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The Washington Post, 202, July 30, 2019
THE BIG IDEA: Huge
protests in capitals around the world are among the most important and
underplayed stories of this summer, but pro-democracy movements on three
continents are at risk of being squelched as surveillance states grow more
adept at controlling the technologies that helped people liberate themselves
during the Arab Spring at the start of the decade.
In Moscow, as an estimated 1,400 demonstrators were
arrested outside City Hall on Saturday, Russian authorities stormed a TV studio belonging to
opposition figure Alexei Navalny so they could shut down a live stream of the
protests on YouTube. Thousands took to the streets, risking prison
time, because opposition candidates have been blocked from appearing on the
ballot in upcoming municipal elections. The violent crackdown, led by a close
ally of Vladimir Putin, came a week after more than 22,000 people protested in downtown Moscow, chanting,
“Russia will be free.”
In Hong Kong, police
arrested at least 60 people on Saturday and Sunday, the eighth consecutive weekend of protests,
the most detained in a single weekend since the start of the upheaval. The
Beijing-backed government is using facial-recognition software to targetdemonstrators. Pro-democracy activists
are responding by wearing surgical masks and using laser pointers to foil the
technology. My colleague on the island, Shibani Mahtani, reports that they’re also deleting all
the Chinese-made apps on their phones, even for e-commerce shopping sites, in
a quest to stay ahead of Big Brother. They’re installing virtual private networks
on their phones and downloading secure messaging apps such as Telegram. Young
activists in Hong Kong who came of age in a digital world are trying to go as
analog as possible so they can limit their footprint on the grid, but they’re
learning how hard it’s becoming. They buy single-ride subway tickets, forgo
credit cards, take no more selfies and buy pay-as-you-go SIM cards.
Chinese authorities
responded by allegedly launching a massive cyberattack against the servers
for Telegram hours before protesters planned a major occupation of Hong
Kong’s streets last month. The company said
it was hit by a powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which
filled servers with junk requests, that originated from the mainland. Hong Kong
police officers also arrested a coordinator of a Telegram group with
thousands of people at his home. A court in Moscow banned Russians from using
Telegram last year after the company declined to provide encryption keys to
the state security agency, and Iran also blocked the app after it was used to
organize protests to draw attention to economic hardships.
In Sudan, the military
council that took control after overthrowing Omar Hassan al-Bashir in April
decided to shut down all public access to the
Internet in a ploy to quell continuing street protests. Sudan is one of at
least 22 African countries where the
government has ordered a shutdown of the Internet at some point in the past
five years. The list also includes Ethiopia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The previous regime ordered telecom companies to block access to social media
from December through April, but it wasn’t enough to stop word-of-mouth
organizing.
There has been
significant bloodshed since the president was deposed after three decades in
power. Sudanese security forces fired yesterday on student demonstrators in a
central province, killing at least five people, organizers told the AP. On June 3, pro-democracy
activists say that security forces killed at least 128 of their people – the state prosecutor says it was 87 –
while dispersing a protest camp in front of the military’s headquarters in
the capital of Khartoum. Organizers say they pulled 40 bodies from the Nile
River that were slain as part of a crackdown.
Hundreds of thousands
of people turned out on June 30 to show that they would not be deterred. “Protesters
rubbed the leaves of nearby neem trees onto their faces to get relief from
the tear gas,” my colleague Max Bearak reported from Khartoum. “Sunday’s protests
were organized almost entirely without Internet service. Graffiti
announcements blanket many of the city’s walls, and small groups have walked
through neighborhoods with megaphones to spread the word.”
The Sudanese
Professionals Association – which helped coordinate Monday’s student activism
– organized months of protests leading to
the overthrow of the former president, but leaders now worry that the
generals won’t follow through on a promised transition to civilian rule.
That’s why they continue to mobilize. The protest leaders are
scheduled to meet today with the leaders of the military to discuss a
power-sharing agreement. There was a tentative accord this month, but several
holdups remain. Among them, according to the AP, is whether military
commanders should be immune from prosecution for violence against protesters.
-- In this brave new
world, there are constant games of cat-and-mouse between people who yearn for
more freedom and those who seek to keep control. In Indonesia, to quell
protests in Jakarta after the president was reelected this spring, the
communication minister curtailed access to social media after
six people were killed and hundreds injured. The
restrictions limited the sharing of videos and photos over Instagram and
WhatsApp.
Iran has been blocking
public access to sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube since activists
used them to organize mass protests and document a crackdown after a disputed
election in 2009. Young people who hunger for a taste of the
outside world go to great lengths to bypass state censors, downloading VPNs. Notably,
though, leaders of the regime – such as the foreign minister – use sites like
Twitter to share the party line. And while pro-government accounts have
proliferated, the AP noted from Tehran last week that
YouTube remains largely off-limits because it’s hard to download and view
videos while using the workarounds.
-- Strongmen fear
social networks because they continue to be such a potent organizing tool.
More than a quarter-million people assembled on June 23 in Prague’s Letna
Park to call for the resignation of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who
they believe subverted the independence of the judiciary by appointing a new
justice minister who is unlikely to bring charges against him in a fraud case
involving the misuse of European Union subsidies meant for small businesses.
(Babis denies wrongdoing and retains a strong grip on power.)
This was the largest
mass protest in the Czech capital since the 1989 Velvet Revolution allowed
dissident Vaclav Havel to become president. It grew out of a Facebook group
called A Million Moments for Democracy, which launched on the anniversary of
that famous protest. Over the past year and a half, thanks
to social media, the campaign has led to protests in more than 300 cities and
villages.
-- After Kazakhstan
held an election on June 9, police arrested thousands of protesters who
believed the regime falsified the results.“Since independence in
1991, Kazakhstan had been ruled by its communist-era leader Nursultan
Nazarbayev, who had handpicked candidate Kassym-Jomart Tokayev — and declared
him the winner. As protests continued despite mass arrests, Kazakhstan’s
urban areas were blanketed by police forces, at times visibly outnumbering
the civilian population,” writes National Defense University’s Erica Marat.
“Both sides of that equation — the mass dissent and the police repression —
reached new levels in Kazakhstan. With a new leader, the nation is entering a
volatile phase of police-public dynamics, one in other hybrid regimes like
Russia or Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych.
“Here’s the issue:
Hybrid regimes — those that are partly democratic, partly authoritarian —
have more protests and more brutal suppression than those that are fully one
or the other,” she explained. “These nations have a coercive apparatus
that is intact and functional — but also a civil society whose members strive
to be active political players. Unlike in fully democratic nations, those
individuals and organizations have no real opportunities to collaborate with
the government. When elections aren’t truly competitive, protesting is one
their few options. But the more anti-government collective action is
organized, the more brutal state response is likely to be.”
-- There have been
scores of other newsworthy protests this summer from Algeria to Zimbabwe, with
recent activity in Guatemala, Pakistanand Bahrain. What modest gains there have been
often seem fragile.
-- Democracy has been
in a recession the past few years, and the
world now stands at a plastic juncture. If the 20th century was the American
Century, will the 21st century be the Autocrats Century?
-- In Hong Kong, China
would much rather use technology than troops to put down the protests. But
the regime's patience appears to be thinning. Top
officials in Beijing called on Monday for punishing the
“radicals” involved in the turmoil. “China maintains a military
presence in Hong Kong, and China’s Defense Ministry suggested last week that
it was open to using troops to quell the unrest, saying the protests were ‘intolerable,’” Mahtani and Anna Fifield report. “Signs of
China’s influence over Hong Kong abound. The Hong Kong and Chinese flags flew
at half-staff above government offices Monday in mourning for Li Peng, the
former Chinese premier known as ‘the Butcher of Beijing’ for his role in the
bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.”
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