Iran: “We do not know what is going on without you”

Over the past two weeks, since Iran’s disputed June 12th Presidential election, the number of visitors from Iran to the VOANewsBlog has surged to new heights. Despite heavy internet filtering by Iranian authorities, several hundred visits have been recorded from inside Iran – most of them from Tehran-based servers but also from 30 other locations in the country, including the holy city of Qom, home to some of Iran’s main religious leaders. Visits from Iran now exceed those from all other countries.

We view this as further evidence of the hunger of Iranians for news about developments in their own country. While the NewsBlog’s contributions have been limited, VOA’s main website and its Persian language site are also reporting record numbers of visits.Iranians are doing more than just visiting websites like ours. They are also sending thousands of emails, still photos and videos – many of which are being used in VOA programming. Iranian officials have denounced those who are sending out information and images to news organizations outside the country as foreign agents.

But the flow of information from what we call “citizen journalists” and others in Iran is unabated. Iranian officials have been trying to block the transmissions of VOA and other broadcasters from getting back into Iran – a technique known as jamming. We have been trying to stay ahead of this by increasing the number of satellites and frequencies we use.

Why is this so important? It’s simple. Here are the words of one Iranian who called us:

“Me and my family need your broadcasts to find out what is going on in our country. It is very important and we do not know what is going on without you.”

Iranians Standing Up for Free Speech

There was a cartoon in the Boston Globe newspaper last week about developments in Iran since the country’s disputed presidential election. It shows two religious leaders standing on a balcony, overlooking a large crowd of protestors. One of the men is shouting “expel the correspondents,” a reference to the crackdown by Iranian authorities aimed at preventing foreign journalists from reporting on events.

But the other religious leader notes that in addition to protest signs, the crowd of demonstrators includes many holding up cellphones, cameras and other electronic devices – some labeled “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “email.” In response to the man shouting “expel the correspondents,” the other says, “but they’re all correspondents!”

Since the disputed June 12 election and the ensuing demonstrations and clashes between protestors and security forces, Voice of America’s Persian News Network, like other news organizations, has received hundreds of pieces of video sent in by ordinary Iranians. These videos are carefully evaluated by Farsi speaking staff before being used in airshows and posted on the web.

Some of these citizen contributions clearly reflect the courage of the contributors, like the one showing militia opening fire on protestors, clearly wounding some of them. Another shows a young woman, just moments after she has been fatally shot. Still another shows baton-wielding police lashing out at group of people that includes elderly women. The video-shooter, a man, can be heard shouting emotionally at the police to “stop beating old ladies” – even as he continues to film the scene.

The world owes these citizen journalists in Iran a deep debt of gratitude. With the government arrests, deportations and attacks on professional journalists, they continue to defy Iran’s effort to eliminate all potential witnesses to what is unfolding in the country.

Roxana Saberi at VOA

Poised and thoughtful, Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi came to VOA this past week for her first and only Farsi-language interview since returning to the United States after being detained in Iran.

In the interview with VOA’s Persian News Network (PNN), Saberi says she was accused of spying and admits she confessed. But she says it was a forced confession while she was under what she calls “extreme psychological pressure.” She says because she was a journalist and was working on a book, Iranian authorities were suspicious of her:

"From the outset, I was charged with being ‘threat to national security’, which, as you know, its definition in Iran can be very extensive. Maybe even what viewers are doing, watching your show [VOA’s PNN] via satellite, fits one of those definitions and they too are a threat to national security. Since I’m a dual citizen, American and Iranian, and was a journalist and was working on a book, they were suspicious of me. I wanted to write a book about Iran’s society and depict the positive aspect of Iran, that Iranians have a rich history and culture. This was for foreigners, but those who interrogated me at the beginning said to me that ‘you are a spy.’ I want to say that most people know that I’m not a spy, but for those who don’t know, I want to say that I am not a spy, never was and never will be."

The 32-year old journalist spent nearly four months in a jail in Tehran. But an Iranian court ordered her release following an international outcry.

She says despite her ordeal, she hopes to return to Iran:

“I went to Iran 6 years ago. I didn’t speak Farsi and wanted to learn it. My father is Iranian and I wanted to see my Iranian homeland and I wanted to do some work there. I had not intended to stay that long, but it proved so attractive to me that I decided to stay. I realized what a beautiful culture, what hospitable and kind people Iranians are. I was so excited in Iran that every time I traveled overseas, I missed the country and wanted to return as soon as possible… I would definitely love to return to Iran someday.”

Stories about the Saberi interview are on VOANews.com, including a full transcript translated into English

Bad for Bloggers, Bad for Press Freedom

The Committee to Protect Journalists has released a report identifying what it calls the “10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger.” CPJ puts Burma in first place because it has “a military government that severely restricts Internet access and imprisons people for years for posting critical material.”

CPJ goes on to call Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Egypt the leading online oppressors in the Middle East and North Africa, while it pegs China and Vietnam as Asia’s worst blogging nations. Cuba and Turkmenistan round out the CPJ list.

The CPJ report coincides with World Press Freedom Day, May 3rd. Last year CPJ reported that bloggers and other online journalists were the single largest professional group in prison, overtaking print and broadcast journalists for the first time.


CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon says: “The governments on the list are trying to roll back the information revolution, and, for now, they are having success. Freedom of expression groups, concerned governments, the online community, and technology companies need to come together to defend the rights of bloggers around the world.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists report comes as the New York Times carries a fascinating report about how unusual alliances have been forged to help people worldwide use technology to try to defeat government efforts to censor what they can read online.

The report by John Markoff notes, for example, that Iranian Internet users last year began circumventing government censorship by using a freely-downloaded computer program created by Chinese computer experts with the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which has been suppressed by the Chinese government.

As Markoff reports: “a disparate alliance of political and religious activists, civil libertarians, Internet entrepreneurs, diplomats and even military officers and intelligence agents are now challenging growing Internet censorship.”

The article notes the Voice of America has financed some circumvention technology efforts. With a growing audience online, especially in countries where authorities try to censor the news, it is in VOA’s interests to support what is, after all, considered a fundamental human right: that everyone has the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

A Debate Over A Story About Dress Codes

We recently received an email about a report by Abuja-based correspondent Gilbert da Costa headlined “Nigerian Muslim Nurse Sacked for Violating Dress Code.”

The report earlier this month said the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, one of the largest health facilities in northern Nigeria, had fired a nurse named Safiya Ahmed for allegedly persistently violating the dress code for nurses at the hospital by wearing an unapproved hijab or head covering. The report went on to say Muslim groups were calling the woman’s dismissal unfair and a violation of her constitutional rights.

Our email writer, a faculty member at Ahmadu Bello University, said that she had a daughter who was a nursing student at the school and that she and her daughter were both “aware of what is the dress code requirement for both students and staff nurses.” She notes the dress criteria were set by the Nursing Council of Nigeria and established mainly “for the purpose protecting the health interests of both patients and the medical personnel.”

She complains the VOA report was incomplete “because you only report about one side and did not bother to hear what the other side (teaching hospital) has as a reason for the action. This kind of act is what initiates and precipitates misunderstandings and because religious sentiments are involved, some serious problems may arise.”

We forwarded the faculty member’s comments to correspondent da Costa, who responded that he believes his piece “highlighted the position of the hospital authorities on the matter.”

Correspondent da Costa concedes that it might have been better to have a recorded interview with a hospital official. But he feels, “having anchored the story on the stated position of the medical facility, I sincerely think that all sides had their views amply conveyed in my reporting.”

If you have questions or comments about any of the stories on VOANews.com, please send them to us here at the NewsBlog and we will try to get a response for you.

VOA Cares

Last month we received and wrote about an email from a garment worker who was upset about a VOA story in which two prominent world figures, during a visit to Haiti, said that what the people of that poor Caribbean country needed most of all were jobs.

The garment worker, who lives in the United States (our audiences are outside the United States, but our website can be accessed from almost any location in the world), said she appreciated the need for jobs in Haiti.

But she said she was about to lose her own job and said, “what about the need here? There are about 250 of us and no one seems to care that we are losing our jobs.”

We passed her email on to VOA’s Central News Division --- and they dispatched one of VOA’s videojournalists to York, Pennsylvania where he linked up with the woman.

Jeff Swicord’s report is up on our website under the headline, “Laid Off Workers in Pennsylvania City Try to Retool.” It’s definitely worth a read. And it demonstrates how interaction via the web can produce results.

Internet Enemies

Reporters Without Borders recently issued a report on what it calls “Internet Enemies.” It named 12 countries: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

The press freedom group says: “All of these countries mark themselves out not just for their capacity to censor news and information online but also for their almost systematic repression of Internet users.”

Of all these countries, Reporters Without Borders casts China as Internet Enemy Number One:

“The Chinese government has the sorry distinction of leading the world in repression of the Internet. With the world’s largest number of Internet users, its censorship mechanisms are among the world’s most blatant. However, the authorities are rarely caught napping on the content of articles posted online.”


This past week, Chinese authorities showed how quickly they can move. After they denounced as a fake a video posted on YouTube that appeared to show police beating Tibetan prisoners, the owners of the popular video-sharing site reported it was being blocked inside China.