El Coco wins Cyber-freedom prize
p2pnet.net News:- Guillermo ‘El Coco’ Fariñas, head of Cuban independent news agency Cubanacán Press, has been awarded the 4th annual Reporters Without Borders Cyber-freedom prize for 2006.
This February Fariñas said he’d starve himself to death unless he and fellow journalists were allowed Net access.
“The authorities hospitalised him and put him on a drip to try to end his campaign,” says RWB, going on:
“After he had spent several months in intensive care suffering from kidney and heart problems, the authorities told Guillermo Fariñas he could have ‘limited’ access to the Internet. He refused, explaining that he could not honourably exercise his profession as a journalist by looking only at news and information which had been filtered by the government.”
El Coco ended his hunger strike on August 31, ” after a brush with death and the loss of 15 kilos,” says the story, saying he continues to keeps foreign media up to date with human rights violations in his country, “and in particular passes on information about intimidation and harassment of independent reporters”.
RWB states:
The Cuban government uses a variety of tools to ensure the Internet is not used to ‘counter-revolutionary’ ends. First of all, private Internet connections are more or less banned. Cubans wishing to surf the Net or check their emails have to go to public places such as cybercafés, universities, youth computer clubs and so on, where it is easier to keep checks on what they are doing. Then, Cuban police have installed software at all cybercafés and big hotels which sends out an alert as soon as ’subversive’ key words are entered. The government also depends on self-censorship. In Cuba, one can be sentenced to 20 years in prison for posting a few “counter-revolutionary” articles on foreign websites and to five years simply for going online illegally. Few Internet-users dare to take such a risk to defy state censorship.
Other 2006 nominees in the Cyber-dissident category: were
Habib Saleh, Syria
Syria President Bashar al-Assad has made Syria into one of the worst ‘black holes’ in the Internet. He has set up systematic filtering of online opposition publications and sent his political police to mercilessly track down dissidents and independent journalists expressing themselves online. Writer and businessman Habib Saleh, 59, has paid the price of this systematic repression. On 29 May 2005, he was arrested at his office in Tartus, 130 kilometres north of Damascus. He was sentenced to three years in prison at the end of an unfair trial at which he was accused of “spreading lies” on the Internet.
Yang Zili, China
Computer technician Yang Zili was sentenced on 28 May 2003 to eight years in prison for “subversion”. His “crime” was to post articles on his website lib.126.com, “the garden of Yang Zili’s ideas”, in which he wrote about his support for political liberalism, criticised the crackdown on the spiritual movement Falungong and condemned the economic woes of China’s peasants.
He was only 30 when he and his wife were arrested on 13 March 2001. “It was like the films about the cultural revolution”, his wife, Lu Kun later said. “They ransacked my apartment and held and questioned me for three days in the cellars of a police station. It was only when I returned home, without my husband, that I began to cry.”
This is the fourth time that Reporters Without Borders has awarded a “cyber-dissident” prize.
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
Cyber-freedom prize – Cyber-freedom prize for 2006 awarded to Guillermo Fariñas of Cuba, December 13, 2006
Net access – Cuba’s Net hunger striker, February 5, 2006
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