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.)

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.

Kenya Indymedia is beginning to upload some brief audio interviews, including one with a Somali man considering returning to Somalia (mp3) after the recent violence. Slum-TV is blogging, but yet to upload video.

As for photographs, there’s some extraordinary photojournalism online – Reuters and Panos Pictures (click through to the News section for their latest pictures from Kenya), for example – and a quick scan of Flickr reveals a handful of users such as Kenyan photojournalist DEMOSH, blogger Afromusing, and other individuals who witnessed events while in Kenya, but as with video, the lack thusfar of citizen or activist images online has been striking. Blogger Joseph Karoki has been pulling together images from a variety of news sources to provide visual updates.

Mapping:
The UN provided some striking images via satellite, showing the worst concentration of violence by looking at the number of fires burning, available in lo-res (1, 2) and hi-res (1, 2) (via IRIN).

Perhaps the most promising and practical initiative to date is Ushahidi (via White African), a Google Maps mashup enabling individuals to report incidents of post-election violence, including some video already (taken by Afromusing). What’s particularly interesting about this is that the incident reports are being verified with local civil society before being posted, but individuals visiting the site can also submit further information related to particular incidents.

It also demonstrates how rapidly these new tools can be adapted and updated. One commenter asks that “rape” be added to the list of incidents, and lo, there it is. As a basic template for tracking this kind of crisis, it’s a very good start. Inclusion of some kind of timeline, a la Oakland Crimespotting, would be a useful addition, but for 2 days’ work, kudos goes to the team (Kenyan Pundit, Mental Acrobatics, and White African).

Ways to act:
Pambazuka has been active in coordinating with a wide cross-section of civil society, calling for assistance in establishing Rape Crisis Centres, setting up an international petition, and posting regular updates on its Action Alert Blog, including a planned March for Peace, Truth and Justice today.

Avaaz has a tool to help individuals to write to their Foreign Minister to call for a transparent inquiry into the disputed election.

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…

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.

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…

FarsiTube shows a different side to life in Iran [via Hamid]

Iranian YouTube hommage FarsiTube holds reasonable quality footage of the 2006 Women’s Day march in Tehran that was broken up violently by police.

The site holds a variety of material, including a documentary about the execution of 16-year-old girl Attafeh Sahaaleh.

It’s one of a rash of sites like DocuTube using the “+tube” format – if you’ve come across another one, share it below, or mail me.

The half-life of Litvinenko [via Veronica]

If this video story from Polish newspaper Dziennik is true, the discovery of Alexander Litvinenko’s face on a special forces shooting-range target is pretty embarrassing for the Russian authorities, even if the original video does date from 2002:

[Originally from Dziennik]

Russo-phobic blog The Russophobe takes up the story and AP adds more.

Beirut burns as strike leads to clashes [via Moussa]

In late January the Lebanese opposition called a general strike in protest against the government, and finkployd of Blogging Beirut took several videos of the resulting clashes between “Christians of Hazmieh, Beirut, Lebanon and the Demonstrating (with rock throwing and tire burning) Muslims of West Beirut, on January 23, 2007 [...]” – the longest of which is below:

[Revver=http://one.revver.com/watch/150083/flv]

Video by finkployd of Blogging Beirut

After these pictures were taken, Sunni-Shia fighting broke out in Beirut, and a fight in a student cafeteria spilled over into wider violence. A curfew was imposed across Beirut in an attempt to restore order. According to Al-Ahram, tensions remained high over the weekend, and neither the government nor the opposition looks likely to back down. An estimated 300,000 citizens demonstrated in support of the government on Wednesday on the second anniversary of Rafik Hariri‘s assassination.

Cleaners take protest littorally [via Juan and David]

Hundreds marched onto the beaches of Asia, a Peruvian resort south of Lima, under the banner “Basta de Racismo” (Stop Racism), after domestic workers were banned from swimming at the beaches before sunset – despite a law which prohibits restricting access to the sea.

There are several videos of the protest – a brief taster of Operativo de la Empleada Audaz (Operation Bold Employee), as the action was called, below:

There’s a longer version here.

David also sent me a video purporting to show two young men in Lima harassing and abusing their family’s domestic worker. In a post at Peruanista, Carlos A Quiroz appealed for any information as to the identity of the domestic worker or the family, and asked readers to visit YouTube, and to flag the video for “graphic and violent content”. The video has now been taken down (“due to terms of use violation”), and Peruanista has posted an update, and a host of videos on the broader issue of violence against women in Peru, at “If you beat your wife, watch these”.

This is the first concrete example I have seen of users being mobilised to flag content of this kind, but I am sure there are others – let me know below, or by email.

UAE students vlog on bloggers [via Amira]

This comes out of, I am guessing, a journalism program in the UAE, as the site is entitled “Broadcasters of Tomorrow”. Please send me more links of this kind, as I’d love to see more examples of local perspectives on human rights stories from around the world.

Cochabamba clashes [via Eduardo]

Finally, Eduardo Avila’s superb overview of Bolivia’s Black January clashes in Cochabamba, which is required reading and viewing (see videos from YouTubers nenamade and estotaweno), ends with these words:

“A witness in the story stated that the cocaleros (coca growers) had filmed the entire incident [of the death of 17-year-old Cristian Urresti] on a camera. That video could provide clues as to who was ultimately responsible for the brutal death, but it is very unlikely that video will ever find its way to sites like YouTube.”

As this tour of recent videos on GV shows, there’s precious little that won’t be on YouTube, Ikbis, DailyMotion and MetaCafe before long…

‘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.

That second video (which I won’t show here) shows a group of officers torturing a suspect – handcuffed, stripped from the waist down, and on the ground – by inserting a stick into his anus. Now Wael Abdel Fattah, the journalist who wrote the 27th November piece in El-Fagr, has published the names of the officers who carried out the torture, and tracked down and interviewed the victim, a bus driver. Sharqawi and Hossam el-Hamalawy cover the story and relay the victim’s account of how he came to be arrested, and of the horrific acts of torture perpetrated by the police. Both bloggers publish the victim’s name, which, although it’s in the public domain in El-Fagr, has caused debate, with one blogger, Elijah Zarwan, wondering at The Skeptic, whether this was the right thing to do.

With Ikhwan (the Muslim Brotherhood) now alleging police torture of one of its activists, and lawyers threatening a national strike in protest against police harassment, the anti-torture campaign in Egypt is growing in confidence and pace.

One YouTube user has now posted a video tribute to the bloggers here (3’42):

If bloggers like Wael Abbas, Demagh Mak, Misr el-Horra can continue to cover and make unignorable the stories that the traditional media find harder to publish, as with the Eid sexual harassment incidents, then it may open the door for the media to enter the debate – which might finally make Egypt’s Interior Ministry take the problem seriously.

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.

Official media remain silent in “Black Hole of the Internet”

In most countries this would dominate the national media for days, but much of Egypt’s official and semi-official media remained conspicuously silent for many days after the events of Eid al Fitr. These stories would probably have died but for Egyptian bloggers such as Wael Abbas, Arabist, 3arabawy and Sandmonkey, who wrote both in Arabic and in English, publicising the video of the incident. Even as international attention grew, Egyptian media maintained their silence, only broken by government-aligned magazine Rose al Yousef, which attacked Wael Abbas for besmirching Egypt’s name. The government eventually responded, saying that these events could not have occurred, since there had been no reports of crimes of that kind. In a society where, activists say, women are forced to take the blame for attacks on them, and where police do not take such reports of sexual harassment seriously, is it so surprising that there were no reports of harassment crimes on those nights?

Egypt is listed by Reporters Sans Frontieres as one of the 13 Enemies of the Internet, a Black Hole of information, yet, since the Eid al Fitr attacks, discussion and debate has erupted online about what could have caused this outburst of violence against women. On Al-Ahram Weekly, one commentator see this as part of a larger pattern of frustration at economic and social divisions in Egypt, while another speculates that young men see “women’s bodies as the only battleground between Islam and the West.” Bloggers female and male have speculated on whether it’s down to sexual frustration among young men. Sandmonkey even points to a TV interview with a man he says is a convicted rapist on Egypt’s Death Row, in an attempt to “make some sense of the Eid attacks”.

Women face widespread sexual harassment

Whatever the complex causes of this violence, public sexual harassment is a human rights problem that, according to some female Egyptian bloggers, every woman in Egypt has experienced, but about which there is apparently little public debate.

The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights runs a campaign (Arabic here) to collect and document testimonies about sexual harassment of women and plans to take the evidence of widespread harassment to the government to get them to take the problem seriously. The ECWR campaign aims to raise awareness and debate in the media about harassment, which, if the blogs are anything to go by, affects thousands of women on the streets of Cairo and Egypt’s other cities every single day.

How successful the ECWR’s campaign has been or could be is unclear, but since the Eid al Fitr attacks, female bloggers such as Mademoiselle HH, Ghawayesh, Zeinobia, and MaryInEgypt, and many commenters on their blogs, have related their own experiences of sexual harassment, and even sexual abuse, to a wider world.

If blogs and citizen video are finally breaking the official and semi-official media’s silence on this issue, that is to be welcomed, but the government’s attitude may have some distance to travel.

Shutting down women’s rights demonstrations at home…

Two demonstrations against sexual harassment in the street have been held in Cairo near the site of the October attacks, on 9th and 14th November. Blogger Mademoiselle HH attended the demonstration on 9th November, and “got home in one piece and did not have to use either my pepper spray or my telescope baton which was a relief”. Her trepidation was understandable, given how women activists and journalists were treated during a protest against a referendum in May 2006 – sexually assaulted by supporters of the ruling party as police looked on, without intervening. Two excellent photo slideshows of the 9th November protest are on Flickr, by Nora Younis and by Nasser Nouri, a Reuters photographer.

On 14th November Magda Ally, Director of the Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, led a demonstration, at which speakers called for the government to take action against sexual harassment in public spaces. The 50 protestors from The Street Is Ours were surrounded by hundreds of police and security services personnel, and were pushed away from the Metro Cinema, where the Eid al Fitr attacks began, into the Excelsior Cafe, where they remained for an hour. Foreign journalists complained to Reporters Sans Frontieres that they were being prevented from reporting on the protest, in the course of which eight activists were detained.

Mohamed Gamal, a blogger who witnessed the Eid al Fitr attacks and attended the 14th November protest, sums up in The Daily Star what many Egyptians are thinking:

“It is the duty of our government to provide security to all Egyptian citizens,” he says. “The security forces are only protecting the regime instead of the Egyptian people.”

Attempts to foster the public debate continue in the face of intimidation. There’s a meeting planned for 4th December at the American University in Cairo, AUC, at which speakers will debate a range of key issues emerging out of the Eid al Fitr attacks.

… while championing women’s rights abroad

Recommendations for protecting and respecting the rights of Egypt’s women have come regularly from many quarters – the Egypt Human Development Report (PDF), the National Council of Women, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. President Hosni Mubarak‘s government was cracking down on protests by its female citizens at the same time as the President’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, leading the Egyptian delegation at the Bahrain meeting of the Arab Women’s Organisation, issued a challenge to Arab states and societies:

“The development of women cannot be separated from the development of Arab society as a whole. Development requires social, political and economic reform. The Arab world faces globalisation challenges and must be able to partner with developed countries. In order to meet these challenges, the role of women must be activated.”

But to Egypt’s women, appealing in vain to Hosni Mubarak’s government to tackle the problem of public sexual harassment and humiliation, his wife’s challenge must seem like a distant dream.

Journalism seems like a precarious profession to practise in Mexico. It’s ranked by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) as one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist.

The latest tragic example of this came on Friday 27th October, in the southern state of Oaxaca, with the shooting of Brad Will. Brad was in Oaxaca as a journalist for New York City Indymedia, trying to get stories out about the protests in Oaxaca (for up-to-date accounts and context of the crisis in Oaxaca, read my GV colleague David Sasaki’s latest post). While filming skirmishes between paramilitaries and protestors in Santa Lucia on Friday afternoon, Brad was shot in the abdomen and neck, and died from his injuries, prompting the CPJ to call on the government to investigate Will’s death. Now Indymedia has released the tape that was in Brad’s video camera when he was shot.

It’s a sixteen-minute video with English subtitles, and beware, the last minute (from 15’30) is very difficult to watch. Click here to launch the Quicktime video (there’s a YouTube version without subtitles here).

There’s more footage at Mexican opposition blog Hoy PG, which points to a piece of unidentified news footage of Brad Will shortly after he was shot – not for the faint-hearted.

It’s a moot point whether these are human rights videos per se, but Brad’s tape in particular ends so shockingly, and depicts with such brutal suddenness the risks run by those determined to bring human rights stories to light, that it demands to be seen. But as one of the blogs David Sasaki quotes had it, there’s a balance to be struck between outrage at the killing of Brad Will, and at the mounting number of local deaths and injuries.

Part of the reason that Brad was in Oaxaca was because there has been scant international attention paid to the growing crisis there. But while cases like Brad’s – involving attacks on journalists and human rights activists from information-rich societies – gain huge amounts of traction in global media, in this case bringing Oaxaca to the top of the news agenda, the far greater number of local journalists and human rights activists affected in similar ways rarely receive the same level of coverage.

Think back to Alive In Baghdad, which brought us the Iraqi Torture story a few weeks back, and which finds that its correspondents can receive harassment and intimidation, if not worse. One correspondent, Marwan, was recently kidnapped by a militia group, possibly the Mahdi Army. Iraq is an extreme example, but it’s by no means the only example.

At the end of the information chain, all over the world, there are people working to bring to light human rights abuses, oppression, torture, genocide. They are often working under difficult, extreme conditions, whether alone or in a group, undercover or in public, and often without a safety net. They might be journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, doctors, mothers. They often live in fear of repercussions, for themselves, or their families. Most of the time, it’s these people – the locals – who are threatened, attacked and imprisoned, rather than foreign correspondents or international human rights workers. Brad Will was working with these people to tell their stories, and suffered a tragically similar fate.

Anyone already doing or supporting this kind of work should take note, and prepare accordingly. The WITNESS manual Video For Change has a chapter on safety and security (PDF, 1.28 MB), an essential read for anyone going into similar situations. The Rory Peck Trust, mentioned in the chapter, offers support to “the families of freelance newsgatherers killed whilst on assignment [and] to freelancers who are unable to continue their work due to severe injury, disablement or imprisonment”, and works in Mexico, as well as South Asia and the Middle East. Feel free to add other useful resources via the comments box.

As for Oaxaca, if you’re interested in the background on the protests, in addition to David Sasaki’s latest post, you could do worse than read previous updates:

David Sasaki on the original teachers’ protest in June 2006 | Liza Sabater shows 8 videos from the June protests | October 10th: APPO says “Stay away from Oaxaca” | October 12th: More updates from Oaxaca-based bloggers | October 19th: More death in Oaxaca | October 27th: APPO locks down the city

This video reached me late last night via Ethan Zuckerman. At nearly ten minutes, it’s longer than the other videos we’ve put up, but I strongly recommend you watch this.

It includes footage of the Zimbabwean police and security intelligence services breaking up a peaceful demonstration by members of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions (ZCTU) on September 13th. The police repeatedly beat the demonstrators, who are calling for the provision of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for the treatment of HIV, a minimum wage, and stabilisation in the prices of certain basic commodities. The bulk of the video involves interviews with the ZCTU members describing the events of the day, and the actions of the police. Ethan and Rachel Rawlins have kindly provided a transcript.

When news of the beatings originally leaked out, trades unions in other countries strongly condemned Robert Mugabe’s hardline approach with legitimate and peaceful demonstrations. Last week a court dismissed the police report on the incident, and postponed the trial of the ZCTU protestors until October 17th, to give the Criminal Investigation Department time to conduct a thorough investigation of the allegations of police torture. When footage of the protests was smuggled out of Zimbabwe on DVD to South Africa this week, it prompted the head of one of South Africa’s labour unions to say that she would give President Thabo Mbeki a copy of the DVD of the beatings in a meeting with him on Friday.

More as and when it emerges…

The latest twist in the long-running saga of anti-gay violence and state oppression took place yesterday in Moscow, as an appeals court upheld the earlier lower court ruling to ban Moscow’s Gay Pride March in May 2006. The gay rights activists who brought the case will now attempt to challenge the rulling in the European Court of Human Rights, and they say they expect to win.

As GVO’s Eastern and Central Europe Editor Veronica Khokhlova reported in May 2006, Moscow’s Mayor, Yuri Luzhov, banned the Moscow Gay Pride march from taking place. The religious leaders of Moscow met – on the one issue they could agree – to back his decision and called for violence against anyone who tried to march – a call that was unfortunately heeded. The video below – apparently uploaded to YouTube from a Russian anarchist site – doesn’t directly show the violence that took place, but does give a very immediate sense of the atmosphere in Moscow that day, and of who was involved:

Just as sites like YouTube can be used as a dissemination tool for less savoury content, they can also be used as a tool for solidarity and support, and potentially as evidence. In the case of anti-gay violence, users have tried to upload their own footage (as with the videos in this post), and, where first-hand footage is not available, they have uploaded clips from their local TV news (here’s a clip from Serbian TV’s coverage of the 2001 Gay Pride in Belgrade).

And that solidarity and support may well be needed. Human Rights First, a US-based organisation, released a report earlier this year citing an increase both in rhetoric and in hate-crimes of a homophobic or racist nature in Russia (PDF) over the past year. But it’s not just Russia where this is a trend. Since the accession of 8 Eastern European countries to the EU in May 2004, the spotlight has come to rest increasingly on the rise in official, or state, homophobia across Eastern Europe.

The most high-profile manifestation of this is how governments handle Gay Pride marches – which are now held all over the world – in which lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT organisations march to commemorate LGBT rights, and to celebrate LGBT pride.

You might remember accounts of Latvia’s Riga Pride in July. Here’s a reminder from Latvian blogger and journalist Juris Kaza:

Now, Veronica, Aleks of AllAboutLatvia.com and this eyewitness give compelling, horrifying reports, alongside the photographic evidence, but seeing the footage above and here brings home the kind of opposition that campaigners for gay rights face. The anti-gay pressure group No Pride involved in the Riga protests received both tacit and open support from politicians and religious leaders, and in such a climate, if its modus operandi is taken up as quickly as its logo by groups in other Eastern European countries, the prospects of further violent confrontation are high.

The role of religious groups in reinforcing the climate of intolerance is often pivotal.  The pastor who officiated at the Riga church service picketed by No Pride was “excommunicated” by the Latvian Evangelical Church’s hierarchy. In recent weeks, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia has even gone beyond Russia’s borders to condemn Jerusalem’s planned gay pride – postponed again, now from Rosh Hashanah this Thursday, to November 10th – as a “scandalous blasphemy”.

Political populism isn’t just confined to attacking or banning Pride marches. One Latvian political party is reported to have prepare draft amendments to legislation, making it illegal to publish article featuring gays or lesbians talking about their lives or gay rights. Although the proposed legislation was rejected (it contravenes Latvian and international law), that it was proposed at all shows that there is populist ground to be won through demonstrating official homophobia.

That’s certainly the case in Poland, where twin brothers, President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, of the ruling Law and Justice party, head a coalition that includes the League of Polish Families, a right-wing party with a history of anti-semitism and homophobia. One of the vice-presidents of the league, Wojciech Wierzejski said, in advance of Warsaw Pride 06, “if the deviants will start demonstrating, they need to be bashed with a thick club”, leading to official condemnation from the European Parliament, and a row that has rumbled on even till now – with Lech Kaczynski telling Associated Press on Monday, in New York for the UN’s General Assembly, that his views on gays had been misunderstood.

Eastern Europe seems to be the most prominent battleground at the moment, with a religious, conservative political climate, little history of a public gay culture, and pressure coming from the EC to respect gay rights.

Nonetheless, the majority of countries worldwide remain deeply resistant to advances in gay rights, or even actively hostile. Here are just a few recent examples: Cameroon, Ghana, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Mauritius, Mexico, Nepal, Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, Uganda, USA, Zanzibar