Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Is Malaysia’s net clampdown at odds with knowledge economy?
The opposition wants to cut the sale of alcohol in a state that it rules and now the government wants to restrict Internet access .
Malaysia is a multicultural country of 27 million people in Southeast Asia. It has a majority Muslim population that of course is not allowed to drink by religion. Yet clearly some do as shown by the sentencing to caning for a young woman handed down recently
(Photo: Prime Minister Najib Razak leaving the National Mosque as he prepared to mark his first 100 days in office in July. Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad)
Proposals by the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party, which wants an Islamic state, could effectively end the sale of alcohol in the country’s richest state, Selangor, which is next to the capital Kuala Lumpur.
Its rules would penalise not only Muslims that consumed alcohol, but also for example Muslim shop assistants in say Tesco’s who could be fined if they sold alcohol.
This is coming from a country whose most celebrated film maker, PJ Ramlee, made movies featuring alcohol, smoking and night clubs as well as cross-racial relationships and whose first premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Muslim of course and a member of one of Malaysia’s royal families, was fond of whisky.
And the Internet? If you want to find out anything in Malaysia, you need to read the net. The country’s newspapers, largely owned by the political parties that have run this country for 51 years and which need to be licensed annually, feed their readers a steady diet of pro-government propaganda.
Web crackdown spreads
– David L. Stern covers the former Soviet Union and the Black Sea region for GlobalPost, where this article originally ran. –
With less than six months until it takes over the chairmanship of one of Europe’s flagship human rights organizations, Kazakhstan has thumbed its nose to Western governments and introduced a draconian Internet law.
The new legislation follows similar crackdowns on online political communication in other former Soviet republics and signals a growing fear among officials in authoritarian states after public uprisings in Iran and Moldova were fueled by internet social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a law on July 10 that classifies all online public discussions as forms of publication. As a result, any comment that appears on a blog, forum, chatroom or social networking site, such as Facebook and Live Journal, is subject to the country’s already punitive mass media and libel laws. The law also restricts foreign news outlets, which can be blocked if they are likewise found to disseminate information that violates the Central Asian state’s laws on expression.
Human rights groups immediately sounded alarm bells. “The wording of these bans seems to target political discussion, and it is so broad that it could easily give rise to arbitrary interpretations,” said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, in a press release.
The Kazakhstan law seems to have been primarily in reaction to web pages that published information about Rakhat Aliyev, President Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law who now lives in Austria. After a falling out with the first family last year, Aliyev — a former ambassador and security chief — is now waging an information war against his former relatives from afar, publishing allegedly compromising telephone conversations.
Kazakh authorities for their part have convicted the former first son twice in absentia, sentencing him to what amounts to decades in prison, first for what they say was his masterminding the abduction of three bank managers, and then accusing him of planning a coup d’etat.
Malaysia is known for talking big and acting small. That’s why nobody thinks they can enforce the Internet restriction order.