Under the guise of protecting children, government shuts off an avenue
for critics
Cambodia's Ministry of Post and
Telecommunications has issued a circular banning internet cafes within 500
meters of schools or educational buildings, a move that is regarded by critics
as a serious infringement on freedom of communication in a poverty-stricken
country with few computers.
Although authorities say they
want to limit access by children to internet cafes and by extension
pornography, in fact there is almost no area of Phnom Penh, the country's
capital, that doesn't have a school within a 500-meter radius of an internet
cafe, according to the Cambodian human rights NGO Licadho.
Despite a visit by US President
Barack Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in November for the meeting of
leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations which momentarily lifted
the country's prestige, Cambodia has hardly been considered a democratic nation
by the stretch of anybody's imagination.
Obama's call for President Hun
Sen to hold fair elections and release political prisoners was ignored, pretty
much along with Obama himself as Wen received the red carpet treatment. Hun
Sen, in an exchange described as strained, said Cambodia's human rights record
was fine and demanded that the US forgive US$370 million in debt owed to the US
government.
The government has grown
increasingly irritated by the legions of western NGOs and United Nations
agencies in the country who provide approximately half of Cambodia's national
budget and who continuously demand that the country adhere to their standards
of behavior. The government, rife with corruption, has tired of the hectoring
of the western agencies and has sought to crack down on them for the last
couple of years and also has begun taking after critics.
In October, for instance, a
Cambodian court sentenced Mam Sonando, a 71-year-old journalist and activist to
20 years in prison for allegedly instigating an anti-government rebellion, a
verdict that Rupert Abbott, of the London-based Amnesty International, called
"outrageous," adding that: "We believe the motivation behind his
conviction is because he's been a prominent government critic. He's seen, I
think, as a threat to the government; someone who's prepared to speak
out."
Sonando ran the popular
independent radio station Beehive Radio and was president of Cambodia's
Democrat Association. In Cambodia, the media scene is dominated by outlets that
are generally sympathetic to the ruling party. But Sonando's station often
aired stories that were critical of Hun Sen's governing Cambodian People's
Party.
In 2011, the government suspended
for five months a German funded NGO, Sahmakum Teang Tnaut, which advocates for
the urban poor, an action that earned the condemnation of 40 civil society
bodies and umbrella groups who charged that the government intended to use a
law restricting NGO operations "to curb the activities of all associations
and NGOs that advocate for the rights of marginalized groups within Cambodian
society."
The groups, Oxfam, the
Cooperation Committee for Cambodia (CCC), and the NGO Coalition to Address
Trafficking & Sexual Exploitation of Children in Cambodia, demanded an
"immediate reversal" of the suspension.
With relatively few computers in
the impoverished country, Internet cafes have become a crucial outlet for
critics who want to go online. Using proximity to schools appears to serve as a
handy method of getting rid of them.
Accordingly, Phnom Penh internet
cafes received the circular on Dec. 15, signed by the Ministry of
Telecommunications and purporting to establish rules of control over public
commercial services. The persons writing it seemed to compare internet cafes to
brothels and apparently were unable to distinguish internet cafes from video
arcades.
And, while Cambodian internet
cafes do sometimes resemble arcades where students and others congregate to
play games on computer screens, it is also where government critics operate.
Said Licadho's Director Naly
Pilorge by email: "We don't know the number of Internet cafes potentially
affected by the circular. We are concerned, however, that this circular is a
preview of what is to come when the government enacts the so-called
"Cybercrime law," which has been rumored for a while – though not
made public by the government. All of the actual crimes that the circular
purports to address are already illegal. The circular's sole purpose seems to
be to create unjustifiable obstacles to Internet access. We believe this is a
transparent attempt to block part of the population's access to independent
sources of information through news sites and social media.
There are few opponents of
limiting access to video games on the part of students, but the comparison of
internet cafes with video arcades isn't correct. In a country where very few
children and youth enjoy the benefits of the Internet and few schools have a
computer room, critics say the order to banish public PCs from the schools'
areas is astonishing and senseless.
A more sound rule could work to
integrate those internet cafes to the schools' educational systems. They are by
themselves public computer rooms and cheap digital libraries where students can
find the windows to science, technology and culture.
With reporting by Albeiro Rodas,
who blogs for Asian Correspondent.
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