July
2005 - Reporters Without Borders Press Release
Royal
Army launches offensive in cyberspace |
Reporters
Without Borders expressed concern at an escalation in violations of freedom
of expression on the Internet by the Nepalese army, under the control of
King Gyanendra since 1st February 2005.
Websites
have been blocked, bloggers threatened, discussion forums closed and emails
increasingly put under surveillance.
"Direct
and indirect censorship imposed by King Gyanendra in February 2005 has
made freedom of expression on the Internet all the more crucial. But the
army and the government have extended their crackdown into Nepal's cyberspace,"
the worldwide press freedom organisation said. "We call for the end to
blocking of websites and the authorities' constant harassment of service
providers".
Some
300,000 people use the Internet in Nepal and more than a dozen news sites
set up by Nepal's civil society or by the Nepalese community abroad have
been blocked by service providers. The most recent, www.samudaya.org and
www.insn.org, were made inaccessible, on 30 June 2005, by a majority of
Nepal's 16 providers, an error message appearing each time the URL is typed
in for one of these sites.
A
military spokesman confirmed that these sites had been blocked at a press
conference in Kathmandu but said they had been accused of working for the
"terrorists".
A
journalist on the daily Kantipur said however that the military authorities
were angry that samudaya.org used familiar vocabulary to refer to the king
and the highest government authorities. For their part, those who run samudaya.org
deny that they support the Maoists. "If the ministry believes that we have
supported the Maoists, we request the ministry to point out where, when
and how", the website's directors said in a statement.
Insn.org
was apparently targeted for posting Maoist releases, but its presenters
also deny favouring the rebels. "We post releases from the Maoists just
as we post the king's speeches and even an army video," said one of the
presenters.
"We
have never been warned by the army or service providers. There is no legal
basis for the ban against us, since there is no specific law on the Internet,"
one of the journalists from insn.org added.
Around
a dozen of the 23 news sites that have been blocked are linked to the Communist
Party of Nepal (Maoist), including http://www.cpnm.org and http://krishnasenonline.org,
and which put out appeals for armed violence posted by "journalist combatants".
Following
the February coup, the authorities ordered the closure of a very popular
discussion forum on the site Nepalnews.com. In the following weeks, the
presenters of a blog United We Blog were summoned by a military officer
and reminded about their responsibilities for the contents of the blog.
One of the presenters confirmed to Reporters Without Borders that the army
Directorate of Public Relations (DPR), headed by General Depak Gurung,
was taking more and more interest in activities on the Internet. Further,
the DPR fait regularly puts pressure on journalists to influence their
coverage of the conflict and to control content on sites dealing with Nepal
by ensuring they put out armed forces communiqués.
A
technician at one of the kingdom's major service providers, Mercantile,
confirmed to Reporters Without Borders that the authorities were threatening
to withdraw licences of service providers unless they obeyed the blocking
orders. He also confirmed that teams from the royal army and the Nepal
Telecomunications Authority (NTA) recently visited service providers' offices
to check the servers.
Other
local sources told the organisation that the authorities had already forced
some providers to install software to filter email. For this reason, in
May, Mercantile stopped handling customers' emails for more than 48 hours
for technical reasons. Since then some customers realised that emails dealing
with Maoists were no longer arriving. Mercantile has not confirmed that
he filters have been installed.
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