Hey everybody. First off, Budapest is a great city! We’re about to start the GVO meting, which is focusing mostly on censorship. Considering we are definitely blocked in Uzbekistan, and quite possibly elsewhere, this matters tremendously: From a less vainty-based perspective, there is the case of Afghan journalism student Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, who was sentenced to death for printing out an Iranian webpage that is alleged to have questioned Islam. Elsewhere in Central Asia, there are the many regular journalists who have been murdered for practicing their craft—to say nothing of the ways in which home-grown citizen journalism is threatened. Nasim Fekrat, the co-founder of AfghanPenLog (a collective of Afghan bloggers), in particular weighs on my mind during this: he has a strong and independent voice, and given the current media climate in Afghanistan, I worry for his safety.
The meetings will be liveblogged and webcast at the Summit website: summit08.globalvoicesonline.org. I don’t know how busy I will be, but I’ll try to post whatever updates I can.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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I think the block on us in Uzbekistan has been lifted. There were a handful of visits from Uzbekistan over the last month. The block usually comes up for a while whenever Gulnora gets mentioned.
Nevertheless… I wonder what kind of summit against censorship this will be, while GVO in many cases supports and practise sensorship… I just wonder…
Christos: I’m curious, how does GVO do this?
For example, on the Greek-FYROM dispute over the name issue, many point of views have been expressed and a lot of talking is taking place on GVO… Nevertheless, I would love to see posted all the comments (greek or not) that were deleted and confront/answer to the skopjan allegations.
It is more than clear that GVO preserves a favored position towards skopjan “point of view” (but I am not judging that); I would expect GVO to be placed somewhere in the middle… since “the world is talking and we must listen”…
Therefore, maybe you could ask from the Administrators of the site to provide you with a copy of all (there are plenty of them) deleted comments (since the presentation of the whole issue changes and the discussion gets a short of manipulation…) and then, I could answer to any question you might have.
Let me also note here that I don’t say that GVO follows the same “policy” on every issue – point of view presented within its frame; or that GVO is not a very useful tool and place for discussion. That would be outrageous and that is not my cup of tea. But, knowing… makes me double check again and again what is written and what is presented by GVO