Sameer Padania

Human rights, video, technology, media, journalism, and, occasionally, other stuff

13/02/2008 • 19:07 0

Kenya, Cambodia and Australia at the Hub – NOW!

Head on over to the Hub (once you’ve read these great posts from Matisse and Sam, of course) for this week’s Picks… and see the end of this post for further links and info.

As well as images of continuing violence from the Rift Valley town of Naivasha, shot by our Kenyan partners Cemiride, we’ve also got footage from Licadho, a group that participated in last year’s Video Advocacy Institute (applications open for this year, folks…). Licadho’s short video, shot on a Flip camera, shows one example of the daily indignities suffered by residents of Dey Krahorm village in Phnom Penh “in a three-year campaign of harassment and intimidation of the community to coerce them to surrender their land to 7NG in return for new apartments on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, 20km away, or cash payments of far below the market value of the land.”
And after Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a historic apology to the country’s indigenous communities, we have a video from EngageMedia taken on Australia Day, or what some have taken to calling Invasion Day, marking the impact of colonialisation on those communities.

Further links:

Keeping on the Australia theme, I like this audio/photo slideshow from the Sydney Morning Herald, which weaves together photographs taken of the stolen generations by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board with interviews with some of the individuals depicted in them. It’s particularly interesting as an example of how individuals can re-appropriate their oppressor’s archival images of themselves and their histories. More to come on this theme later…

Cemiride // Licadho (background on the Dey Krahorm story here and here) // EngageMedia (Read Kevin Rudd’s historic apology. And if you don’t know the work of Swedish author Sven Lindqvist, you should. His latest book, Terra Nullius, takes his recent theme of European-driven genocides to Australia – read an extract here, et ici en francais.)

Filed under: Archive, Human Rights, Panel discussion, Protest, The Hub, Video, Video Advocacy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

10/01/2008 • 08:47 7

Kenya in crisis: a search for citizen cameras…

The crisis in Kenya may ultimately stem from a democratic failure, corruption and tribalism, or poverty and inequality, but either way, evidence of brutal violence continues to emerge, both in terms of killings and of violence against women and girls, and there’s news of an impending health crisis. For a quick tour d’horizon, including ways to act, click “more” below.

Some of the top Kenyan bloggers have been providing compelling updates since the beginning of the election campaign – of those that I read regularly, Kenyan Pundit and Mental Acrobatics particularly stand out – and it’s worth keeping an eye on Global Voices’ Kenya Elections page. That said, we’ve been finding it difficult to track down much citizen video or audio at all from Kenya thusfar – if you come across any, or we’re missing something obvious, please let me know via the comments, or upload it to the Hub. I’ve been wondering why it’s taking time for video to emerge – is the footage out there, but just not online yet? Was it just too insecure and dangerous to film during the first few days? Here’s a by no means comprehensive scour for video, audio and photos out of Kenya in recent days…

Video / Audio / Photos:

The only source providing genuine street-level citizen reporting that I can find is AfricaNews’ Voices Of Africa, which equips local reporters with cellphones, and dubs them “camjos”. It’s a general news site, using traditional media reporters, and the range of post-election reports includes police turning back protesters, and an interview with a Somali refugee, as well as an interview with a tourist industry representative and signs of daily life returning to normal in Nairobi. The reports are of varying quality and interest, but they provide a much more street-level view, and point to the potential video-enabled cellphones might bring to human rights reporting.

It’s not quite clear to me whether this is related to an initiative by Media Focus on Africa, a Dutch-Kenyan NGO, equipped several reporters around the country with high-end video-enabled mobile phones – the reports on this site appear to end on 21st December, before the election.

Over at YouTube, another Kenyan online effort, Kenya Votes, conducted vox pops with ordinary Kenyans in the run-up to the elections, including this young woman expressing her fears about tribalism:

As you might expect, there’s plenty of traditional media coverage on YouTube – Kenya’s own Nation TV, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and CNN are all putting video reports and interviews online. Rocketboom’s Ruud Elmendorp has a short video report from the days before the election. Currently individual users, like YouTube newbie theweepingsoul, seem to be using news images culled from the web in homages to the photojournalists and other journalists getting images out and in pleas to end the violence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Blogging, Human Rights, Journalism, Media, Protest, Social Media, Sousveillance, The Hub, Video, internet , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

12/12/2007 • 17:10 0

International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (via H-Net)

Received this morning via H-Net listserv:

Title: International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest,  1500-Present

Description: Call for Essay Contributions — [...] This eight-volume, 5,000-page, peer-reviewed work, to be published by Blackwell next year is intended to become the definitive reference work on the role of popular agency in transforming the world …

Contact: jcohn@pnc.edu

http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=159819

I wonder if they’re including any audio-visual documentation…

Filed under: Archive, Human Rights, Protest, Reference, Video , , , , ,

12/03/2007 • 17:53 1

“Live Working Or Die Fighting” – Paul Mason’s new book on the global labour movement

BBC Newsnight‘s indefatigable Paul Mason has a book out soon.

I’m waiting for an advance copy of this (hint, hint), but in the meantime, read more here, listen to an extract here, and order it here.

Filed under: Freedom of speech, Human Rights, Journalism, Law, Politics, Protest, REGION, Unions, Violence, Women, technology

14/02/2007 • 10:11 0

Caught On Camera: Human Rights Video on GV [via GV/WITNESS]

[Originally published here as part of WITNESS’s collaboration with Global Voices Online]

It has been a bumper few weeks on GV for human rights video, so let’s get straight into it…

Bandh of brothers… [via Neha]

This footage, filmed by Dinesh Wagle, of United We Blog!, shows motorcycle riders being turned backed by members of the National Federation of Nepal Transport Entrepreneurs in Kathmandu. The NFNTE had called a bandh (strike) prohibiting vehicles from running on the streets, after public buses were torched in an earlier protest during the instability in Terai.

I’d love to know what’s actually said in the exchange between the two sides – any offers to post a transcript or to subtitle via dotsub or elsewhere?

Wagle offers a worrying perspective on the unpredictability of life in Nepal at the moment:

“[...] it’s indeed hard to predict the political and other developments in today’s Nepal. The trend of creating anarchy and take advantage of such situation has increased over the past several months. There is a kind of planned competition to exploit the situation. You never know what’s going to happen when. Anyone can call a Nepal banda any time. General public has to face the difficulties caused by such prompt and unnecessary decisions. Public have always become the victim of such bandas in the past. What can they do other than quietly suffer?”

FarsiTube, Alexander Litvinenko, strikes in Lebanon, maids protesting at the beach in Peru, vlogging from UAE, and clashes in Bolivia after the jump…

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Filed under: GV, Human Rights, Journalism, Law, Protest, Unions, Violence, War & Conflict, Women, cellphone, citizen journalism, internet, online video, technology, witness

09/12/2006 • 13:47 0

Egypt: Bloggers open the door to police brutality debate [via GV/WITNESS]

[Originally published here as part of WITNESS's collaboration with Global Voices Online]

‘Extraordinary rendition’ has passed into common parlance over the last year as human rights organisations have accused the US government of exporting suspects to be tortured in regimes like Egypt, Morocco and Syria. But while cases involving international suspects get the headlines, these countries are regularly cited by human rights activists as having a major domestic torture problem, with the police in particular seeming to act with total impunity.

Now in Egypt, bloggers have struck a blow against police torture, by publicising videos shot by police officers of their colleagues beating suspects, and of police cadets receiving training. Add to this articles in the independent press and protests by civil society organisations, what’s fast becoming a national campaign is gathering momentum.

Demagh Mak and Wael Abbas writing in Arabic, and others writing in English, such as Hossam e-Hamalawy, have consistently sought out and brought to light videos of incidents of police brutality on their blogs over the past few months. It’s videos like this one – uploaded by Wael Abbas – that appear to be shifting the debate:

As reported by Hossam el-Hamalawy, an investigation has been launched into the conduct of the officer shown slapping the suspect in the above video, although it has now emerged that the officer in question has not yet been suspended from duty.

The brutality of Egypt’s police is not a new story – Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights have regularly documented and condemned police brutality in briefings and reports.

But sustained pressure from the bloggers, and the publication of an investigative piece into the police torture video in the independent Egyptian weekly newspaper, El-Fagr, have forced the story into the mainstream. On 27th November 2006, El-Fagr published an expose on violence against suspects in the country’s police stations, identifying the officers in the video above, and describing a second, much more brutal video.

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Filed under: Cyber-Activism, Freedom of speech, GV, Governance, Human Rights, Journalism, Law, Middle East & North Africa, Mobile, Politics, Prisons, Protest, cellphone, citizen journalism, internet, online video, police, technology, witness

23/11/2006 • 08:04 0

Egypt: Cairo’s women speak out against violence [via GV/WITNESS]

[Originally published here as part of WITNESS's collaboration with Global Voices Online]

In the run-up to the annual global campaign for 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, addressing a meeting of the Arab Women’s Organisation, issued a heartfelt plea:

What shall we do to face challenges of discrimination, extremism and religious fanaticism?

It’s a vexing question – and one to which women back home in Egypt would have a very specific answer: stop ignoring violence against women even when it’s become an international scandal thanks to citizen video and the internet.

In her speech, Mrs Mubarak failed to make even a passing reference to what had happened to tens of women in her home city of Cairo just a couple of weeks before. A wave of attacks on women in downtown Cairo erupted on the Muslim feast day of Eid Al Fitr, October 24th 2006, when large groups of men attacked several women in the street, as Manal and Alaa’s bit bucket relates. But this wasn’t a one-off – in January 2006, on Eid al Adha, film-maker Sherif Sadek was back in Cairo, when he heard a commotion on the street outside his downtown apartment. Sherif grabbed his camera and leaned out the window to film the video presented below.

Synopsis

Initially it’s a little difficult to tell what is going on in the video – there are crowds in the middle of the street, which looks unusual – but after about 25 seconds, you will see two or three men leading four or five girls down the street past the building from which Sherif is filming. The crowd behind them is extremely large, a couple of hundred strong, and soon surrounds the girls (around 1’20). They then pass down a side-street, partially out of view, which gives Sherif time to spot a man in uniform – a police officer? – looking down the street at the commotion, who then gets back in his vehicle (1’50). Sections of the crowd then come running back round the corner, although it’s not clear whether they have the girls with them or not.

The October attacks took a similar form. GV’s Amira al Hussaini rounds up the best blog coverage of the October attacks, including Forsoothsayer’s translation of blogger Wael Abbas‘s eye-witness account, and Mechanical Crowds’ attempt to pull together the key facts.

Most strikingly, one of the victims of the Eid al Fitr attacks seems to have found a voice through the medium of blogging. Wounded Girl From Cairo appears to be by one of the women attacked on Eid al Fitr, and her description of her ordeal is required reading.

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Filed under: GV, Governance, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, Politics, Protest, Women, internet, online video, technology, witness

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