/Culture/ Blogging against the machine
18/01/2007 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Despite championing free speech for the benefit of foreign investors, the Malaysian government’s track record is, in reality, an embarrassing dossier of censorship and intimidation. Scott Carney uncovers a trail of online oppression
On a sunny afternoon in a cafe in the heart of downtown Kuala Lampur, a middle-aged consultant in a ruffled shirt and a homemade haircut sips coffee. No one in the room suspects that they’re within spitting distance of public enemy #1. It’s only when I call him by name that a woman at a nearby table turns her head and raises an interested eyebrow.
“Over here, blogging is a weapon for the oppressed,” he chuckles into his foamy latte. Jeff Ooi isn’t an ordinary blogger. He’s the patron saint of an internet free speech movement that just might shake Malaysia to its core. Ooi’s blog, Screenshots (www. jeffooi.com), gets more than a million visitors a month and is one of a handful of muckraking portals that dish underground gossip on government policy, and whose criticisms of policy have brought out big gun sedition charges that threatened to let him languish in jail without a trial.
It began in 2004 when a commenter on his blog compared the Islamic government’s anti-corruption policy to “urine and feces”. In places where free speech reigns, governments have withstood much worse, but Malaysia has thin skin. The comment swept through the blogosphere and news media like lava through a vat of butter, when one of the country’s conservative newspaper commentators at the New Straits Times alleged that Ooi was hosting a website with seditious content.
Ever since, Ooi’s life has been a living hell. Since Web 2.0 journalism has begun to find its financial footing, bloggers and old media journalists have been trying to figure out where one ends and the other begins. But in Malaysia, where the news media is almost completely controlled by government interests, the differences are enough to draw blood. It has become a war, where bloggers play the part of poorly equipped guerillas fighting the massive military might of entrenched media powerhouses. Almost 20 years ago, the Malaysian print media gave up its rights to independent thought and are spending an inordinate amount of effort policing the internet to be sure that people like Ooi don’t come up with original ideas.
Even so, “Bloggers are changing the terrain,” says Ooi. In 1984, the Printing Press and Publication Act (PPPA) effectively leashed every publication to a major political party when it required all publishers to re-up for a government approved licence every year. In practice, this has meant that a handful of ministers can shut down any paper they want to without giving a reason. To protect themselves, papers need powerful allies. For almost three years, things went along as normal until a police crackdown that invoked another statute called the Internal Security Act – a British legal holdover established during WWII to control communists – and arrested 27 journalists and activists and kept them behind bars without a trial for up to two years. In the years that followed, the nation’s leading paper, The Star, had its licence pulled and was near bankruptcy when it relented and agreed to gag all of the critical voices that had been hiding within its pages. These days, The Star doesn’t shine as bright as it used to and more or less steers clear of hot button issues.
Every other major media outlet in the country took heed of The Star’s fall and realised that in the high stakes world of media competition, the easiest way to oust your rival was to turn them in for sedition. Journalists began to attack commentators at other papers who they thought broke the new rules. From then on, competition between papers began to resemble the legal situation in Salem Massachusetts circa 1692.
Change of heart
At the same time, the PPPA was going into effect, the then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed was also selling Malaysia to the west as a bastion of Southeast Asian modernisation. He embarked on a campaign to make his country a First World nation by 2020, and to do so, he established a 50 kilometre long IT ‘supercorridor’ that was wired to the gills with the fastest Ethernet cables available, to attract international investors. But realising that investors wouldn’t set up shop if they felt censored by a repressive regime, he also decreed that the internet would be a free speech zone and electronic media would be unrestricted. “Mahathir is really a victim of his own methods. He opened the door to the electronic opposition at the same time that he closed down the print media,” says Nik Nazmi (www.niknazmi.com), a popular blogger and political commentator for the left. The only effective means of censoring electronic media has been to use the print media to cause public outcry and then invoke sedition acts. This is why, when the New Straits Times attacked Jeff Ooi, it seemed like the last bastion of editorial freedom might be on the verge of collapse. “But publishing on the internet isn’t a free ride,” says Ooi. “I’m still subject to Malaysian laws and quite vulnerable to all manner of libel, defamation and sedition charges.”
Ooi was especially vulnerable because he took the courageous step of hosting his blog on a local Malaysian server, making him subject to all manner sedition and criminal statutes that could have been avoided if he had simply switched to an ISP in a neighboring country. But it was a calculated risk: “If they target me, they will be establishing a precedent that they will have to deal with later. You can’t change the situation by avoiding it,” he says.
Once Ooi posted about the government’s activities on his blog, the accompanying blog storm was enough to keep him out of jail for a while. The charges didn’t exactly disappear, but with an internet spotlight focused on them, the police backed off. Now, his blog continues to take careful aim at government policies, but the site bristles with warnings to people who leave idle comments.
A problem shared
Lim Kit Siang, one of the few parliamentary leaders who has embraced blogging, often wonders when criticisms might land him in the same sort of trouble as Ooi. “All political blogs operate under ISA Sword of Damocles, or those of other repressive laws – in particular, the Sedition Act – not only for what the bloggers say, but for comments from visitors. Such threats must be resisted, but when the first case of blogging victim under ISA occurs, it’s going to have a dampening effect,” he says. Yet, free speech may not be the only way out. Filmmaker Amir Muhammad, whose recent documentary The Last Communist (lastcommunist.blogspot.com) was blacklisted last year. “A newspaper got hold of the film, and without even watching it, said that it was too pro-red,” he says. “Malaysia doesn’t have a censorship problem. If anything, we need more censorship to shut up fundamentalist voices in the papers.”
Comments
Pai / 28/01/2007 / 04:28
i hate how the gov think about us (bloggers).. Blog supposed to be the freedom of speech, right! now what happened is, if you write something bad about them, you got sued.. but i you write something nice about them, everythings fine! cant you see? where goes the freedom?
we all just trying to help them to build a better country by telling them what happened behind them, or exposing what has been done without their knowledge.. but what we got in return? a message saying "see you in court.."
what a life man... what a life..
