A Syrian activist and blogger was burned alive earlier this week after the military targeted his home in a firefight that left 16 people dead.
The blogger, who catalogued the country’s civil war under the pen name Abu Hassan, was killed after soldiers set fire to his home in the city of Hama.
Hassan’s death highlights a disturbing trend that reflects the fragility of the Internet’s anonymous shield, especially in autocratic states.
While it’s trendy to talk about the role social media has played in the Arab Spring and other recent citizen challenges to autocratic regimes, many muckraking journalists continue to use old-fashioned Internet reporting tools: blogs. And across the world, bloggers are being targeted the same way journalists have been for generations: with violence and long prison sentences.
At least 30 netizen and citizen journalists have been killed so far in 2012—most of them Syrian—compared to just three in 2011, according to Reporters Without Borders, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for press freedom around the world. Meanwhile, at least 127 netizens have been imprisoned so far this year. (The organization did not collect similar data for 2011.)
On Sept. 19, for instance, United Arab Emirates blogger Ahmed Mansoor was allegedly attacked at night by an unidentified man outside of the university where he studies law. The blogger had previously languished in prison for eight months with four other men after posting anti-government messages on a Web forum. Though the five were pardoned in January 2011, they are still unable to travel freely or look for work. Mansoor said this is the second time since his release that he’s been assaulted.
And in Vietnam, three bloggers were sentenced to long prison terms earlier this week for posting comments critical of the state, part of a broader Internet crackdown in the communist southeast Asian country. The mother of one of the bloggers, Tan Phong Tan, died after setting herself on fire to protest her daughter’s arrest in July.
Hassan, the Syrian blogger, quit his job as a construction worked and picked up filmmaking to “expose the crimes that the regime is carrying out,” Hassan said in one of his videos, according to the AP. “I will film until my last breath.”
Another Syrian activist who knew Hassan told the Associated Press: “They [the military] knew very well who he was. The whole of Hama knew how much of the revolution he had filmed. Abu Hassan was one of the bravest people I have ever met. He sacrificed his life to show the world what is happening in Syria.”
Photo by FreedomHouse2/Flickr