From Dissent to Disillusionment?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:13
And a warm welcome to this panel discussion, co-sponsored by Deutsche Welle. I'm your host, Rob Mudge, not Sulfik Albani.
00:21
If you saw the name earlier, my colleague was sick during the week, so I've jumped in at short notice. I'll try and make it as painless as possible for you. Our panel discussion will focus on the title, From Dissent to Disillusion, where we're going to look at three countries, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria, looking at the status of social media, what role they've played throughout the year,
00:43
and where we are now, what the status quo is. And I'd like to introduce you to our panel for today's discussion. On my left, Claire Ulrich, who is the editor of the French version of Global Voices Online, a member of the Bob jury, and you've written extensively about Tunisia.
01:01
A warm welcome to you. A warm welcome to Claire Ulrich, thank you. Then on my right, we have Leila Nakhwati, a Spanish Syrian blogger. I hope I got that right. And a human rights activist, assistant professor of communications at Carlos III University in Madrid. Just adjunct professor, I learnt the new word,
01:21
the translation from Spanish is not literate. That's new to me. Okay, and my far right, Tarek Amr, an Egyptian blogger and activist, also works with Global Voices and also a member of the Bob's jury. A warm welcome to all of you, thank you for coming.
01:42
And essentially, I'd like to just explain, break it down into two parts of our debate today. First, I'd like to look at getting an appraisal from each individual country about the status quo of the social media, what role they've played, what role they play now. After that, I'd like to encourage questions and comments from the audience,
02:01
so please feel free to join in. And the second half, I'd like to focus at whether there is a kind of overarching support network between the three countries. Have they been able to help each other in giving ideas and tips on how to proceed? And again, after that, if there are any questions and comments, then please feel free to join in.
02:22
Before we start our actual debate, we'll show you a short video looking at the current status quo in the three countries we will talk about. People in the Arab world took to the streets calling for freedom of speech.
02:45
Here in Egypt, they managed to oust the government. Now they have to readjust to life in a completely new world. It's sometimes hard to find one's own role.
03:03
Am I part of the revolution or just reportedly a part of the world? You want to show where you stand in your reports, but you aren't actually taking part in the demonstrations, even if it feels like it. New broadcasters have gone on the air, including 25TV,
03:20
made by young people who took part in the revolution. They're glad to be involved in something new, even if they still face censorship and excessive bureaucracy. At an international media conference, Docevela's Global Media Forum, journalists met to discuss their successes and failures after the political changes.
03:44
Lina Ben-Mini from Tunisia was one of those attending. The situation of media in Tunisia didn't change at all. It's the same for the police who are still using violence. Violence and repression are part of everyday life for Mohammed and his friends in Syria.
04:04
They try to report to the world on the current situation via the Internet from a secret location. 10, 20, 30 seconds. We send the media everything we can so people can see what's happening.
04:25
It often takes hours to upload the short scenes of violence. The reporters live in constant fear of being discovered by the secret service. The videos show that speaking your mind can still involve huge risks for many people in the Arab world.
05:11
How would you assess the current situation on the ground? Well, about the title of our panel, from dissent to disillusionment,
05:21
I think it refers more to the disillusionment part. It's hard to pronounce this word, being a non-English speaker, disillusionment. So I guess it comes more from mainstream media coverage of the revolutions and how there were a lot of expectations from the rest of the world
05:43
in seeing change from very repressive societies to stable democratic societies. And this, unfortunately, does not happen overnight. So I really would like to ask if any of you has heard of any revolution that does not stumble,
06:02
that does not find internal division and that leads from repression, decades of dictatorship and destroying every civil society infrastructure to a very healthy, stable, democratic society. So we're going to need some more time to see the outcome of this.
06:22
I think citizens continue dissenting, continue dissenting even in extremely dangerous places, such as Syria, continue risking their lives to share what's happening. That video, that interesting video that Robert shared, they showed some activists in Syria.
06:42
It's very common now, and this answers the question of how people have been learning from each other. More and more video activists in Syria have learned from activists in Tunisia, activists in Egypt, and they protect their identities more.
07:02
I don't know if those people on the video, they probably said they wanted to be on camera, those Syrians, but normally it's a requirement for us who are working with Syrians to hide their identity, to blur their faces. So there's more and more efficient use of this identity protection techniques
07:27
which have been a result of the government hunting down people who appear on camera. So the visibility helps us denounce crimes in countries such as Syria,
07:41
but the visibility is a double-edged sword, and this is what activists have learned from the previous activists. So now we see how most YouTube videos are shown from behind, so activists record demonstrations from behind, and there's also new software to blur people's faces. There's a software that witnesses, yeah?
08:02
Can I just... Sure, sure, sure. A key word I think is visibility, and those images are still very fresh in our minds. Can we maybe turn to one country that has maybe been through that phase and gone one step further? Claire, you've followed the events in Tunisia extensively. Where do they stand now?
08:21
We don't hear or see that much from Tunisia. Tunisia has gone out of the news a little, at least in the Western world, but the process continues, and an incredible amount is happening every day since the revolution. As Leila said very well, it's gritty, it's not glamorous,
08:41
but Tunisia still remains, and I'd like to say to stress that I am not Tunisian, but that I've been following Tunisian bloggers for a long, long time now, five years, and I've known a few, and I've been to Tunisia, and I know a lot of them. What strikes me is the fact that it's been an absolutely bloodlet...
09:03
Well, there was a lot of blood at the beginning, you know, with the uprising, many people died, but nothing compared to other countries besides, plus it's a small country. And it struck me that Tunisia is still the lab, the revolution lab, because they've had, in the space of nine months, from the toppling of Ben Ali
09:25
to the general election of the constituent election, which is incredible, there are countries that have taken centuries to achieve this, right? A bloodless election, a free and fair election, and since then, the writing of a constitution.
09:42
So it's not all a bed of roses, as Lina, you know, said on this short TV item, but it's a process where you can see forces fighting inches by inches for the constitution, or for their right, or for their religion, both sides are fighting.
10:02
But it's a process where you have people demonstrating about every day, you have people voting laws and debating laws in an open democratic constituent assembly, and you have people who come to visit as tourists, so the economy is still alive.
10:21
So Tunisia is incredible, and it continues being incredible, and activism plays still a very big role, maybe we'll talk later about that. You mentioned, you said it's almost a bloodless revolution, but if we compare that to what happened in Egypt, which became known almost as the Facebook revolution, that stood out as a key word.
10:44
Tarek, how would you assess the situation today, a year on, from the events there? Well, one point is that calling it a Facebook revolution is, for sure, the internet has helped a lot, but the fact is, on the one hand, it was not the only agent, but the most important thing that,
11:03
I want to skip this discussion now about the effectiveness of the internet, but the most important is that after the revolution, it came out that the internet can be like a spark that starts something, but building a democracy needs other tools. You are having a society with 40% who cannot read and write,
11:22
you have internet penetration is like 20 or 30% in the country, so that's why the process is taking other shapes than it used to be maybe during the early days or the 18 days of the revolution itself. Do you think that's the reason why the West is possibly growing frustrated now
11:41
at the lack of speed of reforms that initially everyone launched onto this Facebook revolution, these events that developed so incredibly fast, and now you say, but there's more to it, obviously, and that's something the West is prone to forget, possibly. Well, I'm not sure if the West is disappointed because of this
12:04
or because there is nothing eye-catching like people demonstrating in the city, what the media has to show most of the time. But we are also disappointed a bit because we have bad history with time, with patience and time.
12:21
The old regime used, most of the time, whenever things screw up with them, they said that, yeah, we are in a process and things will get better in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years, so they keep on postponing everything whenever you blame them. No, okay, it's bad now, but after 20 years it will be good, so wait for us. So that's why we want everything to happen all of a sudden.
12:42
That's why we are a bit disappointed, yeah? But for sure there is changes and the reform is taking place. For sure the army is trying to resist this reform, but it has to take its way no matter what. Can you talk about crackdown and repression again? There are developments in Tunisia again, we hear about the Salafists trying to crack down.
13:04
What is the situation there right now for the media? On the media, well, there are demos because they are debating it for the constitution and media is in a very big problem in a reconstructed country. Medias were before, of course, you know, traditional media were totally, you know,
13:24
took their order from the palace, I suppose, right? And it was an indefinite media were censored. Now Tunisia is arriving at this very delicate point. What will be written in the law for the media, the future media?
13:41
But you can see very encouraging signs. For instance, Nahuatl played a big part as being a core blog, right, during the revolution and before the revolution, has launched a citizen media experiment in six provincial towns, where in the mise-en-de-jeune, the youth club, there will be trainings on citizen journalism,
14:02
how to analyze news, how to be fair, how to look for sources, check sources, and it's an ongoing process and they are hoping to extend it to more cities and not just work on the internet, but why not? Maybe one day it will become the new daily from Tunisia. Why not?
14:20
There are plenty of things happening in Tunisia. I'd just like to highlight how every day is a new adventure. There was lately, there's a minister of human rights, of the women right in Tunisia, and one day he declared that homosexuality was a disease. The reaction was immediate. Gay Day, Facebook demonstration,
14:43
which goes to show that from one side, because you've got Salafism and demonstration in university wanting students to be allowed to wear the full niqab, something is happening every day when you look from afar and it's certainly very difficult for people inside doing cyber activism
15:02
because you can be out of breath after a year, but still they're very resilient, they're continuing for every little detail, like people who've been hurt or received live bullets during the revolution are still not cured. The government still has not released funds
15:21
to send them to hospitals or to give them a pension, and some are dead. Some went into a hunger strike to protest, to have their rights, because nobody looked after them after the revolution from the government. Every day something is happening, and you can see that the citizens are still very,
15:43
not only the professional activists, but they're really fighting it all the way. This citizen journalism you describe, I think it's fair to say in Tunisia and Egypt has taken a certain progression in Syria. It's very nascent. Can you describe how difficult it is for these activist bloggers to get together?
16:02
How do they get together? How do they communicate amongst each other? Media in Syria are controlled. I mean, they have been controlled for decades, so the Syrian media infrastructure is the least developed in the area, but the most controlled, the most surveilled.
16:22
So the government literally owns the media, and they continue fabricating their own reality of events, which is the name of the banner on their main state channel. They call themselves the reality of events.
16:40
So they give this parallel reality of Syria, where nothing's happening, where people are eating ice cream in the street and playing, kids, children. And then sometimes they show these terrorist attacks, what they call them, maybe in some spots of the city. But more and more you can see how these fabrications are clumsy,
17:02
so they make mistakes, like they have people act and pose for the camera, and then you see how these people stand up and go, and they were supposed to be wounded. So more and more these fabrications, pretty much no one believes it, because we have so many contents online,
17:20
so many contents that people are sharing, compared to 1982 during the massacre of the people of Hama, 20,000 people got killed, and there's no videos, no photos, no contents of that massacre. Now we have so many contents that people, inside Syria, because journalists are banned from entering the country,
17:40
so activists are risking their lives to do live streaming of demonstrations, funerals, to share it with the world, and more and more there's a professional, more professional citizen journalism, they document their contents, so they include these banners in the beginning of every video saying Hama, April 20, 2012, so they give the name of the city,
18:05
to provide context for journalists, for other people who want to collect these stories, but I always keep getting asked, how do we know what's reliable? Well it's very difficult to know what's reliable, you have to have your own network of contacts that you rely,
18:23
that's very important, but if someone's to blame for the contents not to be reliable, it's of course the government, you cannot blame the citizens who are risking their lives for that, you have to always question the government who's not letting journalists in. Tarek, we talked earlier about the situation in Egypt,
18:43
and you said it's not all focused obviously on the Facebook revolution, indeed right at the beginning of the uprising, the government managed to crack down and shut down the internet, I think there was a blackout for a few days, but even despite that the protest continued,
19:01
so obviously there is more to it than just the aspect of social media, it does depend on the local characteristics of each respective country we're talking about. I must say that now we are doing things totally the opposite way, we are learning the tools or the methodologies
19:22
or stuff that we learn from social media and we're applying them on the ground. There is this campaign I want to talk about, it's arranged by some Egyptians, it's called the Askr Kazimun, which literally means the militia are liars. What they are doing is they are setting data shows in the squares and in the streets,
19:42
and displaying videos about the army brutality and how they are cracking down demos after the revolution, because there were like those statistics that show that 80% of the Egyptian people are trusting the militia, even after the revolution itself,
20:01
and even with like 12,000 people have been detained after military trials, after the fall of Mubarak himself, there are like thousands of people who have been killed by the army. So they felt that they have to throw people in the streets who don't have internet access to show them this. And what they are literally doing is they are copying what's being YouTube by having it in the streets,
20:26
and people gather there and they do comment on this video, if I have to say commenting, and they might share it as well because those videos are available online, so you can copy this video and share it in another square and displaying it. So at the end of the day you are copying what you have learned from social media somehow
20:44
to do it in the physical world. Another initiative is called Twitchera, it's like Twitter in the street. People go there and they announce like the subject of this conversation, which is the hashtag in this case, and they try to see people going there randomly and stop them
21:02
and start asking them what are your opinion about this, what's your opinion about that, and there are also, again, there are requis, because those people who listen to this conversation, they go there in their homes and everywhere else and try to transfer the message. So in a way or another, social media has helped,
21:22
maybe not in a technological way, it helped, and also the concept that came out from this world of today, of sharing, of shareism, like Isaac Mao tried to call it, these concepts are getting inside or outside the internet to other places.
21:46
Claire, I believe you showed me an email earlier from a friend of yours who rather vividly describes the situation, what the Tunisian people is going through. Yes, it's Afev, Afev is writing for Global Voices and maybe other citizen media from Tunis,
22:03
and she sent me a mail when, and because really I think a Tunisian voice should come from Tunisia, you know, what has happened during this year, what is our stand on this revolution, or disillusion, right? This is what she has to say, please excuse me, my glasses and everything.
22:24
I think it's short. I'd like to tell that like any other democratic transition experience in other countries, the Tunisian experience has had its ups and downs. It's still early to make judgement now, but we were only able to judge it in no less than three years.
22:45
I'm proud of what my country has achieved so far, free and fair election, peaceful transition of power, a culture of protest, art and the civil society that are all flourishing, and I do believe that more than any other country in the region
23:02
we got what it takes to make this experience, meaning revolution, a success. A small homogenous and educated population, around 10 millions. Illiteracy is not high, women are involved, and women's role is very important in democracy.
23:22
So I think it sums it up, even after a year of upheaval and whatever was our political choice, Tunisia is still a lamp of cyber activism, and she hopes that other countries will continue looking at it, supporting it.
23:40
Can I at this point maybe open up the discussion to the floor? Are there any questions or comments? I can hardly see you, sorry about that. Yeah, there's a question down here at the front. I would like to ask what you think about the economic prospects for those countries,
24:02
because I think that's where a lot of the disillusionment comes from, and if people have to judge whether it was actually worth the revolution or not, they will certainly use indicators such as the unemployment rate or inflation rate. Are you addressing that to a specific panelist or country,
24:22
or just a general, I don't know, who would like to? Leila? I'm not an expert on economic issues, but it's definitely a factor, it's definitely an issue, social injustice, and the very unequal distribution of resources. These governments, and I know the Syrian very well,
24:43
but I think it applies to the rest of the area, they rule these countries as if the countries were their own property. So they work as a mafia that controls the resources, so if you want to open a stand or any small store in any part of Syria,
25:02
to mention the example I know best, you have to pay a bribe to the government. In order to travel to the airport, to be able to travel to another country, you have to pay to get your visa. So everything runs under this system of corruption and paying to get your way. So you have a traffic fine, for instance, and you never pay the traffic fine.
25:25
You bribe the policeman so that he will not give you the fine. So he keeps the money, and in exchange for that, he lets you go. So that's how it works. People have been used to this system of social injustice, and the word, the concept karama, dignity,
25:42
has a lot to do with social justice and with inequality in the area. And of course, that's always an issue, not only, I would say not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but in the rest of the world as well. Okay, yeah, I totally agree with Leila. Also, I believe that the government, the economic reasons on one hand
26:03
are helping speeding up the revolution and making people revolt, and this is what they revolt from in the first day. But also the regime is using it as a way to twist their hand by limiting the resources, and sometimes the government is not investing. We have been a year and a half since the revolution in Egypt,
26:21
and the government is not trying to invest anymore. They are trying to show people that revolution is bad for you, and this is what brought this starvation and economic reasons, and they hang everything on the revolution itself. So the government is using this as an excuse for them to act badly
26:41
and for a way to force people not to revolt anymore or to be more stabilized. Any other questions or comments right at the back there? You'll get a microphone shortly.
27:05
Thank you, I think the panel is great, and they show a range of experiences which come from these various countries which are not really, they're quite different in their background, and in the situation at the moment.
27:22
So it was brought to my attention that, for instance, in Tunisia now, we have had a very worrisome development of governmental control over the traditional media which has sprouted after the revolution or as a process.
27:41
So for instance, today there is a TV station called Nasme TV, which has been sentenced guilty of inciting riots for showing the animated movie Persepolis, which is made in France, and they have been fined and declared guilty
28:01
for the riots which destroyed their premises, the premises of their owner and so on, by the Islamic militants, I mean, Islamist party, related people within their country. So it is, I think, very worrisome because it shows that the revolutions do not only go forward,
28:24
but they can go in various directions, and the role of the online and the offline or traditional media is crucial in a way of combining their influences.
28:41
Can I pick up on that and ask you to describe the interrelation, if there is any, between the mainstream media, so to speak, and social media, how they intertwined possibly or not, how reliant the mainstream media has become on social media.
29:00
Nasme TV, which is still a private TV, but well with the former, it is rumoured to have good acquaintances with the former rulers, right? And broadcast the film Persepolis, I don't know if you've heard about it, Persepolis is a cartoon about a young lady growing up in Iran when the revolution arrived,
29:25
and then everything becomes hell because she has to cover herself, and Tehran becomes the town of Mola. Right, it had a huge success, but it's a beautiful film, but it's a personal story, it's a biography of Marjan, the person who wrote the film and designed it.
29:44
And it was broadcast 15 days, if I remember, before the general election, the first free and fair election in Tunisia last September, October. And, of course, the Muslim parties thought it was an insult,
30:02
and a way to press down to scare the people. From then it became a complicated story that has many, many episodes, but it is true that it is a constant battle. It's a constant battle in Tunisia from what we see at Global Voices,
30:21
and now Tunisia is well covered in France in citizen media. It's a constant battle for this trial, for the freedom to have porn, for example. There was a big debate in Tunisia this past month, should we censor pornography on the net?
30:42
And some said yes, because, you know, like everywhere you don't want your kids, and some said no, because if you start censoring porn, well, you know what comes after that? You're censoring bad news, you're censoring unwelcome news, etc.
31:01
And it's still continuing the debate. What has to be understood is some are against, some have for, and believe me, Tunisians will not let go easily of a story. I mean, they're professional cyber activists and activists in town, and this was judged by different courts of justice,
31:20
and it is continuing. So the state of media in Tunisia is indeed some old quote-unquote newspapers and magazine that are starting to reform from inside by hiring young journalists and doing really, you know, trying to, but then you've got the forces like any other country of groups,
31:40
you know, with money, let's say, or with power, trying to influence its common game. What is new in Tunisia is just in this complicated transition where there's not a new press, and of course you can always have the danger of the old press regimes coming back.
32:02
So Tunisia is continuously moving, you know, it's allowed. Leila, you wanted to comment on the question? I was commenting on what that person in the audience was saying, that whatever happens from now on, we'll have to deal with it from now on,
32:22
but nothing, nothing will legitimize, retroactively, these governments that were never legitimate in the first place. So whatever happens from now on, we're going to have to ensure that citizens are represented, that social justice becomes a reality,
32:40
that no one's going to miss those regimes. There's always nostalgic people of the status quo, but that doesn't mean, it's very dangerous when we hear on mainstream media, well, and now what? Well, whatever happens from now on, we'll see, but that's not going to justify the fact that these governments were there for decades,
33:00
oppressing their own peoples, their own people. So when it comes to coverage of mainstream media versus citizen media, we see a lot of differences. As I mentioned, Tunisia, no one was there in the beginning. So people were in Tunisia, out in the streets for a long time, before mainstream media actually understood that there was something to do there.
33:21
It happened the same with other mobilizations in the world. It's happening now with Bahrain. We can see how Bahrain is maybe the forgotten revolution. There's no country, no, we could say, big power that's with the people of Bahrain.
33:40
Pretty much everyone supports the Bahraini regime, which is one of the most ruthless governments against their own people. So now mainstream media are covering the Formula One race, and we can see how the Formula One race is happening, while police is firing tear gas at protesters, arresting, torturing, detaining.
34:01
There's one of the most renowned activists of Bahrain, Al Hawaia. He's dying of a hunger strike for 60 days now, over 60 days, to take attention to the Bahraini struggle, to Bahraini demands for freedom and justice, while mainstream media and the international community have displayed this Formula One race
34:22
for the whole world to watch. So this is how it goes. I mean, what really matters to citizens on the ground is not necessarily matching what mainstream media are really focusing on. And that's why we are very lucky that we have tools now to get other sources.
34:40
If we turn to Egypt again, in the initial phase of the uprising, Al Jazeera, for example, was relying heavily on Facebook material to visualize the uprising. How do you see the correlation between the social media and the mainstream media? Have they used each other, or is the mainstream media actually developing into a certain direction,
35:05
that it's not so reliant on social media? Well, even outside the Egyptian revolution itself, mainstream media is tending now to rely more on social media. Most of the CNN and BBC journalists in Egypt are having Twitter accounts, and they are having discussions with people all the time, with people in Egypt.
35:23
They use it as a way to understand how people are thinking. They use it as a way to collect. We have seen Al Jazeera directly is using Storyfi, which is a tool for curating what people are saying on Twitter and other social media tools. So, in a way or another, mainstream media is being affected by social media,
35:44
and it's using it all the time. And for sure, social media is affected also by mainstream media. It's mutual... How would you say it's affected? Could you just describe what the... Which one of them? How social media is affected by the mainstream?
36:00
Oh, well, a lot of social media citizen journalists are aspiring to be journalists, in a way or another. And they are also learning how to... new rules or new ways of reporting. They get to... sometimes get to this career, sometimes do have trainings by journalists.
36:23
So it's like, even the way of writing a story and covering something, in the beginning, someone, if he was covering a story, just dumps his ideas in his blog, and he doesn't care about the shape or forming it in a way that's appealing more to the audience.
36:42
Because the audience at that moment was limited readers or something who knows what he's talking about. But now many of them are formulating what they are writing in a way that is similar to what's being written on mainstream media, because they know that the audience is getting bigger and bigger, and people even from outside Egypt who might not be totally aware of the situation
37:03
or of the minor details that's going on on the ground. Are there any more comments or questions on this issue? Yes, here at the front. We have a microphone. Thank you.
37:20
I'd appreciate all of you speaking a little bit about the role of social media for shaping the interpretation of what was happening the last few years, about working on the collective memory of the people there. And in regard of that, maybe to whether social media is more the source for news, for videos,
37:48
information, whether journalists, citizen journalists are working with that and spreading that. How important is social media for the discussion from people to people about how do we see that?
38:06
How do we interpret what is happening today, what was happening? Do we see it as disillusionment or do we fight on? And, yeah, that would be my question.
38:22
Well, I agree with you that it's a source for a lot of news nowadays, but I don't like to limit it to be its only role as being a source, because in a way or another, if you go back in time like a year and a half from now,
38:42
during the revolution, I don't like to say during because it's still there, but I mean during those days of the revolution, the message was very simple. People are demonstrating in the streets and they want to bring down the regime. So it was very easy for mainstream media to cover something like this because they can create a story from this.
39:02
But the situation now is like, if I might focus on an incident that happened a couple of days ago, there were people having a sit-in in some square in Egypt, and most of the people in Egypt were against this sit-in and they don't believe in it and they were like cursing it.
39:22
And then the army cracked them down and they killed some of them. So people who were against the sit-in now went to the sit-in and they are in there. And the reason of this sit-in is because one of the candidates in the presidential elections, his mother has double nationality so he cannot run in that direction.
39:45
Why am I saying all this story? Because as you can see, it's a very complicated story and for mainstream media to cover something like this, it's not very attractive to anybody and probably nobody will understand what this story is so they just ignore it.
40:00
So here comes the role of citizen media because they don't have those rules or those backgrounds that limit them from covering a certain issue that's eye-catching or more important to the audience. They cover everything because this is their own lives and they cover it.
40:20
So when it comes to situations that are complicated, that cannot be easily marketed or presented to the audience, they have more persistence to write about it and to elaborate more about it. So they are not only sources but they are also like a parallel world of media.
40:44
Claire, would you like to comment on that or if there aren't any more? Yeah, I received two because before coming to this conference I was asking different Tunisian people in Tunisia what do you think of the role of social media? A lot of them have said it's getting difficult to decipher because the different political parties,
41:07
and there are a lot now, have understood the way to manipulate it. So we're in a strange period but it's difficult if you're not Tunisian, if you don't have an intense understanding of the context of each event,
41:21
to follow news through social media because for many reasons it can be a little bit very aggressive, there can be personal stories between people that you don't know about. So people are starting to be cautious about covering what is happening in Tunisia through social media because a lot of them have gone off social media as well
41:43
because they got flagged. I mean, you know, there was so much violence and aggressivity and the defamation at some point that they left their social media and they're coming back under other form. Just to say that, it's now difficult to cover Tunisia through only social media.
42:01
If there aren't any more comments or questions right now, I'd like to move on to a different point and then we can take some more questions. I'd like to look at the role or the possibility that the various countries were talking about. Have they learnt from each other's experiences? Are there joint networks? Is there some sort of connectivity, some sort of overriding network that one country has learnt from the other?
42:27
Leyla in Syria, maybe you'd like to start. So yes, definitely. Well, Arab regimes have always been divided because each of them has their own interests so they ally with different countries
42:42
and they stand in different places regardless of their citizen needs and demands. But people, the citizens, we have now seen the amount of solidarity within the Middle East and North Africa from country to country and this links these bonds between people, between activists,
43:02
which internet communications have also helped enable. This has a lot to do with the fact that revolutions have moved from countries, from country to country because there was a powerful network in the sense of, when we talk about social network in the pure human sense of the word,
43:22
more than the technological part, social network, people bonding, people getting together, challenging the political barriers. So we see a lot of solidarity with Bahrain despite the lack of interest from the international community in the Bahrain revolution. So Syrians have a lot of problems, as you can imagine,
43:44
but they're very active, they're among the most active in supporting the Bahrain revolution because they know what it is like. They can really relate to that. So we have big campaigns like the support of the Hawaii hunger strike.
44:01
A lot of Syrians are actually making a big deal out of that and the other way around. There's a lot of support to Syrians from the rest of the countries. We have this free Razan campaign that won the jury award at the Deutsche Welle. People from all over the rest of the Arab world, from Tunisia, from Egypt,
44:21
from Bahrain, from Morocco have been extremely active in supporting, in standing in solidarity because they know better than anyone else the amount of repression that they're facing. So solidarity is actually very alive within Arab citizens. But can you give us an example of how difficult it actually physically is
44:41
or technically is to get that support out to the other countries? Well, you have things like very little details like you have on Twitter maybe someone from Egypt I read asking someone from Palestine what do you do about the tear gas? And advice like take an onion, put it to your nose so that you don't breathe the gas.
45:04
So Palestinians are giving feedback to Egyptians. Egyptians are giving feedback to Syrians how to react, how to develop strategies of non-violent resistance. So they're all learning from each other. The bad part of this is that regimes also learn from each other. So we see that every regime that is toppled is more brutal than the regime before.
45:24
So we saw that Tunisians invaded, took to the streets, took to the main squares. Egyptians did too. So Syrian regime made a big, huge effort into not letting people concentrate by hundreds of thousands at big spots like the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
45:44
If we had a million people standing next to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the government would be gone by now. They cannot do anything against that. But they are using every brutality, every technique, every strategy to terrorize population, to prevent them from gathering on physical spaces.
46:05
So they learned from the previous regime what it means to have a million people take to the streets. Tariq, have you got any examples you can give us on this community networking where there's been interchange between the various activists in the different countries?
46:25
Yes, there's a network. It has been very long a while ago. It's not during the revolution. It's been like 10 years or more. Activists meet all the time. If they don't meet, they have like this social network. They use them to discuss stuff all the time.
46:40
Sometimes the messages are hard to be transferred. For example, during the Tunisian revolution, most of the Tunisians on Twitter were talking in French. So for us, it was a bit harder to understand what they are saying. But yeah, this message might be hard, but in a way or another, they were able to help us for advices like this one of the tear guys.
47:04
But what was more important is that there is another message that doesn't need a language and this was transferred from one country to another, which is hope. What we really believe that was the most important thing that the Tunisians gave to us is hope. So in the 25th of January, 2010, not 2011, there were demos in Tahrir Square in Egypt and nothing happened.
47:29
People just went to their homes later on. What is the difference between the 25th of January 2010 and 2011 is the hope that the Tunisians gave to us a few days earlier.
47:41
So I think this is the most important thing that's being transferred between countries from one to another. So the Tunisians gave the Egyptians hope. What are the Tunisians getting maybe now from the Egyptians or from Syria? Obviously their political life in Tunisia is so intense, with something happening every day,
48:02
every day between that maybe they do not have all the time to dedicate, but there is still obviously bonds, as Laila said, bonds have been formed that will be forever. I remember the invitation on Twitter, why don't you come to Egypt?
48:22
Why don't you come to Tunisia for your holidays, cultural exchange or touristic exchange, when Egyptians before never went to Tunisia usually. But it's deeper than that. It's part of a common story and I think they know it. I wouldn't, you know, I see it on social network, I see it on blogs, I see it on traditional media,
48:43
I'm not part of it, but sometimes you get a better view and what you see is one youth. In fact it's very much a question of having lived together those events that shaped your life forever because you were between 20 and 35 and it obviously has impacted their life forever.
49:04
Do you think there's anything the mainstream Western media like Deutsche Welle, CNN, BBC can do to help establish and help to further make it easier for these networks to get established
49:20
and to really form a base in the respective countries? Is there anything? I think Laila might answer this better than me. No, I actually wanted you to answer it because you know Deutsche well better. Well I've been asked this question not once, many times. Whether it's like Western media or Western governments or Western NGOs or whatever.
49:47
I really don't know, I don't have something to say for Western media how to help us. I believe we already are helping our own selves. Maybe your support or your emotional and moral support is very good
50:02
and something we really appreciate but like something tangible that I can say how media can help us. Maybe I'm not an expert in this but I don't know. Well I could say that the lesson we can learn from this and maybe we could have learned it before but it's very obvious now is that you can only media wise and international community wise
50:24
you can only expect that development to be based on respect for human rights. So we have seen how relationships have been based on economic issues and this is why for decades these governments had support and they were legitimized by US government, by European governments, by the international community.
50:47
So I hope now we're going to reflect on where this support has taken us and we will reconsider listening to civil society representatives from this country real civil society representatives.
51:01
So if I have something that I would really ask from media, from governments is to actually listen to civil societies from these countries not to corrupt governments, not to corrupt institutions to actually empower these civil society members and actually enter dialogue with them
51:21
and that should be the basis. I mean human rights support, consistency with human rights support because if we support them with one hand and with the other hand we are providing these governments with technology to surveil people we are providing these governments with weapons to repress people so this is inconsistent and citizens from the Middle East and North Africa
51:44
will question the support coming from Western regimes if it's so inconsistent. We're coming towards the end of our panel discussion but I have one question Would you say that maybe the social media revolution has run its course?
52:01
Has what? I mean what has run its course has come to a point where there is not a lot more it can do and what would come afterwards? I mean Tarik you were saying a lot of these social media, these citizen journalists are aspiring to be mainstream journalists so to speak. I think some of them, but I don't get your question very well.
52:23
I can't get your question yet. Do you think there's, I mean what is the next step? We had the social media revolution, the Facebook revolution, has that basically gone as far as it can go and what if anything could come next?
52:41
Well I'll reply to you and also be replying to Philip who has been asking a question a couple of minutes ago about at the current moment people feel like well things are going in a way or another might not be the way we expected it to be so why did we vote in the first day so let's go back to the old regime.
53:06
The point is that I don't like to see the revolution whether it's in Egypt or elsewhere but let me focus on Egypt more about it's not a revolution against Mubarak. Mubarak was an asshole and we removed him anyway but there are a bunch of assholes taking his place now.
53:21
So it's not a revolution against Mubarak itself. It's a revolution against the barrier of fear in fact. I still remember on the 29th of January I was in Tahrir Square and there was that poor lady who cannot read or write or anything and she was telling me a couple of days ago I was afraid of every single soldier in the street.
53:42
Whenever a soldier passed by I tried to hide. She was not a thief or anything but she was just afraid of them. And today I'm revolting against the head of this state. And I believe this is the most important thing. Seeing it this way makes us believe that no matter how things go worse
54:00
as long as the barrier of fear has been broken there will be a way or another whether it's a demo in the street or a strike in a factory or someone writing against the regime or even using the parliament or legalization to confront with the regime. So it doesn't have to be this romantic image of revolution with people carrying slogans and demonstrating.
54:24
It can be elsewhere or in different techniques. May I say that the aftermath of this social media revolution is still felt because there are countries that are very little in the news that are experimenting it now like Mauritania, you know, the state of Mauritania where demos have been launched on Facebook
54:48
and materialized in the real world thanks to Facebook. It's a direct example taken from Tunisia, Egypt. And then you have another country which has been present at the Bops at the Best of Blog Awards
55:01
which is Bangladesh where there have been horrible murders of journalists and only bloggers protested it, not the politicians. Only social media, only bloggers talked about it, mentioned it, covered it. So it is still happening somewhere else, at different stage, with different culture,
55:24
with different means, technological, intellectual, political, but it is still happening everywhere. We have a couple of minutes left so if there are any more questions or comments from the audience. Right here.
55:42
One minute. Thank you very much. Extremely involving discussion. My question to the panel is that we are talking about social media, we are talking about the revolution that is bringing in then the revolt,
56:03
as it says on top of your slide, is bringing in. Probably it's time that we need to sit back and analyze the entire situation. We need to go back to the 70s, what the international community did in Afghanistan. They equipped the entire Afghani nation, brought all the jihadis, gave them weapons.
56:24
They fought the war, Soviet collapsed and America left Afghanistan and the international community forgot it till the two towers were brought down. Now, it's time that we are again equipping the Arab world with the social media, all these media.
56:43
We need to realize the situation, how this situation be in next 10, 20 years, when the revolt might be against the Western countries. Sorry, I had to interrupt you. Have you got a question? This is the question, that how do we see social media in next 10 and 20 years,
57:02
when it will revolt against us as well. Can you answer from the three of you? I don't know about how we see social media. I think it's a matter of a bigger issue of freedom of expression. So we see that there's a global trend in controlling the tools that we are using to express ourselves.
57:20
This is happening not only in Syria, not only in Egypt. We can see how it's happening in France, in Australia, in Spain. And I think our colleague Gillian York from the EFF talked about this very effectively. So it's a global issue. And what will be the future like? It will be up to us. It will be up to how much can we protest and how much can we resist this attempt from the institutions
57:44
to actually control our movements online. Tariq, short answer? Well, I think also they will keep affecting and affecting each other, both traditional and social media. And eventually they will both evolve more. This is what I hope.
58:01
So they will be able to report incidents that have been ignored in the past or be more reporting towards the people side and not towards the regime side. Maybe this is what I hope for. Claire, any last thoughts? Well, I'm optimistic. Maybe too much. I know there's a cyber war going on and it will pick up speed and it will pick up money because there's the new opening business opportunities
58:24
in cyber wars and cyber arms, obviously. But at the same time you see smart initiatives sprouting everywhere. In Tunisia you have a pirate party now. So in Tunisia, remember where it was one year ago. Now you have a pirate party.
58:41
And you've got bar camps about hacking democracy that teach people how to use cyber warfare on their side. So they're organising, they're informing each other. So l'histoire continu. The story continues. Let's hope it does and that's all we've got time for, I'm afraid.
59:03
I'd like to give my thanks to the panel. Claire Ulrich, Leila Nakwati and Tarek Amir. Thanks very much for the very lively discussion. Thank you very much for coming.