Arguing that homosexuality is a disease which can be treated, Kavaf continued with criticizing the political standing of some feminist NGOs in Turkey. She stated that violence against women is sometimes so exaggerated by certain NGOs that they perceive it as a form of psychological violence when a husband asks her wife for food. Finally, Kavaf expressed her irritation by some soap operas which have explicit kissing scenes.

These shocking comments magnetized several reactions from LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) organizations, human rights organizations, artists, and many other intellectuals. One organization recently filed a criminal complaint against the minister. I argue that one of the most powerful responses was given to the minister during the demonstrations of Women’s Day in the cities of Ankara and Istanbul.

March 8 celebrations in Ankara. The banner says: - In the 100th anniversary of Women's Day, we are getting stronger, changing with struggle. (photo: Eda Acara).

This year on the 8th of March, when Women’s Day was celebrated all over Turkey, a group of people attracted my attention as I was watching some videos captured during the celebrations. The group belonged to the Women’s Platform which unites different women’s initiatives and organizations. Instead of screaming out cliché slogans with fixed tone of voice, they use some sort of a humorous but politically critical way of protesting. For instance, a group of women within this platform sing one of the famous songs from the 1970s named “I born free, I live free” (hür doğdum, hür yaşarım) while jumping on the streets to the lyrics. So, there was this girl who covered herself with her rainbow flag, while singing loudly, arm in arm with a veiled woman:

Why does this liar world keep limiting me? Who the hell are you interfering with my life? I was born free, I live free, it is none of your business, I am not slave to you. My mistake, my life, it is none of their business, go do your own business, don’t interfere with my life.

Another scene that captured my attention was when a second group of people were all sitting on the street with their little hand-made drums (empty cans probably filled with lentil, rice, small stones) and whistles. One of them was standing and shouting “Make noise against heterosexism, make noise against fascism, make noise against capitalism.” Suddenly, everybody was shouting, whistling, playing those drums, right before they slowly stood up and shouted “Another world is possible”. It is quite fascinating to see the unity and solidarity of that group of women with diverse backgrounds.

Throughout this short essay, I will try to introduce the dynamics of the mainstream women’s movement in Turkey and argue that this women’s platform might be an indicator of a new epoch for this movement.

The Turkish Modernization Process: Making the Public Sphere Available for Women

First of all, I will give a brief summary of the Turkish Modernization process as many of the reforms concerning women were introduced during that period of time.

Since the establishment of the Republic in 1923, Turkey has gone through a process of westernization, secularization and nationalization; i.e., the components of what is often defined as the modernization project (Saktanber, 2002, p.20). Women were regarded as an important part of this whole process. As a part of the ‘secularization’ process, women were aimed to be freed from the constraints of religion and turned into citizens of the young republic. The Swiss Civil Code was adopted in 1926 and women’s suffrage was introduced in 1934 which can both be regarded as the major reforms (see additional sources under References below).

Adoption of The Swiss Civil Code guaranteed all Turkey’s citizens equal rights before the law, regardless of their language, religion, race and gender. The most important aspect was the ‘secularization’ of the legal system. In terms of women’s rights, the law guaranteed:

• Equality between men and women within family
• ‘Official’ state marriage as the only ‘legal’ marriage (religious marriage is not legally recognized in Turkey)
• Abolishment of polygamy
• Equality between men and women regarding the issues of divorce, marriage, inheritance and witnessing in trials

The civil code was revised and approved in 2001 and came into effect on January 1, 2002 (see further information.)

The rights that were given to women, however, have not contributed to a total freedom of women from traditional constraints. The young republic was initially an authoritarian and centralized regime which implicitly constrained the organization of any sort of civil society. Claiming that women had been provided full equal status with men and herewith did not need any specific organization, the government shut down the Turkish Women’s Union in 1935 (described in an article by Şirin Tekeli on Turkey’s Women’s Movement). It is possible to say that women were tried to be integrated into the public sphere where the boundaries were rigidly defined by the state. Accordingly, women were expected to appreciate the citizenship rights that were offered to them.

State-designated Image of the ‘Modern’ Woman in Turkey

The paradoxical operation of the modernization process in relation to the status of women can further be evaluated according to the state-designated image of women. The socio-political structure of the Ottoman Empire was very traditional and religion was an important part of the organization of everyday life. In this sense, talking about women’s citizenship rights and offering them access to the public sphere under the ‘modernization project’ was sensitive topics to be discussed during the early years of the republic. In other words, as Ayşe Saktanber describes in her book “Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey”, the politicians of the young republic had to negotiate the status of the ‘modern’ woman with a traditionally conservative society.

March 8 demonstration in Istanbul (photo: engin(art))

Secularism was the key motto and positioning of women within this motto was obviously a challenge. Here, the notion of ‘nationalism’ played a balancing role between modern and traditional. While Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Turkish Republic and the commander of the Independence War, was proposing the reforms concerning women, he emphasized the heroic role played by women during the Independence War, underlying the fact that women share a significant part in the independence of the country and deserve equal rights with men (Parla, 2001, pp.71-75).

This image of the nationalist/patriotic woman was not traditional and backward-looking in terms of appearance and she would not stay at home but participate in the public sphere and serve the modernization of the nation. But at the same time she would be careful about her honour and chastity. In other words, the patriotic modern citizen identity limited the experience and the expression of a distinctive female sexuality, Parla explains. This can be seen as another type of boundaries set in front of women. It sounds like a precondition which offers women to enjoy the public domain but never forget the values and norms attached to her sexuality.

According to a report published by European Stability Initiative in 2007, Turkey has its first “woman revolution” during this modernization process because of the reforms mentioned above.

The report states that currently Turkey is going through its “second women’s revolution” since 2001 with the constitutional changes within the Civil and Penal Code. In order to understand this ‘second revolution’, we have to take a brief look at the development of the feminist movement in Turkey.

Organized feminism boosted after military coup

Undoubtedly, the voices of the 1968 generation were heard in Turkey as well and different groups of people were mobilizing parallel to the world wide identity movements in the 1970s. It was the Progressive Women’s Organization which was effective in vocalizing primarily the conditions of the working-class women in Turkey, according to Tekeli.

The organization and other new feminist initatives were sharply silenced when the military regime came into power on September 12, 1980. Around 650,000 people were detained, 230,000 people trialed, 50 executed, and 14,000 stripped of their Turkish citizenship. All political parties, unions and foundations were closed.

After the coup, the feminist movement gained a new perspective and acceleration. Nilufer Timisi and Meltem Gevrek, who were both part of that movement, define the main features of the 1980s as “Gaining strength” and “Consciousness Raising” in their article. The consciousness raising groups centered around neighborhoods constituted the very basics of an organized movement. Gevrek and Timisi talk about how women began to meet weekly at each other’s houses, and simply shared their daily experiences. The act of questioning the wider system took its root from questioning these local experiences. Finding commonalities between each other’s stories helped those groups of women accumulate the necessary knowledge and triggered their desire to see the wider picture.

This formation, however, was not unitary as it primarily followed the Kemalist tradition and turned the Muslim and veiled woman into the Other, seeing them as “backward” and “non-modern”, as Hilal Ozcetin argues in one of her works. The polarization between the secular and the religious left many women outside of the movement. However, the mainstream feminist movement managed to press the State to change the sexist patterns of the 1926 Civil Code which gave husbands the privileged position as the head of the household, and favored the man concerning property ownership during marriage and divorce (Tekeli, 2006, p.195).

Women’s legal rights improve, but discrimination persists

Lots of campaigns have been launched and The Civil Code was reformed during 2001. Accordingly, any sexual assault towards women is now taken into consideration under the code ‘Felonies against Individuals’ instead of ‘Felonies against Public Decency and Family Order’ as it was before. Besides, equal property ownership rights concerning divorce and marriage are legally ensured by the reforms. Yet, the latest governmental statistics shows that there is still a long way to go for women before they achieve equal status to men in Turkey.

In February 2010, the Prime Ministry Directorate General on the Status of Women (KSGM) published the most recent statistics on the labour and political participation of women in Turkey (pdf, in Turkish).

March 8 demonstration in Istanbul (photo: engin(art))

According to the report, the labour force participation of women has been decreasing during the last decade. In 1990, 34,1 percent of the total labour force was occupied by women, however, this number decreased to 26,9 percent during 2002, and to 24,5 percent in 2008. This number is very low as 43 per cent of the university students are female. Women’s political participation is relatively low in the country as there are only 50 women deputies in the Turkish Parliament which consists of 550 seats. KSGM’s report also comprises numbers about the physical violence against women. It is stated that 38 per cent of urban and 43 per cent of rural women are subjected to physical violence in Turkey.

Uniting the Diversity

The official statistics regarding women’s status in Turkey is quite superficial and overlook the diversity among women. This diversity has been kept obscure even within the feminist movement for a long time. Its agenda was so much occupied by the dominance of patriarchy that it did not pay enough consideration to the merging of patriarchy with the notions of nationalism, religion, and heterosexism.

What is new about this newly emerging feminist movement that we have seen on the streets of Ankara and Istanbul is the fact that they are able to unite different groups of women by erasing the ideological differences among them. In this sense, for me, they form the most subversive fist against patriarchy. This new group of people are able to see all the facets of patriarchy which constraints the lives of a Kurdish woman, secular woman, veiled woman and lesbian woman despite the differences in terms of the degree of that oppression. That does not mean that the differences among women are intended to be neglected, but a common ground is found to act as a whole. I am sure that those women’s initiatives, which form the bigger platform, do have a separate and autonomous agenda that they follow for their own struggle. They are, however, able to create one ‘multivocal’ body of action during mass demonstrations, like they did on the 8th of March.

A transsexual woman in the March 8 celebrations in Istanbul. The banner says: - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transvestite, Transsexual Women are walking in the path opened by the resisting TEKEL Workers. (Tekel is a former state enterprise in the tobacco and alcoholic beverage sector that closed down their factory and left many workers unemployed). (photo: engin(art))

It is possible to trace their unitary understanding in their slogans. They shouted “Smash sexual, national, class-based exploitation” and “The world would shake if women were free”. Undoubtedly, there are organizations who do not want to integrate a veiled woman into them. Some women’s organizations never let the lesbians talk, arguing that the homosexuals’ turn has not come yet. Hence, what I have written about this platform might sound a little bit utopian as many people prefer to look at this new emerging group as ‘dreamers’. For me, they are the forerunner of a new epoch. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” says Arundhati Roy describing the new social movements that unite many different groups against the destructive forces of globalization. Concerning the new feminist movement in Turkey, I would like to believe that another world is possible also.

References and further reading

Bildirici, F.(07.03.2010). Escinsellik Hastalık, Tedavil Edilmeli, Retrieved 08.03.2010, from http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/pazar/14031207.asp?gid=59

European Stability Initiative (2007). İkinci Kadın Devrimi: Feminizm, Islam ve Turkiye Demokrasisinin Olgunlasmasi.Retrieved 09.03.2010, from http://www.esiweb.org/pdf/esi_document_id_91.pdf

KSGM (2010). The Status of Women in Turkey. Retrieved 03.03.2010, from http://www.ksgm.gov.tr/Pdf/tr_de_kadinin_durumu_subat_2010.pdf

Nilüfer, T., & Meltem, G. (2002). 1980′ler Türkiyesi’nde Feminist Hareket: Ankara Cevresi In B. Aksu & G. Asena (Eds.), 90’larda Türkiye’de Feminizm. Istanbul: Iletisim.

Ozcetin, H. (2009). ‘Breaking the Silence’: The Religious Muslim Women’s Movement in Turkey. Journal of International Women’s Studies 11(1), 106-119.

Parla, A. (2001). The ‘Honor’ of the State: Virginity Examinations in Turkey. Feminist Studies 27(1), 65-89.

Saktanber, A. (2002). Living Islam: Women, Religion and the Politicization of Culture in Turkey. London: I.B.Tauris.

Tekeli, Şirin (2006). The Turkish Women’s Movement: A Brief History of Success. In Quaderns de la Mediterrània, n. 7, 2006. 193-197.

Several authors have analyzed Turkey’s modernization process. Here is a selection for further reading:

Abadan-Unat, N. (1978). The Modernization of Turkish Women Middle East Journal, 32(3), 291-306 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/4325769)

Ahmad, F. (1993). The making of modern Turkey: London : Routledge.

White, J. B. (2003). State Feminism, Modernization, and the Turkish Republican Woman NWSA Journal, 15(3), 145-159.(http://www.jstor.org/stable/4317014)

A whole catalogue of interesting facts and opinions about government data — that’s what I’m taking away from the seminar (of course, as I helped organise it this is a completely subjective and biased view!).

Open data as a topic is unusual in that it brings together people with very different roles and backgrounds, from computer scientists via public sector specialists to journalists, business entrepreneurs and innovative civil servants. The presentations and debates at the seminar always zoomed in on the same questions, but from different angles: Why should more government data be made public? What obstacles are in the way and how can they be passed? What can we do with the data?

These are my notes from the seminar presentations, supplemented with slides from speakers. See also other reports and remarks (in Norwegian): Bente Kalsnes’ post on Origobloggen has sparked a lively debate, and a blog comment from Anders Waage Nilsen summarizes the day very efficiently.

Denmark: Demand-driven approach

Cathrine Lippert from Denmark’s National IT and Telecom Agency reported on the agency’s initiatives to improve access to government data. They include a project competition for innovative services (winners to be announced at a conference on February 4), an innovation programme directed towards the private sector, and a data source catalogue on the social platform digitaliser.dk. Planned is also an open data desk which can provide assistance, define guidelines and highlight good practices.

Download presentation (pdf).

The agency tries to advance its agenda by appealing to and bringing together interested groups in both the private and public sector. Lippert said the agency believes it can accomplish more by this demand-driven approach mobilising the grassroots. A top-down approach is hard, as open data does not have the same political weight as currently in Britain and the US.

Britain: Data and innovative journalism at The Guardian

The British newspaper is at the vanguard of using data in journalism. Simon Rogers, editor of the Datablog, explained how The Guardian works toward the “mutualisation of data”. Data is shared with users by publishing the data material behind stories on the Google Document platform – simple and user-friendly. A Flickr group has been set up to collect users’ own visualizations of data.

Increasingly, the role of journalists will be to guide the public through the vast forest of data; to be curators of information, Rogers said.

The Guardian’s “crowdsourcing” of researching the files of parliament members’ expenses is already famous. More than 23.000 users took part in reviewing the files. The editors learned from the experiment that when you ask users for help, you need to define manageable tasks and you should give the users something back for their efforts. When a new batch of data was released, the editors gave more specific tasks and the job was done in one and a half days.

Last week, The Guardian launched its own gateway to public data portals. In the future, they also want to give people visualization tools, Rogers explained.

Hidden data and how to find them

Web developer Harald Groven at the Norwegian Centre for ICT in Education focused his presentation on how vast amounts of highly interesting public sector data are kept under lock and key. In the analogue era publishing medium or low level aggregates of data was practically impossible – there wasn’t enough paper. This is no longer relevant, but the same practices remain, Groven said. Legal constraints are part of the reason why Statistics Norway and other institutions do not release more fine-grained data.

A Norwegian government data portal should concentrate on making available anonymized low level aggregated statistics, data sources that are largely unknown today, Groven recommended. He illustrated the proposition with examples from his own work developing services aimed at giving young people a better basis for making decisions about what to study. A type of data needed for one of the services, salary levels in different occupations, was difficult to get access to at a sufficiently detailed level.

A news journalist’s perspective: TV 2

Journalists often experience that public sector agencies want to control the presentation of data, Gaute Tjemsland of Norwegian TV 2’s news website said in his presentation. When TV 2 wanted the data from national school tests, the ministry responded by sending pdf documents, before finally caving in and releasing the spreadsheets that they had had all along. The reason was explicitly that they didn’t want the media to produce school rankings – i.e. present the data in their own way.

For journalists, the ideal situation is to get structured data, as detailed as possible, and as fast as possible, Tjemsland commented. He had encountered three main obstacles. Public sector agencies want to retain control over information; they are afraid of losing revenue; or in many cases they are not aware that their data can be valuable to others. The last obstacle is probably the most important, Tjemsland said.

The TV 2 editor proposed benchmarking the openness of government institutions. By defining variables to measure transparency, more pressure can be applied to have government data released. The media need to do their part by demanding information and should take a leading role in the debate about open data.

The need for a data.gov.no

In my own presentation, I emphasized four main findings from the project at the Infomedia department — based on a survey among state agencies, an evaluation of state agency websites and interviews with civil servants at the local and regional level.

We found that there is a scarcity of information about what data sources that actually exist. Very few agencies provide substantial information about their own datasets. Second, a central datastore, a data.gov, doesn’t exist; therefore we created a simple “store” of our own using a Google spreadsheet. With the help of a small community around 130 data sources have been registered there so far. Third, our survey and interviews convinced us of the great potential that exists in making more data available. Among other results, six out of ten agencies said they plan to make more data available during the next year. Finally, I highlighted how knowledge of open data issues vary widely across sectors and agencies. This probably reflects the low profile that the topic still has politically and in the public sphere.

In our project report we make ten proposals for making more data available in Norway. In the presentation I emphasized four of them: Create datastores at the state, regional and local levels; define principles and guidelines; give special attention to privacy issues; and define and fund pilot projects to kick-start the process.

The public sector collects and generates vast amounts of data. In recent years the interest in re-using public, non-personal data has been increasing among citizens, groups and companies outside the public sector. The media, civil society groups, businesses and private citizens can use public data as “raw material” to create new services, new insight and economic value. Efficient re-use of public data requires that public sector agencies inform about their data sources and make data available in relevant formats.

Practice varies strongly between Norwegian public sector agencies in different subject areas and across administrative levels (state/regional/local), this fact finding project from August to December 2009 has revealed. Some agencies offer detailed information about their data sources and have made data available for download. However, a major part of the agencies assessed offer insufficient or no information about data sources on the homepage of their websites. Here a fundamental requirement for the re-use of data is missing. The impression of varying interest and unused potential is amplified by the results of a survey among state agencies:

• Two thirds of respondents say their agency possesses data with potential for re-use that is not utilized today.
• The survey on the other hand suggests that the subject of open data is on the agenda in many agencies; more than six out of ten say they plan to make more data available for re-use during the coming year.

The survey shows that increased costs and the concern that external groups will misunderstand the data and misinform the public are cited as the two greatest obstacles against more data being made available. In addition, interviews with public sector agency employees suggest that the topic of making data available is new to some agencies.

A comparison with initiatives and debates about open public data in a selection of other countries (Britain, Denmark, Netherlands, USA) show that the attention the topic receives is greatest when it is placed on the agenda at the highest political level. The report recommends a number of concrete measures that it is assumed would quickly increase the selection of data sets made available for re-use. A website that collects public data sources, inspired by the US government’s data.gov, would be an obviously efficient initiative, especially when accompanied by a set of clear principles and rules and an “instruction manual” that describes how to make data available in a secure and user-friendly way. The report also points out the need for a parallel, ongoing debate about criteria for the constructive re-use of data. The media should, in cooperation with the public, play a leading role by producing examples of best practices in re-using open data.

Later, in November 2009 when election fraud had shocked me, like many others, I came across the article “Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East” written by Ellen Lust. Lust in this article tries to draw a picture of the relation between authoritarian elections and democratization processes in the Middle East. She claims that “Elections in authoritarian regimes [of the Middle East] not only fail to push the transition process forward, but tend to strengthen the incumbent regime” (Lust, 2009, p. 131). She argues that in authoritarian regimes elections are the mechanisms to create competition for access to the limited state resources. By this, she claims that the authoritarian elections reduce demands for change, and create a “Competitive Clientelism”.

From the protests in Iran June 2009 (photo: Hamed Saber, CC license: by)

Lust uses this concept to describe a mechanism where the voters will reduce their demands to interests which fit in the state’s limited resources. In other words, she considers that voters would support the parties or groups which can cooperate with the regime to deliver goods to them. Further, she argues that authoritarian elections only during economic or political crisis can lead to demands for change.

This, in my point of view, contradicts with Lust’s description of voters in “Competitive Clientelism”. How could voters in authoritarian elections demand change (which would lead to democratization) if they will only act based on their limited interests? Is it the political crisis that creates a condition for demanding change? Or does democratization from below create a political crisis, which in the next step might produce the conditions for growing demands for democracy on the surface?

Although I find “Competitive Clientelism” very useful in helping to understand the Iranian presidential election of 2009, I felt the need for some further discussion on the way voters and authoritarian electoral “games” were described by Lust. I use the concept of game in authoritarian elections to indicate that on the one hand these elections seem to be simulation of selections, and on the other hand these kinds of elections are more complicated than simple selections.

As Lust also gave attention to, some voters in authoritarian regimes would not accept the rules of the game and would refuse to vote. But some of the others who participate in authoritarian elections would, in my point of view, learn the rules of the authoritarian electoral games.

In this article, I will consider whether knowledge about the game and participation in the game (in combination with many other factors) would create a demand for change from below. This gives meaning to why authoritarian elections only in a period of economic or political crisis can lead to a demand for democratization. Here, I will use the Islamic Republic of Iran as an example to indicate firstly the way voters as political actors learn about their positions in the authoritarian electoral games. By this, I mean that voters would find a power (even if it is limited) in the game. Secondly, I am interested in indicating that the election system would create a Self for voters which contradicts with the principles of authoritarian regimes (by the concept of Self I mean that the experience of voting creates an individual understanding of being able to choose one’s own representative). In other words the practice of voting creates an individual experience that might be the basis of demanding democracy. This I have called in this article democratization from below.

When elections in political crises do not lead to change

Not all authoritarian elections in periods of political crisis lead to demand for change. Since 1979 a new system of theocracy with some democratic features has prevailed in Iran. On the one hand legislative and democratic institutions such as the parliament have been established, and on the other hand Velyat-e Faqih, the leader of the Revolution, subordinate the people’s will by his ultimate rights (Eshkevari, Tapper, & Mir-Hosseini, 2006).

Between 1979 and 1989 there were continuous fights among Islamist groups and non-Islamist parties in Iran. While the Iranian people fought in battles with Iraq (in the 1981-89 war), radical Islamists established their power in the country by terror and imprisoning of political oppositions. During ‘79 to ‘89 many authoritarian elections were held, where people were supposed to choose selected candidates as president and parliament members. During these 10 years of internal and external political instability, none of the authoritarian elections led to a demand for change.

There should be many reasons for that. Voters might not have seen the election system as authoritarian. Or maybe elections were not understood as a correct way to change power, since the elections were not used by Islamists to stabilize their power. This also means that voters could not see their power in the election system.

Learning how to play the game!

In 1997 when the first post-revolution generation was ready to step onto the political stage by taking part in elections, there had already been some demonstrations at universities against the government. Youth, who were unhappy with the individual restrictions the government had placed on them, supported Mohammad Khatami in the election of 1997. Khatami supported peaceful relationships with Western countries, democracy, individual and civil freedom. “Iran for all Iranians” was one of his most known slogans in the election of ‘97. On June 12th 1997, 79 percent of eligible voters participated in the election and by almost 70 percent of the votes cast Khatami was elected as the new president of Iran. The new generation of Iran was not the only attribute of the election. The Islamist groups that had been excluded from the powerful institutions of Iran had to mobilize people to reach the institutions. In other words, the Islamist opposition groups had to use the election system to gain power.

I believe it is crucial to ask what mobilized people. What were the voters’ interests? Can I claim that the speeches on democracy, individual and civil freedom mobilized voters? If yes, then I would argue that there already existed a huge demand for change and democratization from below in the society. In other words, the excluded Islamist groups and voters used each others interests to reach their own interests. This is what I want to call learning how to play the game. After twenty years of authoritarian elections, voters not only know the rules of the game, but also know more about the fights among Islamists. Since voters can see the oppositions’ need for their support, they recognize their power in the election system. Voters see themselves more as insiders, rather than outsiders in the authoritarian electoral games.

What moves in parallel with learning about the game is the experience of choosing one’s own representatives. Voters not only assume that they have some power in the game, but also they believe they are able to choose their representatives. We should also keep in mind that the Islamic Republic of Iran is the result of a revolution, where there was a belief that people should choose their government. The discourse of “nation’s will” was always powerful in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The experience of choosing own representatives

President Ahmadinejad’s national and international aggressive policies mobilized youth, women and middle class people to vote against him in 2009. The opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi accused Ahmadinejad of making the Iranian people poor by his international policies. Ahmadinejad in return accused them of being corrupt.

Mousavi represented a coalition of different Islamist opposition groups with more reformist feature. Karroubi is known as reformist cleric.

After a few debates among the presidential candidates, it became clear that Ahmadinejad was supported by a generation of Islamists that believed that the Islamic Republic of Iran has chosen a wrong path. They wanted a new start based on their own understanding of the Islamic revolution’s goals. The opposition candidates argued that Ahmadinejad’s international policies are against the interests of lower-class families, and national policies are against the will of youth, women and middle class families.

This video documents in part the election campaign and mass protests:

A detailed discussion on corruption and internal fights among Islamists never were held openly in Iran before the presidential election of 2009. Firstly, this showed a huge political crisis among Islamists in the structure of power. Secondly, it revealed that both the government and the opposition groups needed to mobilize the support of the people to gain power. The video footage taken some days before the election showed that Mousavi had mobilized many people across the country. One of his best known slogans was “every Iranian is one campaign, every campaign is one leader”. While remaining silent could be an option for people, they chose to come to the streets and express their thoughts in rallies. This, among other things, indicates that people believed that they could have impact on the situation and might gain acceptance for their demands.

Despite the mobilization of the opposition, Ahmadinejad was announced as president for four more years. The post election protest which is today called “the green movement” started from the day Ahmadinejad was announced as elected president. The first slogan of the protest was “Where is my vote?” which people shouted in the streets. Only a few days after the protest started, demonstrations changed the focus from election fraud to Vali-e Faqih Khamenei. Such chants can be heard in this video:

If authoritarian elections were only a system of Competitive Clientelism, then any political crisis in authoritarian regimes would only lead to another authoritarian election system. By this I mean that the lack of democratization from below would probably not change an authoritarian election system to democracy in any political crisis.

Here I have argued that the paradoxical nature of the authoritarian election creates a Self that grows against authoritarian ideology. This is not the political or economic crisis creating a condition for demands for change, but the demands for change that exists at the grassroots level. The demand for change can only lead to democratization, when the voters know how to use their limited power in electoral games. These voters who have started to believe in their power and formulate independent demands (independent from the authoritarian regime) know about the oppositions’ needs of support and mobilization.

In this article I have focused on a type of relationship between voters and an authoritarian election system that can lead to democratization. However, I believe that international and global forces should also be taken into consideration when we talk about the relation between authoritarian elections and democratization. How can we talk about an authoritarian regime, or any other regime, excluded from the rest of the world? Even if a regime tries hard to isolate the nation from the world, there will always be some international relations that have impact on authoritarian regimes and also the way authoritarian elections are perceived among the voters.

The text on the poster says: 'Our demand: Referendum again' (photo: Hamed Saber, CC license: by)

Literature:

Lust, E. (2009). Competitive Clientelism in the Middle East. Journal of Democracy, Volume 20, Number 3, July 2009, pp. 122-135.

Eshkevari, H. Y., Tapper, R., & Mir-Hosseini, Z. (2006). Islam and democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the quest for reform. London: I.B. Tauris.

By June of 2009 the nation’s Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, had overseen the launch of data.gov with the goal of increasing public access to machine readable datasets produced by the federal government.  Other government sites such as usaspending.gov and recovery.gov have since been launched to provide even more focused data on how the U.S. spends its taxpayers’ dollars.

A promise of increased participation

The promise of data.gov and of many of these other civic data collections is in allowing citizens to participate in the scrutiny of their government and of society at large, opening vast stores of data for examination by anyone with the interest and patience to do so. Open source civic data analysis, if you will.

The array of data available on data.gov is still sparse in some areas but has steadily grown to include things ranging from residential energy consumption, to patent applications, to national water quality data among others.

And the data transparency movement isn’t just federal anymore: State and local municipalities such as California and New York City are following suit with pledges to make more civic data available.

The benefits of the open data movement are also starting to be recognized throughout Europe. The U.K. has called on Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, to lead a similar government data transparency effort there, which should soon result in a data.gov analogue. And indications of movements are beginning to stir in Germany (link in German).

Beyond Data Scraping

In the U.S. various government data resources have been available in some form or another online for years now. Programmers could scrape these online data sources by writing custom parsers to scan webpages and create their own databases. And many journalist-programmers working in today’s modern newsrooms still do. But it’s messy, it doesn’t scale or extend well, it’s brittle, and ultimately the data that results may not interoperate well with other data.

Having government buy-in to the publication of organized and structured data lowers the barriers substantially for developers and others to get involved with analyzing that data. It also means that structured formats, such as those that conform to semantic Web standards can interoperate more easily and be utilized to build ever more complex applications on top of the data.

Data.gov ≠ Insight.gov

So now that the U.S. government is publishing all kinds of data online, society will be better, right? Well – maybe. Let’s not forget that data has a long way to go before it becomes the information and knowledge that can ultimately impact back on policy.

Some non-governmental organizations are pushing data to become information by incentivizing contests with big prizes. For instance, the Apps for America 2 contest, coordinated by Sunlight Labs, awarded a total of $25,000 to the top application submissions which made data.gov data more transparent and accessible for citizens.

These efforts at coordinating developers and stimulating application development around government data are vital, no doubt. The applications which result typically involve polished interfaces and visuals which make it much easier for people to search, browse, and mashup the data.

Take for example the Apps for America 2 winner, DataMasher, which lets users create national heat maps by crossing two datasets (either adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying values). These operations, however, can’t show correlation, and at best they can only show outliers. As one anonymous commenter put it:

I don’t get it. It shows violent crime times poverty. So these are either poor, or violent, or both? I don’t think multiplying the two factors is very enlightening.

What we end up with is that many of the possible combinations of datasets lead to downright pointless maps which add little if any information to a discourse about those datasets.

Data.gov and indeed many of the applications built around it somehow fall short of the mark in terms of helping people share and build on the insights of others – to produce information. It’s not simply that we need interfaces to data, we also need ways to collaboratively make sense of that data.

The Minnesota Employment Explorer was an early foray into helping people collaboratively make sense of government data. It not only visualizes employment information but also allows people to ask questions and build on the insights of others looking at the visuals in order to make sense of the data. In the long run it’s these kinds of sensemaking tools that will really unlock to potential of the datasets published by the government.

What’s Next?

With a long tradition of making sense of the complex, there’s a unique opportunity for the institution of journalism to play a leadership role here. Journalists can leverage their experience and expertise with storytelling to provide structured and comprehensive explorations of datasets as well as context for the interpretation of data via these applications. Moreover, journalists can focus the efforts and attention of interested citizens to channel the sensemaking process.

I’ll suggest four explicit ways forward here:

(1) that data-based applications be built with an understanding of trying to promote information and insight rather than simply be database widgets,
(2) that journalists should be leaders (but still collaborators with the public) in this sensemaking enterprise,
(3) that these applications incorporate the ability to aggregate insights around whatever visual interface is being presented, and
(4) that data.gov or other governmental data portals should collect and show trackback links to all applications pulling from its various datasets.

And finally, after we all figure out how to make sense of all this great new data, lies the question of whether government is even “listening” to these applications.  Is the federal government prepared to accept or adopt the insight of its constituents’ data analysis into policy?

Daniel C. Hallin is Professor and Chair at the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego. Hallin has over the last 25 years conducted extensive research on war and the media. In his major contribution to the field, The “Uncensored War”, he addresses the issue of the media’s role in the formation of public opinion of the war, the journalistic reporting of the war, as well as the question of the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome”. This is a term that according to Hallin was created by proponents of a more aggressive foreign policy to refer to the reluctance of Americans, after Vietnam, to consent to the exercise of military power abroad — the concern being that intervention in foreign conflicts could lead to “another Vietnam.”

Hallin has also studied the media coverage of the Gulf War. His most recent contribution to the field of war and media studies, the article “The Media and War”, reflected critically on the state of the media and war research field.

This interview took place at the University of California San Diego in late November 2007. Although Hallin’s research focus over the past 10 years has not been on war and the media, but rather on comparative media studies, this interview offered an opportunity for an afterthought from a media scholar highly knowledgeable about media coverage of war and its effects on public opinion.

Helle Sjøvaag (HS): Much of the research on the media-military relationship in times of war has focused on military control of the media. As you yourself have emphasised in your book The “Uncensored War” — The Media and Vietnam, journalists experienced an unprecedented amount of freedom during the Vietnam War — a level of freedom that we have perhaps not seen since. Consequently, research on US media coverage of the wars since the 1980s onwards has focused much attention on military restrictions on journalists reporting war. However, in comparing the media-military relationship during the Gulf War in 1991 with the Iraq War, scholars seem to suggest the military is loosening its tight control of the media. Do you see a trend toward a more peaceful coexistence between the media and the military, or do you think there’s still a lot of conflict there?

Daniel C. Hallin (DH): I think there is more peaceful coexistence. Up until the first Gulf War, the tendency was, at least in the US, for more restriction. After the first Gulf War I think that the military kind of rediscovered that the media is not necessarily damaging to their interests — that actually it can be in their interest to have media coverage. I remember going to a conference after the first Gulf War where all of the press officers — the head press officers for the different military services – were there. The press officer for the army was complaining that the marines had stolen all the glory because he could not get the army officers to allow the journalists to go out with the troops — but the marines would allow them and so the marines stole the glory. So, rediscovering the fact that when you allow the journalists along, most of the publicity you are going to get is favourable. And it could in fact be in your interests to have press coverage. Then with the Iraq War, the policy of embedding gave the journalists way more access than they had had in [the Gulf]. And now of course this has become an unpopular war and so there are tensions, but I do not actually think the tensions are terribly sharp right now. I do not think that there is a lot of hostility in the military. There are complaints that the coverage is too negative but it does not seem like particularly a lot of hostility and not a lot of conflict either.

HS: Military restrictions on journalists have usually inspired loud complaints from the press corps. How loudly are they complaining of restrictions in their coverage of the current war in Iraq?

DH: The journalists are not particularly complaining right now. The journalists complain a lot more in the US about the White House — and this is actually standard. This was true about Vietnam also — that it was not the military that imposed restrictions on the journalists when there were restrictions, it was the civilian leadership in the White House, and this has been true again this time — that the greatest restrictions come from them, not the military.

Photo taken by US Army Cpl. Graner in Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq Oct. 24, 2003. The detainee “Gus” is being pulled from his cell by soldier PFC England as a form of intimidation. (Caption source: salon.com. On copyright: Pictures taken by U.S. military personnel on duty are ineligible for copyright, unless the photographer successfully claims that the photographs were not taken as part of his or her official duties. The photographers of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photos have not made this claim, and have in fact denied it under oath. (source: Wikimedia Commons).

HS: The Iraq War has been compared to the Vietnam War on more points than one. When looking at the coverage of the two wars, we might see a few similarities. One similarity is perhaps that the media coverage of the two wars has been characterised by what you might call “significant events”, such as the My Lai story and the coverage of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the Abu Ghraib story during the current Iraq War. How important do you think these “significant events” are in changing public opinion of war?

DH: I do not think that by themselves they are significant. If you look at the trend line in public opinion I think that you will see that in Iraq, just the same as Vietnam, there are not very many bends in the curves — not like suddenly there is an event and all of a sudden public support drops after that event. What it usually is is a gradual decline. The Tet Offensive did not produce any significant wrinkles in the trend lines in public opinion really. That is not to say it was not important, because there was a lot of very significant discussion and politics that was focused around it. And similarly with Abu Ghraib — I think obviously Abu Ghraib had an important role to play in the decline of support for the war but it did not really dramatically change public opinion by itself. I think the most important thing is just like Vietnam — it is time that matters, and the fact that the war continues on and the casualty rate continues on. It becomes more and more evident that it is not going to end soon, and that is what erodes public opinion more than any particular event.

HS: Is there a fatigue that sets into the public opinion?

DH: There is fatigue, yes, and a kind of growing realisation about the cost of the war, and the fact that it is not as simple as the leaders said. Things like Abu Ghraib, or My Lai — people have a way of explaining those things away. They say that “people got what they deserved”, or they do not really believe that it happened — a lot of people do not. But it becomes harder and harder to explain away — the fact that the war just drags on. That is harder to deny than some of these other things.

HS: One of the other comparisons we can make between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War concerns the growth in one particular medium. In particular, television established itself firmly as a political force during the Vietnam years. Do you see some parallels here to the role of the Internet in the coverage of the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan?

Vietnam war: Viet Cong dead after an attack on the perimeter of Tan Son Nhut Air Base (photo: SP5 Edgar Price Pictorial A.V. Plt. 69th Sig. Bn. (A) (photo: Wikimedia Commons/ The Vietnam Center and Archive.)

DH: Well yes. In a lot of ways I think that what happened with Iraq is the same as what happened with Vietnam. There are some differences. One of them has to do with digital media technology. I think that that is really important — that the pictures of Abu Ghraib were taken by soldiers with digital cameras. Without those pictures it never would have been a story. I think one of the ways in which it is harder for the military to control the circulation of images has to do with that digital technology and the fact that there are soldiers with cameras who are taking these pictures. So the most negative images of the American military are not created by journalists — they are created by soldiers, and then they are circulated in this way. So digital technology is important in that way — and not just the Internet, but also just the cameras themselves.

Another thing is that the media are more globalised now than they were, and this is related to the Internet. But you have these other providers of information — Al Jazeera is the most important, but you also have the websites that are maintained by the militant groups and so on, and they circulate images too. So the flow of images is less totally monopolised by the big Western news agencies than it once was. With Abu Ghraib I think there are two things that are really important. The story of how it became such a big story – it partly has to do with Seymour Hersh [the journalist who broke the story], it partly has to do with whoever leaked those pictures to the media, but it is also true that even when the pictures were first shown, it was not quite such a big story in the United States until President Bush was forced to comment on it. And the reason he was forced to comment on it is because the pictures were also circulating in the Arab world. There was a big reaction in Arab public opinion, and he felt it was necessary to comment on that. So that fact that there are these other flows of information besides the ones involving Western media — it is not purely national, it is a global flow of information. And Bush has to respond to that.

HS: You wrote an article in Political Communication in 1993 called “Agon and Ritual — The Gulf War as Popular Culture”, together with Todd Gitlin at Columbia University. The article characterises the story of the Gulf War as highly ritualistic story, framed rather romantically in a similar narrative frame as the Second World War. The article also discusses the long term effect of media coverage, and you concluded by suggesting that “next time around” it would be easier to mount support for going to war. Looking at the build-up to the Iraq War — do you think this was the case?

DH: I think that was probably true, but there was another factor – which was the aftermath of September 11th, that made it pretty easy for Bush to send American troops to war. So it is true that in the period after Vietnam it became for a period much more difficult for the President to commit troops to combat, because there was a lot of suspicion of getting involved in war. And I do think that the Gulf War reversed the so-called Vietnam Syndrome to some extent, but then on top of that you had September 11th, which really pushed that into the background. Now of course, things are different again.

HS: Would you say that the media’s build up to the Iraq War was less extensive as the build-up to the Gulf War?

DH: I guess it should be said that in both cases there was a lot of coverage, and there was significant opposition in both cases. But I certainly think that the experience of the Gulf War made it easier for people to imagine that you could have a short successful war, and that you were not necessarily going to just get into another Vietnam. I think that the fact that the Democrats held back from criticising the President — they were willing to vote to go along — I think that has to do with the Gulf War, and the fact that that was seen as a successful war, and they thought that that might be what was going to happen again. They did not want to be on the wrong side of a popular war.

HS: In the article “The Media and War”, that you wrote in the book International Media Research, you diagnosed the state of research on war and the media — pointing to some of the aspects where more research was needed, particularly calling for a greater integration of the field and broader questions such as social theory, historical background and so on. You also argued that there should be more research on war as culture. How do you think the field of war and media research has evolved in the last 10 years?

DH: Well, there is a lot more literature now. The argument that I made about the absence of research about war and culture — I think there is a lot of new work on war and culture, not all of which I have read. I see more and more references to that. I mean, we are in a time of war again where this is a really interesting subject so people are starting to work on it much more intensively. And we are back into a situation where — if you believe our leaders — we are going to be in perpetual war for a long time. So it seems very obvious that the culture — our culture — is in some way a culture of war. You have to understand war in order to understand our culture.

References:
Hallin, Daniel C. (1986) The “Uncensored War” – The Media and Vietnam, University of California Press, Berkeley California
Hallin, Daniel C. and Gitlin, Todd (1993) “Agon and Ritual – The Gulf War as Popular Culture”, Political Communication, Fall 1993
Hallin, Daniel C. (1997) “The Media and War”, in Corner, John; Schlesinger, Philip and Silverstone, Roger (eds.) International Media Research – A Critical Survey, Routledge, London, New York
Hallin, Daniel C. and Mancini, Paolo (2004) Comparing Media Systems – Three Models of Media and Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Helle Sjøvaag is a research fellow at the Department of Media Science and the Department of Information Science, The University of Bergen.

Sociologist and asylum-seeker Ali Tayefi chose the latter. “I left my identity. I lost my life and my family.”

He has been in Sweden for the past four years. He hopes he can stay on, or go somewhere else that’s safe. He does not want to go back to Iran, because he is afraid he will be put in jail. Swedish authorities are not of the same opinion, and Tayefi is presently an illegal immigrant in Sweden. “The Swedish judge asked me: ‘Why did you write something critical when you knew it was forbidden?’” Ali laughs dryly.

“I must follow my conscience and my heart. I have an obligation to my society.”

Recently he got in touch with Scholars at Risk, which is trying to help him to the USA. So is the American president of the organisation Sociologists Without Borders. But there are some serious obstacles, not least of which is that his passport has been confiscated.

UNISLAMIC STATISTICS: Sociologist Ali Tayefi could not live in the oppressive academic environment in Iran. “I could not publish a book on the brain drain. I asked my publisher why. He asked the Ministry of Culture. They just said that it was un-Islamic. Everything must be drawn from the Koran.” (Photo: Teresa Grøtan)

Ali Tayefi seems disillusioned. He has not seen his two children, now aged ten and 12, for four years. He does not speak much Swedish. Instead he is absorbed in Iranian academic life: Tayefi is the president of the Iranian branch of Sociologists Without Borders and runs two blogs about the situation in Iran (see his Sociology of Iran blog, in Persian).

Live two lives
The most recent protest against the Iranian regime occurred in October this year, as the Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presided over the ceremony opening the new academic year at the University of Tehran. Students called him a “dictator” and chanted “Death to the dictator!” They also protested against the imprisonment of student leaders. Only last year two students died in Iranian prisons.

According to Ali Tayefi, the fundamentalists in Iran want an Islamisation of the universities. They spread a dark shadow over the academic institutions and try to restrict academic freedom. “The academics have to assimilate to survive. Many try to teach secularism and democracy to their students in secret. In class they teach the way the clergy see fit, but in their free time they find other ways to meet and talk to the students.”

As a student, Tayefi was an active leader in demonstrations against the regime. Tayefi is a sociologist, but was never able to finish his PhD. His articles have been censored. Of the five books he has written, four are banned. Newspapers and magazines he contributed to have been closed down. He has never been able to get a permanent job. “I have encountered so many restrictions,” he says. For Tayefi it is clear this is because of his engagement in socio-cultural and political issues in Iran.

In 2003 the climate in Iran became increasingly hostile and oppressive and he left, after having been in Sweden and Germany to speak about the situation back home. Three months after his departure, the two people he travelled with, a professor at the University of Tehran and a journalist, were arrested. One of them now lives in exile in the USA and the other has “adapted” to the system.

Ali Tayefi is upset with the Swedish immigration authorities. He is tired of being suspected of coming to the country for the money. “I do not have an economic problem. I have an ideological problem with the Islamic regime.”

It is freedom that he seeks. Freedom to express what he believes is right. Freedom to publish results from his research on the social situation in Iran. Tayefi has done studies on prostitution, on street children, on violence against women and on the brain drain; there are 5.000 Iranian professors in the USA and Canada, yet only 1.800 in the whole of Iran.

He characterises the oppression of academics, journalists and writers as a form of torture. “When you cannot speak publicly about your field of study or publish your ideas, you are being tortured,” Tayefi says.

Political filter
After the revolution in Iran in 1979, the universities were closed for three years, during which time all academics who did not agree with the revolution were dismissed. Many went to the USA or to Europe. According to Tayefi, there is a political filter for all people who seek a job in academia in Iran. “You are questioned about everything: your political ideas, your family, your opinion on Islam, your ethics, morals, your background in education and work and so on.” If your answers are not in accordance with Islamic ideology, you will not get the job.

Scholars continue to be pensioned off if they are found to have un-Islamic views. The Islamic theocracy is trying to impose its worldview on academia. According to Tayefi, the clergy, who also are in charge at the universities, believe all new science is Westernized. The intelligence apparatus, which is large and powerful in society at large, is particularly active in the universities: “The clergy do not trust the academics. They are prejudiced,” Tayefi says.

Ali Tayefi does not doubt that the political climate will change in Iran. Eventually. “History proves that science will win in the confrontation between science and religion. The religious way of thinking cannot survive in academia.” And he believes in the new generation: “Many young people have a new vision and are in conflict with the old men who are in control of society. The young people today live with so many restrictions. Many do not understand the revolution; they do not want Islamic thought,” Tayefi says. “They have new ideas about equality and social justice. The system cannot control all ideas and record all activities. This is my hope.”

Teresa Grøtan is the editor of Global Knowledge magazine, where this article was first published (no.2, 2007).

Imprisoned in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, his skin had taken on a green hue from starvation and his blood pressure was dangerously low. Blisters that had formed in the back of his throat from dehydration made it difficult to swallow. Distraught, hungry and panic-stricken, but most importantly innocent, this accomplished and admired professor was accused of endangering national security and consequently imprisoned under abysmal conditions.

LASTING LOVE: Even though there is a looming death sentence for Professor Felix Ulombe Kaputu’s life, he still longs for the green hills of his homeland. “I can think of nothing else but going back to the Congo,” he said. (Photo: Emmanuelle Françoy)

Today, Professor Kaputu is a visiting assistant professor of literature at Purchase, State University of New York, after spending last year as a resident research scholar at the Du Bois Institute for African and African American Studies at Harvard.

His lips are curled up in a careful, almost shy smile, but his eyes speak of suffering and loss. While he is safe in the US thanks to academic and financial assistance from the New York Institute of International Education and the guidance of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) network, he is still working on coming to terms with what happened in Lubumbashi on a beautiful spring day in April 2005.

A treacherous meeting
Born in the south of the Congo, Kaputu was raised in a country that, not unlike many countries in Africa, still suffers from the backlash from colonialism. More than ten million people are estimated to have died during the brutally exploitative reign of King Leopold II of Belgium, part of a century of Belgian rule. The Congo was never able to establish a stable government after the Belgians abruptly withdrew in 1960. The elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was overthrown that same year with US and European support for a cold war ally, Mobutu Sese Seko. Since then there have been many bloody internal conflicts in the Congo, which eventually culminated in a civil war that lasted four years and took more than four million lives.

Child soldiers make up ten percent of the army. Violence against women, including rape and forced sexual slavery, continues to soar and more than one thousand people die every day from starvation and lawlessness. As Kaputu learned first hand, members of the security forces are often poorly trained and paid, and commit serious human rights abuses.

While at Lubumbashi University, Kaputu was working as an associate professor of literature when the Director of Provincial Security requested a meeting one April morning in 2005.

“This was not unusual and I suspected no danger,” Kaputu said. He was often called in to cooperate and assist in matters of state in conjunction with his research. “I was actually excited that the director was interested in my work,” Kaputu added.

But the meeting was anything but cordial. Kaputu was interrogated by a general and accused of having bought and smuggled weapons while attending a conference on religion and gender differences in Japan. The general further insisted Kaputu was acting as the mastermind of a 20.000-man rebel army that intended to declare independence for the province of Katanga.

Kaputu had bought nothing more than a karate suit and a couple of books in Japan and was baffled by what he was hearing. “The claim was so absurd, I did not know how to react,” he recalled.

Kaputu then overheard the general telling some of the guards, “You have to really make him suffer — and don’t worry if he dies. He’s of no use to the president.”

Abysmal conditions
The morning of his capture, Kaputu had woken up at home as a distinguished professor — by day’s end, he was a prisoner in a small, dark, flea-infested holding cell. It would be months before his wife and three daughters would know of his whereabouts and suddenly panic set in. “I was convinced that this was it. But the next day I was at peace and ready for whatever would happen.”

Kaputu suffers from high blood pressure and was not only deprived of food, water and communication with the outside world, he was also denied medical care. “We were given a plastic bottle to urinate in, but after days without water that need vanished,” he continued.

The day he was imprisoned more than 60 men, doctors, leaders of opposition parties, military leaders and the son of a previous prime minister joined him in jail. They were illegally detained incommunicado for two weeks in Lubumbashi. Two weeks later, on 17 May 2005, 15 of the most high profile prisoners were transferred to the Makala central prison in Kinshasa.

“Here you are no longer a professor,” warned the prison warden when Kaputu arrived. “I am putting you in a cell reserved only for the most dangerous criminals,” he spat and slammed shut the heavy metal door behind Kaputu.

The conditions in the prison were abysmal. The stench from rotting corpses lingered in the small room with no light and no ceiling. During a storm the roof had blown off, allowing rainwater to collect in putrid puddles on the floor. When family members came to visit the prisoners, the guards would advise them not to waste their money.

“Once he is in here he is already dead,” they told them. Prisoners had been detained, forgotten about and left to die in these cells before.

Anything but forgotten
On the outside, however, Kaputu was anything but forgotten. On 26 May, Amnesty International issued a “Torture and ill-treatment/medical concern” based on the illegal imprisonment. Human rights groups and colleagues around the world lobbied tirelessly for Kaputu’s release. But it was one journalist in particular, Ghislaine Dupont, reporting for Radio France Internationale, who ensured that the pressure on the government was constant. She was relentless in her quest for answers. Where were the weapons? The soldiers? The training camps? Dupont’s reporting, coupled with pressure from Amnesty and other human rights advocates pressured the Congolese government into releasing Kaputu.

FREE AT LAST: Thanks to tireless efforts from Amnesty International, a relentless reporter and other human rights activists, Professor Felix Kaputu was freed from imprisonment in the Congo and is today working at Purchase, State University of New York. (Photo: Emmanuelle Françoy)

After more than four months in prison, Kaputu was freed and he returned to work the following day. However, his excitement at the prospect of teaching again waned quickly when he noticed there were soldiers outside the lecture hall guarding the door. It became clear that he would never again be free to teach and continue his research under this administration. The northern province of the Congo was intent on getting rid of intellectuals from the south and replacing academics with their own appointments. Kaputu suspected that the reason he was incarcerated in the first place was because of his close affiliation with the former president of Lubumbashi University who was an opposition member of the rebel organization, Rally for Congolese Democracy. Kaputu later assisted with his escape to Belgium; an act that resulted in Kaputu’s death warrant in the Congo.

News of professors, activists and journalists who just “happened to disappear” were all too common. Now, more than ever, his life was in danger. He made sure to always be accompanied by students when in public and took to never sleeping in the same place two nights in row. “Once you are accused, it’s forever,” Kaputu said.

He needed to leave. Through contacts at the American Embassy in Kinshasa, Kaputu managed to get a visa before he escaped to the US via South Africa. Later he was informed that the official who gave him the exit stamp from the Congo was imprisoned for letting him leave the country. Once in the US, a colleague at the university referred Kaputu to Scholars at Risk.

Silencing scholars
“I am not a politician, I am a university professor, that is enough in a human life,” Kaputu said. His hope is that intellectuals and scholars can one day cooperate with the government on improving the situation in the Congo. But currently, the authorities seem intent on silencing scholars, intellectuals and political opponents. Kaputu, rather than succumbing to self-censorship like so many of his colleagues, insisted on teaching his students how to think critically, strive for truth and achieve gender equality.

“I grew up in a poor family and I have worked very hard to get this far,” Kaputu continued, stressing the word “very” and pausing for a second. He turned around and glanced at the bookshelf on the wall in his office, bursting with books on mythology and the history and people of the Congo. “I could have left but I decided not to,” Kaputu said, almost inaudibly and added, “In fact, my interest in the Congo can not just be extinguished, it is a part of my life.”

Kaputu is not only grieving the loss of his motherland, he is also filled with worry about the safety of his wife and three daughters who are still in the Congo. Because of him, they are under surveillance at all times. Kaputu has not seen them since the morning of his arrest and he never got to say goodbye to his deceased mother who suffered a stroke on the day he was arrested.
It looks like Kaputu is in the US to stay, at least for a while. Purchase College is prepared to assist in any way it can. For now Kaputu has to live in the moment and take every day as it comes. While he takes great joy in teaching, his wounds from the time spent in prison have not yet healed. With a death warrant looming in the Congo, it would not be safe for him to return.
He still feels threatened, even in the US.

“I very much panicked,” Kaputu said after attending a conference in Manhattan recently. The Congolese government delegation was in the same city. “I did my best to avoid members from the delegation; I am not ready to face them,” Kaputu explained.

He knows he has no choice but to stay in the US, even though all he can think about is going back to the Congo.

“It was not easy to accept this,” Kaputu said, and added softly, “But, you know I am lucky to have learned so much from this suffering.”

Professor Felix Ulombe Kaputu

• Received his Master’s of Arts degree in Ugaritic and Middle Eastern Mythology from the University of Lubumbashi
• Awarded his PhD. in 2000, specializing in gender issues, religion, and university pedagogy
• Research concentrated on gender issues and the impact of religion, particularly in Central Africa
• Recipient of international grants and awards from the Belgian CIUF-CUD (2001, 2005), the International Association of Oral History (2002), Fulbright (2003), the Japanese Foundation (2005), and the International Association for the Study of Religion (2005)

About the authors:
Marianne Onsrud Jawanda is the Norwegian editor-in-chief for the Norway Times, based in Pelham, New York.
Emmanuelle Françoy is a French photographer and artist, based in Pelham, New York.

This article was originally published in Global Knowledge no. 2, 2007.

“In a sense the threatened scholars make up a micro-cosmos,” Quinn says. “They are pieces in a larger game where organised forces are trying to monopolise knowledge and where the forces of pluralism will organise a reply. The latter is more difficult, because you have to cooperate even with people you disagree with. The underlying questions are: How sincere are we in allowing plurality? And to what lengths are the oppressors willing to go in order to suppress ideas?”

Magical opportunity
SAR, established in 2000, brings together about 150 universities worldwide, most of them in the USA. More than 1.500 scholars from 110 countries have asked for help, and to date SAR has been able to assist 200 of them, offering them temporary academic positions at Western institutions.

“We do matchmaking. First and foremost it is about identifying scholars suffering physical threats or extreme harassment. Next step is to bring them to a safe country. Then we try to offer them relevant work. These are very brave scholars: they speak up, unlike most of us. Most of the scholars we approach have been nominated by NGOs, human rights organisations or fellow scholars,” Quinn says.

MAGICAL OPPORTUNITY: Hosting a scholar is a magical opportunity to expose one’s community to the essence of academic life, reminding us what it is all about, according to Robert Quinn, the executive director of Scholars at Risk (SAR). (Photo: Runo Isaksen)

The idea is that the academics contribute to their host campuses through teaching, research, lectures and other activities. And that they return to their home countries when it is safe to do so.

“I think ten years is the correct measure of return, although we do see people going back after five years. Iraq is a special case, of course. By and large the scholars fresh from their home countries are not ready to jump into full-time teaching. But they can start offering guest lectures, gradually offering more classes.”

In general, salary is offered by the host institution. The legal status of the scholars concerned may differ. Some are refugees, others are temporary visitors.

“As host institution you don’t have to do everything for the scholar. Just tell us what you can do and then we will figure out something. That is the way this network has survived and expanded,” Quinn explains, emphasising that the benefits for both parties are clear. Scholars are free to live and work without fear, and SAR members get talented and inspiring educators in return.

“It’s a benefit just standing with other institutions saying: ‘Scholars and universities should not be attacked for merely doing their job.’ Hosting a scholar is a magical opportunity to expose one’s community to the essence of academic life, reminding us what it is all about,” says Quinn, who recently visited Norway to enlist more Norwegian scholars and institutions. So far, the University of Oslo is the only Norwegian member of SAR.

Freedom and dialogue
Hosting threatened scholars like Felix Ulombe Kaputu is but one of the activities carried out by SAR.

“There are three tracks, of which hosting threatened scholars is one. But hosting a scholar does not help much if we are not able to strengthen the universities, too, and their place in society. This, then, is the second track: engaging faculties in setting up training workshops, notably in developing countries, to make them defenders of academic freedom and dialogue. We hope to see a snowball effect,” Quinn says.

A third track is research. SAR is currently conducting a survey asking questions such as: What are the core elements of a university? What is academic freedom? What means are available for responding to threats to universities?

“The problem is that this territory is so poorly mapped. In a sense we contribute to setting up a new subfield of study: academic freedom studies. For let us face it: there might very well be gaps even between the two of us as to the exact meaning of, say, academic freedom,” Quinn says, admitting that it is crucial to feel the way carefully and to build a dialogue aimed at developing shared understanding.

“There are many landmines: for example religious universities versus secular, private versus public, and so on. I think the network, by virtue of our experience with scholars in over 100 countries, can offer some framework for approaching these difficult questions. Of course advocating academic freedom will be a never-ending process.”

To Robert Quinn personally, interaction with the scholars who are willing to speak up in the face of oppression and the staff going out of their way to help these scholars has been the most interesting aspect of this work.

“In essence it is a wonderful look at humanity. So if you ask me, why bother? I will say: because not to bother will have devastating consequences in the long run. The tension is there not only in Iraq or Afghanistan, but also in Europe and the US. Again: how sincere are we in allowing plurality?”

SCHOLARS AT RISK NETWORK (SAR)

• International network of universities and university colleges
• Promotes academic freedom
• Defends threatened scholars
• Defends scholarly communities
• Membership: open to accredited higher education institutions in any country committed to the principle that scholars should be free to work without fear or intimidation
• Activities: Organises lectures, conferences and public education events and undertakes research and advocacy
• Financing: Sponsored by a variety of trusts and foundations, including the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Arcadia Trust and the Open Society Institute
• Secretariat: three full-time employees located at New York University

Runo Isaksen is an information adviser at The Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Higher Education (SIU).

This article was originally published in Global Knowledge no.2, 2007.

In cooperation with the organizers – the research group for media-, ICT- and cultural policy at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. Vox Publica documents the seminar on these web pages. The documentation contains text summaries of each lecture, supplemented in most cases by audio recordings and slide shows for downloading. Links to additional online resources are included as well.

Overview Public Service Broadcasting and the Internet

Podcast
Listen to some of the sessions on Vox Publica Podcast

Subscribe

• Participation and web central to next generation public service broadcasting
  more…
• Does media participation promote democracy?
  more…
• The business of participation
  more…
• Public service and the Internet: a strategy
  more…
• Post-impartiality: BBC journalism and the Internet
  more…
• Public service broadcasting in the fight over net neutrality
  more…
• Public service from broadcasting to communication
  more…
• European communication spaces and digital broadcasting
  more…

The lectures speak for themselves, but a few preliminary conclusions can still be suggested from the talks. None of the researchers fundamentally questioned that public service broadcasting has a role to play in today’s media society. A direct threat to its existence does not seem to be on the researchers’ radar. But most or even all of them conceded with varying enthusiasm that the broadcasters must redefine themselves in face of the changed media landscape brought about by the web and the emergence of the active user.

Mobilizing the audience
Hence, participation was a central topic touched on by several of the researchers, from different perspectives. Graham Murdock placed the mobilization of the audience as active participants at the heart of his proposal for a commons-based strategy for public service broadcasters. Brian McNair discussed Tony Blair’s central role in shaping participatory formats in British broadcasting – especially on the commercial publice service broadcaster ITV. Further, Georgina Born reported from recent research into the BBC’s experiences with substantial audience participation. And Espen Ytreberg supplemented the discussion with results from a Norwegian research project about the media industry’s – including public service broadcasters’ – strategic use of the new participating audiences.

This seems to be a central point: Can increased user participation strengthen the legitimacy of public service broadcasting, or are users just being instrumentalized by media groups engaged in tough competition? The question caused some discussion at the seminar, and Brian McNair remarked that both answers are possible – increased user participation can be good for media as companies and good for democracy at the same time.

A new media policy
As the broadcasters expand onto new media platforms to test such participatory forms, they face some technical and regulatory problems: those related to net neutrality may be of the most pertinent. Tanja Storsul’s introduction laid out the current situation, and showed the dilemmas for both broadcasting institutions and regulators. The following discussion centred on the potential for political intervention: how much power does national cultural policy have on this issue? And where to start to work towards a reasonable compromise?

Another pressing issue is the growing importance of the European policy level. As the power of the EU increases, other institutions deemed necessary for a well-functioning democracy lag behind: as Barbara Thomass underlined, the promise of European public spheres may seem bleak. In her talk, Thomass outlined a suggestion for thinking about the existing public service broadcasting instutions as tools to improve this democratic deficit. From the same starting point, Jackie Harrison laid out a rationale for Europe-wide public service communications grounded in the EU’s social purpose. Though explicitly normative in form, such suggestions serve to envision alternative ways forward for public service broadcasting policy.

We hope that this documentation will be a constructive contribution to the ongoing debate about the future of European public service broadcasting. Indeed, the debate may continue here – we encourage comments and lively debate on this and all the other articles.