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20
Mar
By CPB Guest Blogger, Hamid Tehrani
This is the first in an occasional series of guest posts. Hamid Tehrani is an expert on the Iranian blogosphere and covers that topic for Global Voices.
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The tragic death of Omid Reza Mir Sayafi, an Iranian blogger in prison in Iran, just a couple of days before the Iranian New Year begins, reminded us once again how bloggers can face danger and merciless prisons because of their posts. His death reminds us of another sad fact: the unbearable lightness of Iranian blogosphere and how much it is fragmented and disorganized.
In the West we love to focus only on the positive sides of the Iranian blogosphere : its vitality, diversity and dynamism.
However, there is no doubt that civil society activists have no access to radio, TV or newspapers in Iran and that they use the Internet, especially blogs, to inform and to organize.
But in Omid Reza’s case, the Iranian blogs showed that they did not have the desire or the ability to support their fellow blogger. There were only a few blogs that talked about his arrest and no petition or campaign was launched to support him.
Unfortunately, the Omid Reza case was not an exception. When the Alaie brothers, physicians who fought against AIDS, were jailed, their USA-based friends launched a campaign on Facebook, but the Iranian blogosphere was quite silent.
An Iranian cleric named Ali Reza Jahanshahi was arrested to protest against corruption. Yes, in the Islamic Republic clerics get arrested too!
Except for a few Islamist bloggers, nobody even mentioned him.
You can make headlines in different blogs if you belong to this or that circle. Student activists are the lucky ones. Can we blame Iranian blogs for that? Not really. Blogs are fragmented and a given blog is not supposed to play an Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch role. After all, a blog is praised for its individuality.
Here is hoping that sites and organizations like Committee to Protect Bloggers, Global Voices and DigiActive can fill the information gap and do what Iranian bloggers are unable to.
Maybe with a little bit of coordination and focus the next Omid Reza will face a less dark future.
- Published by Curt Hopkins in: Reports
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4 Responses to “The Unbearable Lightness of the Iranian Blogosphere”
I think this is probably the case in lots of other countries too? Organizations like Global Voices or Committee to Protect Bloggers aim to create a sense of solidarity and unity between bloggers worldwide, but I guess it’s too much to expect bloggers to feel that way automatically. Was Omid Reza Mir Sayafi a very well-known blogger? From the outside it always seems to come down to who people’s personal friends are, and whether they have the capacity to organize something on behalf of them. It’s definitely very sad, and I wish all the many people imprisoned unfairly a swift release.
Hamid, Great post. When you are blogging from Iran, there is always this fine line between sharing opinions and calling unwanted attention to yourself. This may seem like a cop-out or an excuse for the relative silence, but it is a reality.
If I could make one recommendation to Iranian bloggers, it would be this: if you are going to be outspoken and challenge authority, make sure that you have a lot of support outside Iran. Join a network that will work for you if you are imprisoned. Make sure that people worry about you. Don’t be alone.
but let’s also say that it’s up to us in the west not let them alone, to support and talk and write about them – especially knowing how difficult is for people living under those regimes to freely communicate with the western world
i think that the more attention, the more coverage these stories get in the west, the better – hence the great importance of organizations such as Global Voices or Committee to Protect Bloggers in their daily info-spreading & network building
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