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Subject: Wired Magazine: The Resistance Network


WIRED electrosphere:The Resistance Network - By A. Lin Neumann
http://vip.hotwired.com/wired/4.01/departments/electrosphere/countrynet.html


[This article appeared in the January issue of Wired magazine and 
was forwarded for distribution on BurmaNet by Burma Center, Netherlands]

> [Image]
> 
> The Resistance Network
> 
> By A. Lin Neumann Too many people believe if it isn't on CNN, it isn't
> important. "Countrynets" expose dictatorships, unite activists, and
> give hope to the oppressed around the world.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> For the most part, people outside don't understand and don't care,"
> says the slight young American man who calls himself Strider. "Burma
> is just too far away and too hard to understand." As a result, he
> says, a brutal dictatorship has existed there for years with scant
> outside attention paid to its excesses and abuses. The cure for the
> problem, as far as Strider is concerned, is partly to be found on the
> Internet and in a new kind of communications resource: BurmaNet, an
> information-heavy mailing list that targets activists, journalists,
> exiles, and academics intent on tracking Burma (renamed Myanmar in
> 1989) with detail unavailable through traditional media.
> 
> While commercial online companies sell the _ash and dash of the World
> Wide Web and US Congressional antiporn tub-thumpers seek to impose
> their parochial will on the global networking phenomenon, Strider and
> hundreds of other modem-driven activists are using the Internet to
> quietly transform the work of monitoring human rights violations and
> pressuring governments. They may exist outside most of the recent
> public Net scrutiny, but dozens of mailing lists, webpages, Usenet
> groups, and other tools are springing up to track events and affect
> political decisions in under-reported countries, many of them hindered
> by closed political systems.
> 
> These "countrynets" unite activists separated by tens of thousands of
> miles and allow instant access to a common pool of narrowcast news and
> information on nations and issues that are largely ignored by the mass
> media.
> 
> "For Americans, if it doesn't happen on CNN, it doesn't happen. We're
> trying to change that, at least for those who are interested,"
> explains BurmaNet's Strider, 29, who says he began working on the
> project because he was frustrated by the lack of information available
> in the West about the deplorable human rights conditions in Burma.
> "Without the Net, there wouldn't be any information available," says
> Strider, who doesn't use his real name for security reasons.
> 
> Funded by the Open Society Institute of international financier and
> philanthropist George Soros, BurmaNet is one of the most effective of
> the new countrynet services that have emerged in recent years. More
> than information, however, these nets and a growing number of webpages
> are helping knit together diverse communities united around a given
> issue - be it human rights in Burma, the liberation of East Timor, or
> the release of political prisoners in Kenya.
> 
> As BurmaNet's Bangkok-based moderator, Strider has gradually built one
> of the world's best sources of information on events in Burma. A
> network of volunteers in Thailand and Burma reprint human rights
> reports and articles from wire services and the local press by
> rekeying them into their computers for posting on the Net. (Strictly
> speaking, this is a violation of copyright law, but Strider says he
> has the tacit agreement of wire agencies and newspapers to transmit
> the material because there is no profit involved.)
> 
> Occasionally, Strider and others do original reporting from inside
> Burma, and they have even distributed modems and laptops to a small
> network of correspondents working among refugees and relief workers on
> the Burmese border with Thailand. BurmaNet has opened the list to
> wide-ranging debates by its 500-plus subscribers and thousands of
> netizens who access portions of BurmaNet through Usenet and other
> services.
> 
> "What goes out over the Internet is largely aimed at a specialist
> community," Strider says, noting that the amount of material and the
> detail involved requires a serious commitment on the part of a reader.
> For casual observers and others, however, Strider believes the Web may
> be a better resource; there are now several different Burma pages.
> 
> "This is the information backbone of a larger movement that aims to
> mobilize public opinion against the military leaders of Burma,"
> Strider says. It was the Net, he explains, that helped mobilize
> activists on college campuses and elsewhere in their opposition to
> investment in Burma by Eddie Bauer. (The clothing outfit pulled out of
> the country earlier this year.) And it was the Net that stimulated
> bipartisan sentiment in Congress to impose sanctions on the regime.
> "There are few Burmese in the States," he says, "and relatively few
> people who even know where Burma is. But those who care are organized
> and effective, and it's because of the Internet."
> 
> Not all of the countrynets are the same, of course, and not all of the
> information available is anti-government. Some carry a modest
> subscription fee: Kenya-net, for example, charts everything from news
> and gossip to stock-market quotations and political debate in the East
> African nation.
> 
> Others like the East Timor Action Network - devoted to the plight of
> the tiny former Portuguese colony that has been occupied by Indonesia
> for the last 20 years - are basically electronic extensions of
> networks that have functioned through other means for years. In the
> case of East Timor, activists in Australia and elsewhere use the Net
> to instantly disseminate information and calls for action, something
> that once took weeks of snail-mail and expensive telephone calls to
> arrange. The same can be said of services that track events in Israel
> and the West Bank, as well as in China, Vietnam, Mexico, Guatemala,
> and the former Yugoslavia (see "Balkans Online," Wired 3.11, page
> 159), employing everything from relatively old listserve technology to
> the Web.
> 
> Often the technology allows for some surprising juxtapositions, as in
> the case of Christus Rex, which for all the world appears to be the
> work of the Vatican. Within this beautiful page are links to hundreds
> of pictures taken from the walls of the Sistine Chapel and other works
> of divine art and religious texts. But Christus Rex also features a
> photo history of the 1989 Tiananmen rebellion, pages on Serbian
> atrocities in Bosnia, and human rights violations stemming from the
> Russian crackdown in Chechnya.
> 
> Christus Rex has nothing to do with the Vatican. Its seemingly odd
> mixture results from a singular vision: that of Michael Olteanu, a
> Romanian immigrant to the United States who once suffered at the hands
> of the gulag in Eastern Europe. (Olteanu declined to be interviewed
> for this story.) Christus Rex has also made space available to a group
> of Chinese activists in Silicon Valley who ran a Free Harry Wu page,
> devoted to the release of Wu, a US citizen who was arrested in China
> in June, convicted of espionage, and then released in August.
> 
> "We've gotten supportive messages from all over the world," says Chuck
> Lau, a Silicon Valley information-technology engineer from Hong Kong
> who designed the Harry Wu page and had it up within days of the
> announcement of Wu's arrest. Working with other Chinese-American
> computer experts, Lau credits people like Olteanu for seeing the
> possibilities of the Web and the Internet to explore issues such as
> Chinese human rights.
> 
> PeaceNet, a project of the Institute for Global Communications,
> provides space on its servers to BurmaNet along with hundreds of
> global mininets. BurmaNet, as with many others, acts as a PeaceNet
> "conference" and also e-mails its list free of charge to interested
> parties.
> 
> The rhetorical mud can be pretty thick inside some areas of PeaceNet,
> where activists sometimes debate the finer points of political theory
> while providing only a bare measure of what might be called news. And
> in some cases, the censors at PeaceNet are a bit weird. While the
> group trumpets the free _ow of information, for example, PeaceNet's
> Cuba conference, reg.cuba, is little more than an outlet for the Cuban
> government to issue press releases and call for international support
> in its struggle against the US. You won't find many anti-Castro voices
> at PeaceNet.
> 
> That said, there is a wealth of little-reported information within
> PeaceNet. For example, the conference on Guatemala, which is also
> distributed as a mailing list, has featured a running account of the
> fight of Harvard-educated attorney Jennifer Harbury. Harbury, a US
> citizen, recently filed suit against the CIA for information in the
> 1992 death of her husband, guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez,
> while in military custody. The conference helps activists pressure the
> CIA and the Guatemalan government by allowing them to quickly and
> cheaply share a common base of information.
> 
> PeaceNet also offers its users access to China News Digest, perhaps
> the largest countrynet project in existence. Staffed by more than 50
> volunteers worldwide, China News Digest was set up in early 1989,
> shortly before the Tiananmen Square democracy movement was crushed in
> June. The digest now goes to some 35,200 e-mail addresses in 43
> countries and contains a summary of wire-service reports, news, and
> commentary from dissident sources inside China. (It is curious to note
> that PeaceNet apparently does not approve of China, an out-of-favor
> socialist country, but does approve of Cuba, which is equally hostile
> to internal political dissent.)
> 
> "We see ourselves as serving activists, not being activists," says
> George Gundrey, PeaceNet's coordinator for international programs.
> "This is a way to decentralize the monolithic viewpoints of the major
> media." But activist-oriented services, some observers caution, are
> not a substitute for dispassionate analysis.
> 
> "They operate in a gray zone of committed activists," says writer
> James Fallows, an Asia scholar and computer analyst for The Atlantic
> Monthly, "and they tend to repeat the same information over and over.
> It doesn't replace careful reporting."
> 
> Even those who operate in the world of the activist nets concede that
> their information is only as good as those who post it. "I trust our
> people," says Gene Stoltzfus, who helps run a mailing list called CPT
> Net - a project of the Christian Peacemaker Teams - which gathers
> information in places like Haiti and West Bank Palestinian villages.
> "But we don't post stuff from people we don't know."
> 
> PeaceNet's Gundrey says the lists are a way for alienated,
> disenfranchised people to get their news out, and as such they have a
> growing validity. That validity is an act of faith, however, or an
> exercise in simple news gathering and dissemination, unless concrete
> gains of some kind are made for the people these nets are supposed to
> be representing.
> 
> Michael Koplinka of Cornell University, the man who started the Koigi
> wa Wamwere homepage, credits the Internet with helping to score a
> victory of sorts. Koigi - a former Cornell student, and an opposition
> member of Kenya's parliament and harsh critic of the government of
> Daniel arap Moi - was accused of "robbery with violence" in 1993 and
> was put on trial for his life in Nakuru for almost two years. His case
> generated protests by Amnesty International and other organizations.
> When a decision was finally rendered in October, charges against Koigi
> were reduced, and he was sentenced to just four years in prison.
> 
> "There is no question that if we didn't have this level of
> international pressure generated from the Net that Koigi would have
> been sentenced to death," says Koplinka. Koigi's sentence, which
> included six strokes of a whipping cane, seems harsh enough, but
> Koplinka says that the Net was extremely active during a crucial
> period in September when Koigi's fate was being decided. Activists
> visiting the Koigi page were given the option of clicking on a button
> to create a fax to lobby the Moi government. Koplinka says that over
> the past few months, 632 messages were faxed out of his office from
> 3,212 visits to the website. "We could track the response," he says,
> "through our contacts in Kenya. There is no question the government
> was listening to the response from the Net. In other cases in Kenya,
> prisoners were taken out and hanged in the courtyard 10 minutes after
> the verdict."
> 
> In contrast with traditional organizing, Koplinka says, the Net is
> both fast and international, generating responses from Europe and
> Africa, as well as the US. He cited an incident on August 10 in which
> the lawyers for Koigi were beaten on the courthouse steps in Nakuru
> when they attempted to visit their client. "We had that on the Net the
> same day and had letters and faxes of protest going out to the US
> embassy and the Kenyan government almost immediately," Koplinka says.
> "Amnesty International sent out an action letter on the incident which
> we didn't receive for three weeks. By then it would have been too late
> to do anything. But with the Net, we move instantly."
> 
> Koplinka's actions also belie the feeling that one man can do very
> little in the political arena. "It's really just me," he says when
> asked how many people were involved in putting together the Koigi
> effort at Cornell. Working with a cooperative Internet provider,
> Koplinka enlists volunteers who maintain the page, post the
> information, and track the issue. "It's pretty amazing what we've been
> able to accomplish," he says.
> 
> Others echo the experience of the Koigi case. "The Net has been so
> intrinsic to organizing in the US and internationally for the last few
> years that whatever successes East Timor's solidarity movement has had
> cannot be considered otherwise," says Charles Scheiner, the moderator
> of reg.easttimor, a PeaceNet conference mirrored on the East Timor
> Action Network mailing list. "Consider last month, when five young
> East Timorese activists sought political asylum in the British embassy
> in Jakarta. Within hours, their statement and biographies were
> e-mailed all over the world, and people began calling the British
> embassies in their own countries, as well as Indonesian government
> officials. Within a day, the Portuguese, British, and Indonesian
> representatives met and discussed what to do; within two days, they
> had agreed that the young men would be allowed to leave Indonesia for
> Portugal. Within a week they had left."
> 
> Individual action is a staple of the countrynets. BurmaNet was the
> work, initially, of just one person; Christus Rex is run by one man;
> East Timor Action Network is coordinated largely by Charles Scheiner.
> I found the Koigi homepage on a link inside something called the Human
> Rights Web. That page, it turns out, is not an organization at all,
> but the project of Catherine Hampton, a human rights activist who saw
> an opportunity to do some good in the virtual world and seized it.
> 
> "When a technology like the Web comes up, you don't have to have a lot
> of money or people - you can do it yourself," she says. Hampton
> designed Human Rights Web and posts information on prisoners of
> conscience and other rights violations, as well as links to related
> websites.
> 
> For an observer steeped in a more traditional worldview, there is a
> problem in that a page may look official, as if it represents
> something more than one individual. But that concern seems
> old-fashioned and out of touch to Hampton, who brushes it aside: "It's
> part of a web, it's a node, it's decentralized information. That's the
> point."
> 
> That may be true. But for the uninitiated, the Net can be a confusing
> starting point for insight into the inner workings of a complex
> society or international con_ict. Occasionally on BurmaNet, one can be
> bombarded by competing analyses from splintered student groups whose
> inner divisions are almost impossible for a neophyte to wade through.
> PeaceNet's Gundrey says that users of the Net must develop
> "information literacy" in order to make sense of competing viewpoints
> and raw information.
> 
> Such literacy comes with study, analysis, and experience. It seems
> doubtful that unfiltered information will replace the work of
> reporters knowledgeable on their subjects and able to separate the
> wheat from the chaff. What to make, for example, of All About
> Geopolitics in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia - a page
> devoted to the proposition that the Serbian side in the ongoing war in
> Bosnia and Croatia is being portrayed unfairly in the media, and that
> the Croatians are a bunch of Nazis. Conversely, you can turn to the
> Alleged Criminals of Former Yugoslavia homepage, a website that
> liberally condemns the Serbian side. At least the old media offer some
> kind of distance from the con_ict.
> 
> The problem of e-mail clutter can also be a major difficulty if you
> start tracking countrynet activity through mailing lists. In the
> course of researching this article, I subscribed to BurmaNet,
> Kenya-net, East Timor Action Network, and a mailing list on Chinese
> human rights managed from Silicon Valley. On any given day, I received
> 75 or more lengthy messages. Keeping up with several of these lists at
> a time is a full-time job.
> 
> But to someone who once clipped newspaper articles and coordinated
> phone trees on human rights issues, it is clear that the Internet is
> offering activists and others with a burning need to stay informed a
> wealth of information that was previously hard to come by. As a
> foreign correspondent, I covered the popular uprising in Burma that
> was brutally crushed by the military in 1988. But in recent years, I
> had grown unfamiliar with events there. That problem has been cured.
> 
> Earlier this year, when Burmese government troops overran rebel
> strongholds near the country's border with Thailand, BurmaNet carried
> often gripping updates from the border - on an almost hourly basis -
> during a time when most American newspapers and broadcast outlets
> ignored the clashes. In recent months, BurmaNet easily has been the
> best source of continuing information on events related to the release
> in July of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader
> who had been kept under house arrest by the regime for six years.
> 
> "For the first time, people all over the world who are interested in
> this issue are seeing essentially the same information at about the
> same time. That is really our main contribution," says Strider. "It is
> difficult to track the effect. You can't say this or that happened
> just because of the Net, but the information is what is allowing
> things to happen. There simply wouldn't be an activist movement for
> Burma in the United States without BurmaNet. None at all."
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> California-based freelance writer A. Lin Neumann
> (74507.134@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) was a foreign correspondent in Southeast
> Asia for seven years.
> 
> 
> 
>  [wired]
> 
>  [Overview]
> 
> Copyright ) 1995 Wired Ventures Ltd.
> Compilation copyright ) 1995 HotWired Ventures LLC
> 
> All rights reserved.http://vip.hotwired.com/wired/4.01/departments/electrosphere/countrynet.html

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<TITLE>WIRED electrosphere:The Resistance Network - By A. Lin Neumann </TIT=
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<BODY>
<!-- start local exec -->
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<IMG SRC=3D"../../images/eSphere.gif"><H1>The Resistance Network</H1>
<i>By A. Lin Neumann</i>
<i>Too many people believe if it isn't on CNN, it isn't important. "Country=
nets" expose dictatorships, unite activists, and give hope to the oppressed=
 around the world.</i>
<HR>
<P>

For the most part, people outside don't understand and don't care," says th=
e slight young American man who calls himself Strider. "Burma is just too f=
ar away and too hard to understand." As a result, he says, a brutal dictato=
rship has existed there for years with scant outside attention paid to its =
excesses and abuses. The cure for the problem, as far as Strider is concern=
ed, is partly to be found on the Internet and in a new kind of communicatio=
ns resource: BurmaNet, an information-heavy mailing list that targets activ=
ists, journalists, exiles, and academics intent on tracking Burma (renamed =
Myanmar in 1989) with detail unavailable through traditional media. =


<P>

While commercial online companies sell the =DFash and dash of the World Wid=
e Web and US Congressional antiporn tub-thumpers seek to impose their paroc=
hial will on the global networking phenomenon, Strider and hundreds of othe=
r modem-driven activists are using the Internet to quietly transform the wo=
rk of monitoring human rights violations and pressuring governments. They m=
ay exist outside most of the recent public Net scrutiny, but dozens of mail=
ing lists, webpages, Usenet groups, and other tools are springing up to tra=
ck events and affect political decisions in under-reported countries, many =
of them hindered by closed political systems. =


<P>

These "countrynets" unite activists separated by tens of thousands of miles=
 and allow instant access to a common pool of narrowcast news and informati=
on on nations and issues that are largely ignored by the mass media.

<P>

"For Americans, if it doesn't happen on CNN, it doesn't happen. We're tryin=
g to change that, at least for those who are interested," explains BurmaNet=
's Strider, 29, who says he began working on the project because he was fru=
strated by the lack of information available in the West about the deplorab=
le human rights conditions in Burma. "Without the Net, there wouldn't be an=
y information available," says Strider, who doesn't use his real name for s=
ecurity reasons.

<P>

Funded by the Open Society Institute of international financier and philant=
hropist George Soros, BurmaNet is one of the most effective of the new coun=
trynet services that have emerged in recent years. More than information, h=
owever, these nets and a growing number of webpages are helping knit togeth=
er diverse communities united around a given issue - be it human rights in =
Burma, the liberation of East Timor, or the release of political prisoners =
in Kenya. =


<P>

As BurmaNet's Bangkok-based moderator, Strider has gradually built one of t=
he world's best sources of information on events in Burma. A network of vol=
unteers in Thailand and Burma reprint human rights reports and articles fro=
m wire services and the local press by rekeying them into their computers f=
or posting on the Net. (Strictly speaking, this is a violation of copyright=
 law, but Strider says he has the tacit agreement of wire agencies and news=
papers to transmit the material because there is no profit involved.) =


<P>

Occasionally, Strider and others do original reporting from inside Burma, a=
nd they have even distributed modems and laptops to a small network of corr=
espondents working among refugees and relief workers on the Burmese border =
with Thailand. BurmaNet has opened the list to wide-ranging debates by its =
500-plus subscribers and thousands of netizens who access portions of Burma=
Net through Usenet and other services.

<P>

"What goes out over the Internet is largely aimed at a specialist community=
," Strider says, noting that the amount of material and the detail involved=
 requires a serious commitment on the part of a reader. For casual observer=
s and others, however, Strider believes the Web may be a better resource; t=
here are now several different Burma pages.

<P>

"This is the information backbone of a larger movement that aims to mobiliz=
e public opinion against the military leaders of Burma," Strider says. It w=
as the Net, he explains, that helped mobilize activists on college campuses=
 and elsewhere in their opposition to investment in Burma by Eddie Bauer. (=
The clothing outfit pulled out of the country earlier this year.) And it wa=
s the Net that stimulated bipartisan sentiment in Congress to impose sancti=
ons on the regime. "There are few Burmese in the States," he says, "and rel=
atively few people who even know where Burma is. But those who care are org=
anized and effective, and it's because of the Internet."

<P>

Not all of the countrynets are the same, of course, and not all of the info=
rmation available is anti-government. Some carry a modest subscription fee:=
 Kenya-net, for example, charts everything from news and gossip to stock-ma=
rket quotations and political debate in the East African nation. =


<P>

Others like the East Timor Action Network - devoted to the plight of the ti=
ny former Portuguese colony that has been occupied by Indonesia for the las=
t 20 years - are basically electronic extensions of networks that have func=
tioned through other means for years. In the case of East Timor, activists =
in Australia and elsewhere use the Net to instantly disseminate information=
 and calls for action, something that once took weeks of snail-mail and exp=
ensive telephone calls to arrange. The same can be said of services that tr=
ack events in Israel and the West Bank, as well as in China, Vietnam, Mexic=
o, Guatemala, and the former Yugoslavia (see "Balkans Online," <I>Wired</I>=
 3.11, page 159), employing everything from relatively old listserve techno=
logy to the Web.

<P>

Often the technology allows for some surprising juxtapositions, as in the c=
ase of Christus Rex, which for all the world appears to be the work of the =
Vatican. Within this beautiful page are links to hundreds of pictures taken=
 from the walls of the Sistine Chapel and other works of divine art and rel=
igious texts. But Christus Rex also features a photo history of the 1989 Ti=
ananmen rebellion, pages on Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, and human rights =
violations stemming from the Russian crackdown in Chechnya.

<P>

Christus Rex has nothing to do with the Vatican. Its seemingly odd mixture =
results from a singular vision: that of Michael Olteanu, a Romanian immigra=
nt to the United States who once suffered at the hands of the gulag in East=
ern Europe. (Olteanu declined to be interviewed for this story.) Christus R=
ex has also made space available to a group of Chinese activists in Silicon=
 Valley who ran a Free Harry Wu page, devoted to the release of Wu, a US ci=
tizen who was arrested in China in June, convicted of espionage, and then r=
eleased in August. =


<P>

"We've gotten supportive messages from all over the world," says Chuck Lau,=
 a Silicon Valley information-technology engineer from Hong Kong who design=
ed the Harry Wu page and had it up within days of the announcement of Wu's =
arrest. Working with other Chinese-American computer experts, Lau credits p=
eople like Olteanu for seeing the possibilities of the Web and the Internet=
 to explore issues such as Chinese human rights.

<P>

PeaceNet, a project of the Institute for Global Communications, provides sp=
ace on its servers to BurmaNet along with hundreds of global mininets. Burm=
aNet, as with many others, acts as a PeaceNet "conference" and also e-mails=
 its list free of charge to interested parties.

<P>

The rhetorical mud can be pretty thick inside some areas of PeaceNet, where=
 activists sometimes debate the finer points of political theory while prov=
iding only a bare measure of what might be called news. And in some cases, =
the censors at PeaceNet are a bit weird. While the group trumpets the free =
=DFow of information, for example, PeaceNet's Cuba conference, reg.cuba, is=
 little more than an outlet for the Cuban government to issue press release=
s and call for international support in its struggle against the US. You wo=
n't find many anti-Castro voices at PeaceNet.

<P>

That said, there is a wealth of little-reported information within PeaceNet=
=2E For example, the conference on Guatemala, which is also distributed as =
a mailing list, has featured a running account of the fight of Harvard-educ=
ated attorney Jennifer Harbury. Harbury, a US citizen, recently filed suit =
against the CIA for information in the 1992 death of her husband, guerrilla=
 leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, while in military custody. The conference =
helps activists pressure the CIA and the Guatemalan government by allowing =
them to quickly and cheaply share a common base of information.

<P>

PeaceNet also offers its users access to China News Digest, perhaps the lar=
gest countrynet project in existence. Staffed by more than 50 volunteers wo=
rldwide, China News Digest was set up in early 1989, shortly before the Tia=
nanmen Square democracy movement was crushed in June. The digest now goes t=
o some 35,200 e-mail addresses in 43 countries and contains a summary of wi=
re-service reports, news, and commentary from dissident sources inside Chin=
a. (It is curious to note that PeaceNet apparently does not approve of Chin=
a, an out-of-favor socialist country, but does approve of Cuba, which is eq=
ually hostile to internal political dissent.)

<P>

"We see ourselves as serving activists, not being activists," says George G=
undrey, PeaceNet's coordinator for international programs. "This is a way t=
o decentralize the monolithic viewpoints of the major media." But activist-=
oriented services, some observers caution, are not a substitute for dispass=
ionate analysis. =


<P>

"They operate in a gray zone of committed activists," says writer James Fal=
lows, an Asia scholar and computer analyst for The Atlantic Monthly, "and t=
hey tend to repeat the same information over and over. It doesn't replace c=
areful reporting." =


<P>

Even those who operate in the world of the activist nets concede that their=
 information is only as good as those who post it. "I trust our people," sa=
ys Gene Stoltzfus, who helps run a mailing list called CPT Net - a project =
of the Christian Peacemaker Teams - which gathers information in places lik=
e Haiti and West Bank Palestinian villages. "But we don't post stuff from p=
eople we don't know."

<P>

PeaceNet's Gundrey says the lists are a way for alienated, disenfranchised =
people to get their news out, and as such they have a growing validity. Tha=
t validity is an act of faith, however, or an exercise in simple news gathe=
ring and dissemination, unless concrete gains of some kind are made for the=
 people these nets are supposed to be representing. =


<P>

Michael Koplinka of Cornell University, the man who started the Koigi wa Wa=
mwere homepage, credits the Internet with helping to score a victory of sor=
ts. Koigi - a former Cornell student, and an opposition member of Kenya's p=
arliament and harsh critic of the government of Daniel arap Moi - was accus=
ed of "robbery with violence" in 1993 and was put on trial for his life in =
Nakuru for almost two years. His case generated protests by Amnesty Interna=
tional and other organizations. When a decision was finally rendered in Oct=
ober, charges against Koigi were reduced, and he was sentenced to just four=
 years in prison.

<P>

"There is no question that if we didn't have this level of international pr=
essure generated from the Net that Koigi would have been sentenced to death=
," says Koplinka. Koigi's sentence, which included six strokes of a whippin=
g cane, seems harsh enough, but Koplinka says that the Net was extremely ac=
tive during a crucial period in September when Koigi's fate was being decid=
ed. Activists visiting the Koigi page were given the option of clicking on =
a button to create a fax to lobby the Moi government. Koplinka says that ov=
er the past few months, 632 messages were faxed out of his office from 3,21=
2 visits to the website. "We could track the response," he says, "through o=
ur contacts in Kenya. There is no question the government was listening to =
the response from the Net. In other cases in Kenya, prisoners were taken ou=
t and hanged in the courtyard 10 minutes after the verdict."

<P>

In contrast with traditional organizing, Koplinka says, the Net is both fas=
t and international, generating responses from Europe and Africa, as well a=
s the US. He cited an incident on August 10 in which the lawyers for Koigi =
were beaten on the courthouse steps in Nakuru when they attempted to visit =
their client. "We had that on the Net the same day and had letters and faxe=
s of protest going out to the US embassy and the Kenyan government almost i=
mmediately," Koplinka says. "Amnesty International sent out an action lette=
r on the incident which we didn't receive for three weeks. By then it would=
 have been too late to do anything. But with the Net, we move instantly." =


<P>

Koplinka's actions also belie the feeling that one man can do very little i=
n the political arena. "It's really just me," he says when asked how many p=
eople were involved in putting together the Koigi effort at Cornell. Workin=
g with a cooperative Internet provider, Koplinka enlists volunteers who mai=
ntain the page, post the information, and track the issue. "It's pretty ama=
zing what we've been able to accomplish," he says. =


<P>

Others echo the experience of the Koigi case. "The Net has been so intrinsi=
c to organizing in the US and internationally for the last few years that w=
hatever successes East Timor's solidarity movement has had cannot be consid=
ered otherwise," says Charles Scheiner, the moderator of reg.easttimor, a P=
eaceNet conference mirrored on the East Timor Action Network mailing list. =
"Consider last month, when five young East Timorese activists sought politi=
cal asylum in the British embassy in Jakarta. Within hours, their statement=
 and biographies were e-mailed all over the world, and people began calling=
 the British embassies in their own countries, as well as Indonesian govern=
ment officials. Within a day, the Portuguese, British, and Indonesian repre=
sentatives met and discussed what to do; within two days, they had agreed t=
hat the young men would be allowed to leave Indonesia for Portugal. Within =
a week they had left." =


<P>

Individual action is a staple of the countrynets. BurmaNet was the work, in=
itially, of just one person; Christus Rex is run by one man; East Timor Act=
ion Network is coordinated largely by Charles Scheiner. I found the Koigi h=
omepage on a link inside something called the Human Rights Web. That page, =
it turns out, is not an organization at all, but the project of Catherine H=
ampton, a human rights activist who saw an opportunity to do some good in t=
he virtual world and seized it. =


<P>

"When a technology like the Web comes up, you don't have to have a lot of m=
oney or people - you can do it yourself," she says. Hampton designed Human =
Rights Web and posts information on prisoners of conscience and other right=
s violations, as well as links to related websites. =


<P>

For an observer steeped in a more traditional worldview, there is a problem=
 in that a page may look official, as if it represents something more than =
one individual. But that concern seems old-fashioned and out of touch to Ha=
mpton, who brushes it aside: "It's part of a web, it's a node, it's decentr=
alized information. That's the point." =


<P>

That may be true. But for the uninitiated, the Net can be a confusing start=
ing point for insight into the inner workings of a complex society or inter=
national con=DFict. Occasionally on BurmaNet, one can be bombarded by compe=
ting analyses from splintered student groups whose inner divisions are almo=
st impossible for a neophyte to wade through. PeaceNet's Gundrey says that =
users of the Net must develop "information literacy" in order to make sense=
 of competing viewpoints and raw information. =


<P>

Such literacy comes with study, analysis, and experience. It seems doubtful=
 that unfiltered information will replace the work of reporters knowledgeab=
le on their subjects and able to separate the wheat from the chaff. What to=
 make, for example, of All About Geopolitics in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herz=
egovina, Croatia - a page devoted to the proposition that the Serbian side =
in the ongoing war in Bosnia and Croatia is being portrayed unfairly in the=
 media, and that the Croatians are a bunch of Nazis. Conversely, you can tu=
rn to the Alleged Criminals of Former Yugoslavia homepage, a website that l=
iberally condemns the Serbian side. At least the old media offer some kind =
of distance from the con=DFict. =


<P>

The problem of e-mail clutter can also be a major difficulty if you start t=
racking countrynet activity through mailing lists. In the course of researc=
hing this article, I subscribed to BurmaNet, Kenya-net, East Timor Action N=
etwork, and a mailing list on Chinese human rights managed from Silicon Val=
ley. On any given day, I received 75 or more lengthy messages. Keeping up w=
ith several of these lists at a time is a full-time job.

<P>

But to someone who once clipped newspaper articles and coordinated phone tr=
ees on human rights issues, it is clear that the Internet is offering activ=
ists and others with a burning need to stay informed a wealth of informatio=
n that was previously hard to come by. As a foreign correspondent, I covere=
d the popular uprising in Burma that was brutally crushed by the military i=
n 1988. But in recent years, I had grown unfamiliar with events there. That=
 problem has been cured. =


<P>

Earlier this year, when Burmese government troops overran rebel strongholds=
 near the country's border with Thailand, BurmaNet carried often gripping u=
pdates from the border - on an almost hourly basis - during a time when mos=
t American newspapers and broadcast outlets ignored the clashes. In recent =
months, BurmaNet easily has been the best source of continuing information =
on events related to the release in July of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Pri=
ze-winning opposition leader who had been kept under house arrest by the re=
gime for six years.

<P>

"For the first time, people all over the world who are interested in this i=
ssue are seeing essentially the same information at about the same time. Th=
at is really our main contribution," says Strider. "It is difficult to trac=
k the effect. You can't say this or that happened just because of the Net, =
but the information is what is allowing things to happen. There simply woul=
dn't be an activist movement for Burma in the United States without BurmaNe=
t. None at all."

<P>

<hr>

<p>

<i>California-based freelance writer A. Lin Neumann (<a href=3D"mailto:7450=
7.134@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx">74507.134@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx</a>) was a foreign correspon=
dent in Southeast Asia for seven years.</i>

<P>

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