeting journalists, opposition activists and non-governmental organisations.
Transcript of domain registration for Istraga.rs published by VOICE. PD.
In an article published on 27 August 2019, VOICE – a research and analytical center run by the Independent Journalists’ Association of Vojvodina, revealed that the previously unidentified owner of the website Istraga.rs is a business partner of a pro-government media mogul.
The owner of the internet domain used by Istraga.rs, ”which since its founding is used to spread insults and libel against journalists NGO activists and opposition politicians, in the most vulgar manner, is a certain man named Luka Rakočeviić, co-owner of a company with Lav Pajkić,” VOICE revealed in its article.
VOICE obtained the domain registration data from the Basic Court in Novi Sad, likely through a freedom of information request.
Rakočević shares the ownership of a company called Best Vision Productions with Pajkić, a media personality with his own show on the influential pro-government sensationalist Pink TV, in which he uses “satire” to attack the the opposition. Pink TV is a media company dominating the Serbian broadcasting market, with news channels similar to Fox News, and slate of entertainment programs such as turbo-folk music and reality shows, as well as other kinds of music and movies.
Istraga.rs started its work in January 2019, purporting it does investigative journalism. However, unlike the media outlets recognized for their investigative work in the public interest, it provides no transparency about its editorial staff (Impressum) and ownership. Its internet domain has been registered in a ”private’ mode until it was recently exposed by VOICE. It is not a member of the Press Council, a self-regulatory body for media that adhere to ethical Code of Journalists.
On 19 February, they published the following video showing a group of about 15 burly men wearing a kind of uniform – hoodies and jackets branded with “Istraga” inscription, walking  around a city block in the night without showing their faces, sticking advertisements for the website on post boxes and walls. The video ends with a call for others to join: “We are Istraga. We research the connections between politics, crime, non-governmental organizations and the secret services. Join us!”
VOICE pointed out that Istraga.rs became notorious for publishing “utterly repulsive texts about journalists, politicians, non-governmental organizations from Serbia (i.e. free-thinking individuals and organizations which critically report or talk about the Vučić's regime).”
Most of their articles are focused on ‘proving’ that certain people or organizations are ‘mercenaries’ and ‘traitors’ to Serbia. Using populist tactics perfected by Serbian pro-government media in the last three decades, they usually allege that their targets have obtained large sums of money. Many of their articles follow a pattern with the title “Who funds the [a media outlet, an NGO, an opposition politician]?!”
Some of the sums presented are from publicly available sources, for instance transparency statements on the websites of the targets. Many articles do not contain any data, just loaded questions alleging profiteering. For individuals, Istraga.rs uses doxing – taking contents from their targets’ social media profiles and presenting it in an intimidating or defamatory manner.
On 23 January, the Independent Association of Journalists of Serbia (NUNS) warned that this website introduced a new genre “pointless investigations” – as an excuse to write defamatory articles which were then promoted on social networks by profiles linked to Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), the ruling party in Serbia. SNS has developed a massive online apparatus similar to troll armies of populist parties in Russia and North Macedonia. These profiles are called SNS-bots in everyday Serbian slang.
NUNS in particular pointed at Istraga.rs articles targeting female journalists, with titles such as: “KRIK journalist Dragana Pećo hugging men in Albanian sweatshirts” – implying that she is a traitor for fraternizing with the national ‘enemies,’ “Parents of Vreme weekly journalist Jovana Gligorijević have insulted the Serbian Orthodox Church,” and “Hana Adrović one of the leaders of protests in Belgrade simulates oral sex in a night club (VIDEO).”
As the promotion of the doxing website increased in February, NUNS issued another public announcement:
Podsećamo i da sajt istraga.rs ne poseduje impresum pa se ne zna ko zapravo stoji iza ovog takozvanog medija. Istovremeno, tekstove ovog “hrabrog” portala prenose po društvenim mrežama uglavnom botovi, što je još jedan dokaz da je reč o botovskom oruđu, čija je jedina svrha postojanja da etiketira i kroz tabloidno blato pokušava da provuče sve one koji misle svojom glavom i ne pristaju na cenzuru.
We remind the public that website Istraga.rs doesn't have an Impressum so it is unknown  who is actually behind this so-called medium. At the same time, the text from this “brave” portal have been disseminated by bots via social media, which is another piece of evidence that it's actually a weapon for bots, whose purpose is to label and smear all those who think with their own heads and refuse to submit to censorship.
VOICE pointed that one of the most tendentiously malicious texts by Istraga.rs was against the three female authors of antiwar documentary film “Ethnic Albanian women are our sisters” (“Albanke su naše sestre”), produced by Milena Popović, Sanja Kljajić i Vanja Đurić. The film covers the NATO bombing of 1999 and the people in Serbia who stood up to the criminal war policies of regime of Slobodan Milošević. It is one of five films from a project titled “Real people – real solutions” (“Stvarni ljudi – stvarna rešenja” ) about relations between Kosovo and Serbia. In 2017 mobs of Serbian nationalists disrupted the  censored the projections of these movies by threatening those  cinema audiences.
The portal's sexist attacks against women journalists, activists and women relatives of persons deemed undesirable by the regime are especially troubling.
They for instance published doxxed swimsuit photos they deemed ‘provocative’ from the Instagram profile of the daughters of the former president Boris Tadić, who is currently an opposition politician. Another article, decries the luxurious life of the daughters, based on doxed photos from the Instagram profiles of the two young women. It alleges that ”unlike their peers from Serbia they spend several average salaries for their expensive caprices” like designer bags, plastic surgeries and travel. The article does not offer any evidence for these claims, including the malicious conclusion that the girls were dissatisfied with their looks and spent “thousands of euros” to change their “noses, mouths and breast.”
In another post titled “How high are the salaries at KRIK? KRIK journalist Marta Mihajlović takes summer vacations at luxurious destinations.” they doxxed vacation photos of a young female office manager of reputable anti-corruption outlet KRIK. Istraga described her as “an example of arrogance and hypocrisy” of the whole organization “whose journalists lead a dirty campaign against Serbia.”
Such articles imply indirect threats to the young women. They are simply young people who shared vacation memories with their circle of friends. By taking the photos out of their private contexts and abusing them for political harassment, Istraga.rs and its social media auxiliaries commit textbook cyber-bullying.
In spite of disproved claim by Serbian Minister of Interior that “today all journalists are safe,” this website has contributed to fostering an atmosphere of fear in the country.


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Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe dies, leaving behind a ‘very complicated legacy’ · Global Voices
Kudzai Chimhangwa

Then-president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, listens as professor Alpha Oumar Konare, chairman of the Commission of the African Union, addresses attendees at the opening ceremony of the 10th Ordinary Session of the Assembly during the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, January 31, 2008. Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeremy Lock via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0.
Zimbabwe’s first post-independence leader, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, has died at the age of 95.
Mugabe died at a hospital in Singapore on Friday, September 6, 2019, after battling ill health.
According to Al Jazeera, he was hospitalized in Singapore for months for an undisclosed ailment, as officials often said he was being treated for a cataract, denying frequent private media reports that he had prostate cancer.
Current President Emmerson Mnangagwa expressed his condolences on Twitter early Friday:
It is with the utmost sadness that I announce the passing on of Zimbabwe's founding father and former President, Cde Robert Mugabe (1/2)
— President of Zimbabwe (@edmnangagwa) September 6, 2019
Deputy Minister of Information, Publicity & Broadcasting Services, Energy Mutodi, also expressed condolences, calling Mugabe an “African icon” and a “revolutionary.”
Rest In Peace President Robert Mugabe. There is no doubt you were an African icon, a statesman of a rare character and a revolutionary. I wish to pass our condolences on my own behalf & on behalf of the government to His Excellency President ED Mnangagwa & the Mugabe family.
— Hon. Dr Energy Mutodi (PhD) (@energymutodi) September 6, 2019
Mugabe was ousted from power in a military coup in November 2017, before his long-time political colleague and protégé, Mnangagwa, forcefully took over — ending 37 years in office.
Mugabe was born on February 21, 1924, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, a colonial state ruled by the British. Known as an intellectual who fell in love with Marxism, he studied at Fort Hare University in South Africa. He later taught in Ghana, where he was influenced by its founder, President Kwame Nkrumah, before he returned to Southern Rhodesia in 1963. There, he was imprisoned in 1964 for a decade without trial after criticizing the Rhodesian government over its racist policies.
In 1973, while still in prison, he was selected as the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) president and was a leading figure in the contentious civil war that led to independence on April 18, 1980.
Robert Mugabe in the Netherlands, June 1982 via Wikimedia Commons CC BY 2.0.
Mugabe’s rule was characterized by various episodes of success soon after independence when he made a clarion call to erstwhile warring parties to unite and live peacefully for the good of the nation. However, this olive branch was short-lived after he waged war against those he termed dissidents in Matabeleland (Southern Zimbabwe), resulting in the massacre of thousands of local Ndebele-speaking people.
After years of waiting for Britain to fulfill its terms outlined in the Lancaster House Agreement to fund a  land reform program that would redistribute land to black Zimbabweans, the country’s war veterans grew impatient, as there was no progress in this regard.
Under immense pressure from the war vets, Mugabe relented and allowed a chaotic land reform process to occur, leading to violent attacks on commercial farms throughout the country.
Mugabe’s final years in office were characterized by a catastrophic economic collapse, violent land seizures of farms belonging to white commercial farmers, abductions, intimidation and a vicious power struggle.
Mugabe’s own frustration and sense of humiliation over his ousting were clear, and voiced with typical rhetorical force at an extraordinary press conference at his residence in Harare, the capital, days before elections in July 2018.
Nelson Chamisa, leader of the main opposition party in Zimbabwe, the Movement for Democratic Change, tweeted his respect for the late Mugabe, despite the major political differences they shared:
1/3 My condolences to the Mugabe family and Africa for the passing on of Zimbabwe’s founding President.This is a dark moment for the family because a giant among them has fallen. May the Lord comfort them.
— nelson chamisa (@nelsonchamisa) September 6, 2019
The public has been abuzz with various views and thoughts on his passing away.
Magumbo Special tweeted about the complexity of Mugabe's legacy:
I'm conflicted #RIPMugabe you leave a very complicated legacy. Some will forever admire you as a liberation hero, but many who suffered under your harsh rule will only remember a dictator who ruined a country with great potential. You have run your race now time to face your Maker pic.twitter.com/yvQhXA1Hg7
— Magumbo Special?Shumba's Lioness? (@docfarai) September 6, 2019
Netizen Thandekile Moyo, in a tweet to President Mnangagwa, wrote:
Be sincere. You of all people know about #Gukurahundi.
Mugabe was a ruthless mass murderer who ruled for as long as he did because of his killer instinct. He dedicated his life not to emancipation but to his quest for a one party state whose benefits you are reaping. Respect us.
— Thandekile Moyo (@Mamoxn) September 6, 2019
The Gukurahundi refers to the massacres of Ndebele civilians by the Zimbabwe National Army between 1983 and 1987.
Leader of Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa, Julius Malema, wrote:
I'm saddened by the passing of our martyr & giant of the African Revolution cde President Robert Mugabe. Let's continue the fight & protect his legacy. We must not allow our enemies to tell us how to remember him; we know our heroes.
May his soul rest in revolutionary peace. pic.twitter.com/wpvQm3Waf0
— Julius Sello Malema (@Julius_S_Malema) September 6, 2019
Donald Kipkorir laments how Mugabe could have been great, but became “bewitched by insatiable greed”:
Robert Mugabe could have been Africa’s greatest leader but like most, got bewitched by insatiable greed for riches .. Like many failed leaders who had so much promise, his Advisers were sycophantic cowards who echoed him & supported & participated in his thievery .. #RIPMugabe
— Donald B Kipkorir (@DonaldBKipkorir) September 6, 2019
But others chose to focus on reasons to celebrate his achievements:
He was feted as an African liberation hero and champion of racial reconciliation. Rest well Mugabe #RIPMugabe
— Abubakar As'sidiq (@afkar_9) September 6, 2019
The ailing Mugabe spent his last remaining years shuttling between medical facilities in Singapore and his mansion in Harare.
Mugabe had made it clear to his close family members that he did not want to be buried at the National Heroes’ Acre or to be associated with President Mnangagwa and all those he viewed as his ‘betrayers and tormentors,” according to a close family friend as reported in Bulawayo. “He has said he doesn’t want them to sing and pontificate over his dead body.”

author: Kudzai Chimhangwa


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Community-based approaches to bridging the mental health care gap in India · Global Voices
Anumeha Verma

Ashwini N.V. conducting a workshop: “Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse” for children at National Child Labour School, Lucknow, India. Photo courtesy of the Muktha Foundation.
India is the second populous country in the world and leads in the number of cases of child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation. A 2013 study by the Indian Journal of Psychiatry mentioned that half of all Indian children have faced some form of sexual abuse and one in five have experienced severe forms of abuse.
A culture of victim-shaming enables perpetrators to roam free and the abused children to carry the scars into adulthood, often leading to persistent mental health issues. At the same time, insufficient mental health professionals and a history of stigma make mental health care a colossal challenge.
Social workers, mental health professionals and organisations are trying to take a community-based approach to combat mental health problems. Ashwini N.V., a mental health professional and academician, believes that community-based initiatives that focus on capacity building in addition to providing psychotherapy can help bridge mental health care gaps.
According to a World Health Organization report, only 0.3 psychiatrists, 0.07 psychologists and 0.07 social workers are available per 100,000 population to cater to the mental health issues of a burgeoning population. Compare it to the data tabled in a National Mental Health Survey report in 2018 that says 150 million people need mental health treatment. Bridging this gap is an enormous task.
Mental Health in India is a huge issue that needs to be addressed! Our mental health budget is still negligible compared to other countries. https://t.co/dfiSDwQEqJ#mentalhealth #MentalHealthMatters #MentalHealthAwareness #mentalhealthinindia #mentalhealthbudget pic.twitter.com/ZPWUokAndt
— rhea saupin (@rheacolette) August 11, 2018
While most organisations work either in the field of mental health or abuse prevention, Ashwini founded and directs Muktha Foundation, which brings the two facets together. (Muktha stands for liberation in English.) Ashwini divides her time between running the foundation, conducting capacity building workshops, counselling and teaching. In an interview conducted at the foundation’s office in Bengaluru (Bangalore), she talked about the twin mandates of the organisation and a need to pay heed to mental health issues:
While counselling and doing community work, I observed that most of my clients who came for counselling had a history of abuse, in one form or the other. It also came to my notice that both the perpetrators of abuse and the survivors more often than not suffered from some form of mental distress.
Based on these incidental observations, Ashwini joined hands with other social workers, mental health professionals and organisations to build a platform where abuse prevention is seen as a significant step towards ensuring mental and psychological well-being.
Bhaya Muktha (liberation from fear), is one of the foundation's ambitious initiatives in the area of child sexual abuse. The foundation is working with preventing sexual abuse of children and combating mental illnesses due to trauma experienced by survivors:
We ran the first phase of programme for three months beginning from January 1 to March 31 this year. Bhaya Muktha covered all 26 states and three union territories of India. We conducted eight programmes each in the capitals of the states and in union territories with different stakeholders including doctors, police, parents, teachers, children and healthcare professionals. We equipped participants to identify symptoms of sexual abuse in children and trained healthcare professionals to use different approaches to counsel the survivors.
India is a linguistically diverse country. Through a countrywide initiative, the foundation has identified people who are skilled and willing to work in their own communities. These trained groups are working in different regions following two approaches: First, they are taking forward the fight against stigmas and myths attached to child sexual abuse. Second, they are working to ensure the mental well-being of the children and adolescents who have survived sexual abuse.
Children attend a lifeskills programme conducted by Muktha Foundation to promote mental health in a school at Bengaluru. Photo courtesy of the Muktha Foundation.
In the second stage of the programme, the resource persons from Muktha aim to go to tier-II cities of India and gradually break into the hinterlands to build capacity.
Apart from child sexual abuse, Muktha is also addressing issues of interpersonal violence, dating violence, domestic violence, bullying and cybercrimes. In the last two years, its members and partners have conducted several workshops in educational institutions, non-governmental organizations and workplaces. Being an academic, Ashwini also feels there is a need to bring abuse to mainstream academics. She explains:
We are rolling out a 45-hour certificate course on the psychology of interpersonal violence with one of the universities in Bengaluru [Bangalore]. These initiatives are important to make people talk about issues surrounding abuse and mental well-being.
With mental health concerns increasing by the day, conventional therapeutic approaches need to be complemented by more innovative approaches. Ashwini and her colleagues are engaged in a research programme called Muktha Abhivyaktha (expressions of liberation):
Psychotherapy needs to go beyond the conventional approach of talk. Sometimes it is difficult for people to express trauma verbally. Art, theatre, dance, storytelling, music, writing and other forms of expression have great potential in this area.
Despite initiatives being taken by organisations such as Muktha, mental health remains a major challenge for practitioners, policymakers and the citizens of India.
Several experts in the area think mental health should be a right. A big win on this front came in the form of the Mental Health Care Act, 2017. The Act makes provisions for the rights of people with mental illnesses for due care, safety and dignity. However, a gap still remains in the need and delivery of care.
A more rights-based approach toward mental health in India is being sought from several quarters. “Bridge the Care Gap” is one such campaign that attempts to build public opinion on this issue:
The State needs to take far more agressive steps to implement the Mental Health Care Act and Policy. #BridgeTheCareGap advocates for just that. Lend your voice. Sign the Petition https://t.co/0hEpTEWF50
— Harsh Mariwala (@hcmariwala) April 13, 2019
Why #BridgeTheCareGap in mental health?
If effective and humane mental health care services are made available, accessible and affordable, then 150 million Indians living with mental health issues can avail treatments that help them avoid chronic… https://t.co/ZjFtJMchTR
— Nandita Das (@nanditadas) April 7, 2019
As mental health awareness grows and the need for addressing the existing gap becomes more imminent, many more community-based initiatives are required to relieve the mental health crisis in India.

author: Anumeha Verma