Western tech companies are often confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

Aliakbar Mousavi is a former member of the Iranian parliament and an internet freedom and human rights advocate now living in Washington, DC. In 2006, he was arrested and jailed by the Iranian government for urging human rights reforms.

But the authorities are not the only ones to shoulder blame for quelling dissent, he says. Mousavi told IPS that the U.S. sanctions imposed on Tehran over its nuclear programme are also stifling freedom of expression in his country. “There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments.” -- Danielle Kehl

“People in Iran are suffering because of technology-related sanctions. After the 2009 revolution, Iranians were being arrested and had their private e-mails and information exposed,” he said.

The problem, activists say, is that even though the U.S. government has recently created some exceptions to protect the flow of information in sanctioned countries, regulations are still unclear.

This has led to a situation in which U.S. and other Western tech companies are confused as to what type of digital products they are actually allowed to unblock in sanctioned countries.

“One of my friends, who is also an influential person in Iran, was jailed and accused of conspiring against the regime,” Mousavi said. “After they arrested him, they got hold of his e-mails and showed them to him. He simply couldn’t deny their accusations, even though his e-mails were private.”

Mousavi said that those e-mails came from a Yahoo account. After these incidents, together with a group of Iranian activists, he tried to convince Yahoo to protect their personal information from the Iranian government at the time.

After nearly three years of exhortations, he said, Yahoo’s new president took charge and the company agreed to put in place new protections. At the same time, he noted, Iranians are still finding it difficult to open e-mail accounts because of sanctions still in place.

Last month, Iran and a group of six world powers that includes the U.S. struck an interim nuclear deal to ease sanctions on the Iranian government in return for a partial freeze of nuclear activities.

However, looking at the broader picture, experts here are urging the U.S. government to better protect internet freedoms when it imposes sanctions on countries with questionable human rights records, such as Iran.

“There is really no reason why U.S. sanctions should be inadvertently doing the work of oppressive governments,” Danielle Kehl, a researcher at the New America Foundation (NAF), a non-partisan think tank here, said Thursday at the launch of a new report that criticises some aspects of the U.S. sanctions approach in Iran and beyond.

Kehl points to how unclear sanctions regulations have curtailed the ability of ordinary citizens to share and access information over the internet in countries where U.S. sanctions are in place.

“Expression that seems most threatening to the state is not political manifestos on democracy, but exposés on the foibles and corruption of leaders,” Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of the PEN American Centre, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS.

“This reality is much more troubling under repressive regimes like those in Syria, Iran and North Korea, where people can be killed or jailed for speaking out.”

Chilling effect

“We’re still seeing a chilling effect caused by these sanctions,” Jamal Abdi, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), an advocacy group here, told IPS. And the recent exemptions the U.S. government has put forward to protect internet freedom in sanctioned Iran haven’t been enough, he said.

“Companies that could be taking advantage [of the exemptions] aren’t doing so, because they see it as too perilous because of all the risks, and as generally not being in their economic interest,” he said.

According to the report, the problem is that “the lack of legal clarity and fear of political or economic repercussions often discourage American companies from attempting to export their products to sanctioned countries.”

“Some specific examples include Google apps, mobile apps, Skype credit, or antivirus programmes such as McAfee and AVG,” the NAF’s Kehl told IPS.

Although the U.S. government currently imposes comprehensive sanctions on a set of different countries, including Cuba, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, much of the discussion has focused on Iran, partially because of the recent nuclear deal and the country’s history of stifling freedom of expression.

“Sanctions regulations in some cases effectively aid repressive regimes that seek to control access to information within their borders,” the report argues.

Lack of clarity

In recent years, the U.S. government and Congress have enacted some legislation and regulations that would facilitate the provision of technology in sanctioned countries.

In May 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department published a new license that allows companies to export software and services to Iran that are “incident to the exchange of personal communications over the internet, such as instant messaging, chat and e-mail … sharing of photos and movies, web browsing, and blogging.”

Although the license (known as General License D) does grant greater internet freedoms for Iranians, experts note a continued lack of clarity, especially when it comes to the difference between an exemption and an authorisation.

“Congress needs to show more flexibility in the way it issues exemptions, because that will leave more room for executive agencies … to issue adequate safeguard regulations such as General License D,” Kehl told IPS.

And this flexibility, activists say, should leave more room for ordinary citizens to conduct basic financial transactions.

“Remember that simply authorising a product doesn’t mean that people can actually use it,” Mousavi told IPS.

“So far, Iranians have been able to use free software but can’t use most of the important ones – like antivirus and security programmes – that come with a payment, because these companies are still not allowed to process payments coming from Iranian accounts.”

“What we need,” he continued, “are more clarifications and executive orders coming from the U.S.” that would allow ordinary Iranians to express themselves freely.

Members of the PTI party protest the U.S. operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama Bin Laden. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Though the constant hum of unmanned aerial vehicles flying overhead makes a strong case for staying indoors, residents of Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency are emerging in droves from their humble homes, some no bigger than huts constructed from mud and stones.

They have come out to protest the drone strikes on this devastated region, a hotbed of militant activity located on Pakistan’s northern border with Afghanistan, which is quickly becoming ground zero in the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

"We watch the drones all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.” -- Rasool Bacha
Since 2004, 355 drone strikes have killed 3,336 people and injured scores more, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S.–based New America Foundation.

But while the U.S. government claims to be singling out militants and “Al Qaeda affiliates” for attack by remote-controlled aircraft capable of raining missiles down from a height of 10,000 feet, residents of this mountainous province say that civilians are taking a bigger hit.

Imad Ali, who has lived in North Waziristan his whole life, lost two sons in a drone attack. He told IPS that the pilotless planes appear unable to distinguish between civil and military targets, and called the strikes “indiscriminate and unacceptable.”

Now Ali, like many others in this Agency of 30,000, is joining mass rallies spearheaded by the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), a major opposition party under the leadership of former cricket legend Imran Khan, to call for an end to strikes on unsuspecting non-combatants.

“I lost my wife and elder daughter to drone attacks in February,” Muhammad Rafiq, a schoolteacher in South Waziristan, told IPS, adding that civilian opposition to the attacks will keep growing as long as innocent people are losing their lives.

Victim of a drone strike lies in a hospital bed in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“We pass sleepless nights due to the looming threat of drone strikes. The situation is especially difficult for children who fear they could be killed at any minute,” he added.

With so many people busy counting the dead, the injured often get relegated to the footnotes of this story; like Rasool Bacha, who was fast asleep in his home in Dattakhlel, a small village close to the Afghan border, when he was struck by shrapnel from a drone attack this past January.

“Later in the morning I discovered that the strike had also killed four of my neighbours,” Bacha told IPS in the hospital where he is currently undergoing physiotherapy after surgery.

“All the victims were poor farmers,” he added, “and had no relation to the militants. It is simply not true that the drones kill only militants – when they rain down they destroy everything that comes in their way.”

Every day, eight to 12 unmanned aircrafts hover in the sky, he said. “We watch them all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.”

Enter the politicians

While residents are mainly concerned with the immediate threat to their daily lives, political parties have seized on widespread discontent to advance their position that the attacks constitute an assault on national sovereignty.

Following the latest series of strikes – that killed the deputy chief of the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Waliur Rehman, on May 29 in North Waziristan – Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif labeled the attack “a violation of international law” and urged the United States to “respect the sovereignty of other countries.”

On Jun. 4, the PTI – which formed a coalition in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province after winning a landslide victory in the May 11 general elections here – submitted a resolution to the KP assembly condemning, and calling for an immediate cessation of, the attacks.

Echoing Sharif’s words on sovereignty, PTI Spokesperson Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was quick to point out that his party was the first to take up the issue as far back as May 21, 2011 following a strike that halted a NATO convoy heading for Afghanistan through the KP.

He told IPS his party also held a rally in Waziristan, whose population has borne the lion’s share of the attacks.

As elections draw nearer, other parties keen to “exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support” are also stepping up opposition to the U.S. strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants, according to Muhammad Azeem, former mayor of Mardan, one of 25 districts that comprise the troubled KP province.

He told IPS that the political grouping Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA), which gathered various religious parties under one banner to win a sweeping victory in the 2003 elections, governed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southeastern Balochistan province until it fell out of favour with the Taliban in 2008.

Now, parties like the Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) have taken up the cudgels on behalf of civilians living in terror of drone strikes, and have promised to guard tribal populations from a military offensive by the government.

But as political analyst Javid Hussain pointed out, this military operation against which parties are now crying foul has been ongoing in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005, leaving 300,000 of the region’s 5.8 million people homeless.

“None of the political leaders bothered about it until now,” he told IPS, adding that politicians are only interested in the issue of drones insofar as they pay dividends in the election.

Earlier this month, the Peshawar High Court declared drone strikes illegal and asked the government to move a resolution against the use of drones in the United Nations, Muhammad Arif, political science lecturer at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, told IPS.

The court made its announcement in response to a legal petition filed last year by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an Islamabad-based legal charity, on behalf of the families of up to 50 people killed when missiles stuck a tribal gathering, or jirga, in March 2011.

“The National Assembly has passed several resolutions terming these aerial attacks unlawful, and demanding that they be stopped, but they continue unabated,” Wali Khan said.

On May 23, the tribal population was further disappointed when U.S. President Barack Obama made it categorically clear that drones will continue to target “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they killed U.S. citizens.

The attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in early August on the heels of the shooting at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado signals the rise of right-wing domestic terrorism in the United States, experts say.

After the shooting at the Sikh temple, a statement repeated on nearly every U.S. media outlet was that the Sikh shooting was a case of mistaken identity and that because gunman Wade Michael Page was actually trying to gun down Muslims and desecrate a mosque, the act was somehow therefore justified.

A talk held by the New America Foundation on Aug. 23 entitled “What do we make of extremism after Wisconsin?” sought to address these issues and highlight hate crimes against Muslims that have not received the same media attention as recent events.

On Aug. 6, a mosque in Joplin, Missouri was burnt down. The day before, the Sikh temple shooting had taken place in Wisconsin. On Aug. 7, pigs’ feet were thrown into a mosque in southern California. On Aug. 10, pellet shots were fired into a mosque in Illinois. The list doesn’t end here.

Haris Tarin, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council believes that a change in attitude towards Muslim Americans needs to come from the top. “Democrats and Republicans need to come together to fight Islamophobia. We don’t want it to become a partisan issue,” said Tarin, who pointed to Representative Michelle Bachman’s witch hunt as an extremely dangerous turn taken by politicians.

Participants at the talk argue that how politicians portray American Muslims has a significant impact on how they are treated. “When the president talks, it helps. When politicians talk in favor of a certain group, it definitely helps,” says Valarie Kaur, director of the Visual Law Project.

Perhaps most unsettling is the fact that Muslims in America are held accountable and answerable for terrorist crimes perpetrated by a select number of Islamic extremists – most often foreign elements – who, moderate Muslims have explained, do not represent true Islam.

Spencer Ackerman, a senior reporter at Wired.com, dismissed the idea that people weren’t educated about Islam. “I’m an American Jew, and I have never had to explain or defend actions of Jewish people around the world. I realize I am in a privileged position. So why do American Muslims have to explain themselves or defend other Muslims’ actions?” said Ackerman.

Kaur added that no white Christians would ever be held responsible for the actions of other white Christians across the world.

The double standard is mind-boggling, but a truth that slowly seems to be permeating American society.

After 9/11, hate crimes against Muslims and turban-wearing Sikhs more than doubled. The word “terrorist” has become synonymous with “Muslim extremists”. The Aurora shootings, the Sikh temple tragedy – neither of these incidents was treated as “terrorist” activity by the media.

The manner in which media covers such events, as well as how politicians talk about Muslims, plays a huge part in the way Muslims are perceived in the United States.

“Rhetoric does not fall on deaf ears. Rhetoric is how political extremism becomes mainstream,” says Tarin. “There is a correlation between violence, rhetoric, and political extremism; hate crimes do not occur in a vacuum,” he adds, explaining how the media and the government can mould the public’s view towards certain groups.

Two incidents that highlight this correlation are Bachman’s witch hunt against Muslim politicians, and Representative Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) claim made in a town hall that radical Muslims are “trying to kill Americans every week”. The town hall was 15 miles from the Morton Grove Mosque, where pellets were fired by David Conrad. Other attacks such as an acid bomb incident in Lombard, Illinois and graffiti in Evergreen Park, Illinois, also took place in Walsh’s district.

Although negative perceptions of Muslims have reached extreme levels and can and have take on dangerous forms, there is reason to believe that not all Americans maintain such negatively biased beliefs about Muslims.

An evangelical friend of Tarin, along with a group of other evangelicals, has bought ad space and plans to put up signs reading, “I stand with my Muslim brother. I stand with my Sikh brother.”

“This is the greatness of America, its democracy and its pluralism; that people stand up and support one another,” says Tarin. Yet a lack of exposure to other cultures and religions is perhaps one of the largest factors for fear and hatred towards certain religious groups.

“The most supportive pro-Islam groups in the U.S. are returning veterans. Most Americans don’t travel, (they) only assume,” says Ackerman of the need for people in the United States to broaden their horizons and understand other peoples and cultures.

Whether Islamophobia will decrease in coming years will depend greatly on the media, and the U.S. government’s willingness to tackle hate crimes and counter negative perceptions of this religious group.