Shaky, grainy, traumatic footage filmed on mobile phones wielded by brave citizens – from Burma to Tibet to Iran – has fast become both part of and fuel for contemporary narratives of uprising, struggle and repression – and it increasingly represents one of the key acts of resistance that individual citizens in repressive societies can make.  While this now makes it seem almost commonplace in the rituals of human rights media, it wasn’t always thus.

I’ve been tracking, analysing and curating human rights video online for the human rights organisation WITNESS since the middle of 2006, initially via a blog aiming to unearth examples of activists using new technologies to document, expose and bring an end to human rights violations.  A large number of stories were about mobile phone video – from police cells in Egypt to the execution of Saddam Hussein – and strikingly the most compelling, unvarnished and actionable footage often came from the cameras of the human rights abusers themselves.

Most of these cases showed networked technologies could reinforce repression – specifically taking mobile footage of humiliation, beatings, abuse, torture, happening in secret places, to show it directly to those you want to intimidate, and to circulate it more widely via Bluetooth “pour encourager les autres”.  But in a certain number of instances case the videos found their way into the hands of outraged activists who spread and publicised the abuses online, to often global attention, with the long-term effect of focusing attention, activism, and advocacy to the governments tolerating or sponsoring these abuses, or at the very least, to undermine officially sanctioned or imposed narratives of law, order, justice.

Some videos, however, don’t make the same dent.  My chosen video is one of the very first mobile phone human rights videos I ever saw, one that circulated for months in Chechnya until it reached the eyes of a New York Times reporter, and thence the wider world.  In Argun, Chechnya, in March 2006, the woman in this video, Malika Soltayeva, was abducted by local security forces (kadyrovsty), after her husband alleged that she had had an affair with a Russian militiaman stationed in the town.  Soltayeva was pregnant at the time, and after a series of humiliating abuses, all captured on mobile video by her kadyrovsty attackers – having her head and eyebrows shaved off, her head daubed with a crucifix in green paint, her now bare scalp painted green, and being beaten, kicked, taunted – lost the baby a few days later.  Bravely, Malika launched a legal case to bring her attackers to justice, supported by international submissions from the likes of the Helsinki Commission.

This segment of the video (there’s more detail at the NYT site) follows the moments after the kadyrovsty had released her, and shows them forcing her to dance in the street in her degraded and abused state.  The camera is both distant and uncomfortably persistent – but importantly, unlike most of the clips in the early stories we were covering, it is filming in public space, for public humiliation.  It’s a scene that seems somehow emblematic of ancient hierarchies and punishments – the public shaming by men of a woman for alleged adultery, but also a religious marker, with the “thumb-thick” crucifix on her forehead painted in the green of Islam.  The video did not receive as wide a circulation outside traditional human rights circles as others above have, and fell perhaps a little into the shadows until the murder earlier this year of human rights defender Natalia Estemirova – who was, among many things, instrumental in bringing this story to light, as the NYT’s C J Chivers acknowledged.  Is the reason that the video didn’t receive more sustained international focus that it’s just one among a huge number of human rights violations – assassinations, censorship, disappearances, mass graves – in Chechnya?  Or is it more that the humiliating abuse seems to come almost from a pre human rights era, like tarring and feathering, or a scarlet letter?  Another video, purporting to be of public witch-burnings in Kenya, surfaced on Wikileaks many months ago, and similarly gained only limited attention, despite the graphic content.  Do events that are already public somehow circulate less readily?

At WITNESS we’re working to understand the mechanisms and dynamics by which this kind of video emerges and circulates, as human rights values clash with other values, and as privacy is contiuously renegotiated.  We are also working to help shape ethical norms that are relevant to the newer modes of networked audio-visual communication to ensure that when video of this kind does emerge, it both inspires the advocacy and action that is necessary to end the abuses shown, and is shown in a context that places a primacy on the dignity and security of the persons depicted.  How this plays out under an anthropological lens is something that we’re deeply interested in, and we welcome your thoughts…

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…

You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s been Saddam, Saddam, Saddam, in recent weeks, but GV has covered other human rights videos that deserve a bit of limelight – so, in this regular new feature, I’m going to round up the best of those recent stories.

Something for WITNESS’s Amazon Wishlist [via Veronica]

First to Pawlina, host of a Ukrainian radio show in Vancouver, Canada, who blogs about human trafficking at The Natashas. After her post in late December commending Ukrainian pop star Ruslana for releasing a video condemning human trafficking, Pawlina praises another musician, Peter Gabriel, for founding WITNESS, but, under the title “Some human rights abuses harder to expose than others”, offers some advice:

It’s very commendable of rock stars to help expose human rights abuses around the world.

British rock legend Peter Gabriel has formd an organization called Witness that provides video equipment to human rights activists to record such abuses.

I suspect he may not be aware of the horrific abuses suffered by hundreds of thousands of young women and even children, at the hands of human traffickers pandering to men seeking instant, no-strings-attached sexual gratification.

In which case, someone should send him a copy of The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade.

Then again, no doubt it would be extremely difficult to film what goes on behind the closed doors and barred windows of brothels and “breaking grounds”, much less expose it to public view.

In fact WITNESS did produce a documentary about trafficking in 1997, Bought And Sold, but Pawlina’s right – it’s proving quite difficult to find footage from behind those “closed doors and barred windows” – so if you have seen, or even filmed footage of that kind, please email me (email address at the end of the article) to let me know.

Knocking on doors and making things happen [via Neha]

Opening doors and unbarring windows, India’s Drishti collective have set in motion some pretty impressive video magazines made by their seven Community Video Units. The magazines often make for uncomfortable viewing for local officials, as this post from Reflections in a Window Pane shows. One of the CVUs is hosted by Navsarjan in Gujarat. When one Dalit community in Saurashtra, northern Gujarat, complained that a water-processing plant designed to lower the levels of fluoride in their water had not been used for three years, they met official stonewalling. The Navsarjan CVU’s video magazine asked why, and after the magazine was screened to the whole community, including the relevant officials, the water-processing plant was turned back on.

Drishti works with Video Volunteers and you can see a presentation by Gavin White, of Video Volunteers here. I hope to feature some of Drishti’s video soon.

Do videos show Nepali police joining in ethnic riots? [also via Neha]

In neighbouring Nepal, youths from the Pahadi community clashed with people from the Madhesi community, and businesses and houses burned in the western Nepali city of Nepalgunj in late December. Paramendra Bhagat at Democracy for Nepal presents three video extracts of the aftermath, claiming that the clashes were in fact a “hate crime” by the Pahadis against the Madhesis. Now the Nepali Times is reporting that the local police were seen attacking Madhesis too. All this is leading some commentators to fear that, with the entry of the Maoists into politics, ethnic rivalries may enter Nepal’s politics.

Were the 2006 Fiji elections rigged? [via Preetam]

Fiji’s military, which took power in a coup d’etat in 2006, released a video that purports to show senior members of the former ruling party, the SDL, admitting vote-rigging and interfering with ballot boxes. FijiBuzz uploads the video, but meets sceptical responses from commenters on two counts: first, that the man who shot the video, Peter Foster, is said to be a conman who can’t be trusted, and second, commenters think that the video fits too neatly with the military’s need for some kind of evidence justifying the coup.

Forced evictions ‘rampant’ in Cambodia [also via Preetam]

Forced evictions in Cambodia are rampant, said the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions in 2006. In the absence of citizen-filmed footage of evictions, blogger Mongkol linked to a TV documentary showing the extent of forced evictions in Cambodia.

To find out more, visit the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, the Asian Coalition on Housing Rights, and COHRE’s Cambodia page.

I’ll be featuring more stories on forced evictions soon, so if you have access to relevant footage from anywhere around the world, I’d be very interested to hear from you by email or through the comments box below.

The ethics of filming the poor [back to Veronica]

Finally, Minsztrel at Pestcentric takes issue with a cameraman filming poor Hungarians at a soup kitchen outside the District VII Mayor’s office in Budapest. A question for you: how are vloggers dealing with the issue of consent, and what guidelines do they need to follow?

[Thanks, Jose!]

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.