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i'm not sure whether making archives of users' personal pages is really justified - if you think this is getting too much like "personal promotion", please comment here. Boud 15:15, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)


Indymedia and Nepalese Maoists

Someone wrote to me privately the following attempt to understand and/or show that indymedia supports violence - IMHO this is too detailed a discussion, but at least by responding here maybe this might help clarify the argument.

Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004


Another example of support for tyranny on Indymedia, ripped straight from today's headlines.

Today we hear that Maoist Rebels have abducted 50 school children in Nepal. The students, aged 13-16, were dragged at gunpoint from a village school. Most were girls.

AFAIR this is a credible newstory, but without even a URL i haven't been able to find the report itself.

We know the goals of these rebels, because they trumpt them loudly on their website and other venues: they are traditional Maoist communists, and they seek the usual sorts of things that type seeks, via the usual methods. There is every reason to expect the result, if they are successful, is to be the same as in every other case in history: mass murder on a breathtaking scale.

So, let's search on Indymedia, to see what they have to say. There are any number of intellectually respectable positions on this, including oppoisition to the existing government, which is flawed in many obvious ways.

But Indymedia does not take those positions. Instead, as one might easily predict from past experience, Indymedia fully sides with the rebels, including with their violent activities.

IMHO the closest thing to what could be called Indymedia's intellectual position on this is that the people who can best communicate what is happening in Nepal are the people living there, and that it would be great if a variety of people living in Nepal could organise an open, non-hierarchical indymedia group there. Last year there was some discussion regarding this, see the archives:

Alternatively, in the absence of a local group, another local indymedia group engaged in solidarity with Nepalese might use their open, agreed-upon editorial process to prepare a collective, centre-column article, pointing to several sources of information. But this only engages the local collective in its point of view of information uncontrolled by authoritarian governments, corporations, unions, etc; it does not engage the whole network.

In the absence of both a local nepalese indymedia and any centre column articles, if there are articles posted on open newswires which are not hidden by the local collective, all this means is that the local collective lacked the time or ability to consense that the article is (for example) racist and consense on hiding the article.

It is simply wrong to say that Indymedia fully sides with the rebels. It could be said that people rarely add comments describing systematic human rights violations by the rebels to newswire articles, which i would guess is probably true simply because people are tired of having to do this, or because they are not engaged in any actions regarding Nepal and don't see any point in trying to add information to a situation where they have no first-hand information or information via methods which seem reliable.

Search on google for "nebal rebels site:indymedia.org".

This is not a method for trying to find any "official" position of Indymedia - Indymedia is a very horizontal network, many of the collective statements which are de facto agreed to are, in formal terms, only draft documents.

It should be: google on nepal rebels site:indymedia.org (p not b).


Check out the headlines, read the articles. We see a mixed review of Maoist radio (it seems that it has lots of useful information for the people, but is boring because it praises Mao all the time). We see a celebratory headline, excited about a violent campaign to disrupt "capitalist production".

We see a reprint from the Marxist "A World To Win News Service" which is of course unadulterated praise for the "People's War". There's nothing like kidnapping children at gunpoint to get Marxists excited, that's for sure.

This google search give a mix of articles from many different years, from different indymedia groups, and with no indication of whether the articles are hidden or not.

AFAIK, very few indymedia groups choose to label their hidden articles in a way that makes it obvious that these have been hidden; maybe this should become more common. The fact is that using google to find indymedia articles is not the best way to find indymedia on Nepal: the best way is to go on the spot, meet various Nepalese people who want to start indymedia Nepal (or Kathmandu) and if they really want to make an open publishing site, then help them do it.

Boston Indymedia has a nice article to illustrate my point. Bush asked for $30 million to help fight these rebels, and this might or might not be a good idea, but *we don't even need to look at Indymedia* to guess what it says: this is not just a bad idea, but it's a bad idea because the Maoists are the *good guys*. It's a "popular socialist uprising". The rebels are responsible for "tremendous advances" in "education, clean drinking water, women's rights, and land reform."

My guess is the subject is this article:

This is the height of absurdity.

This is one article from 11 May 2002 making several claims and at the end presenting a point of view which calls for action (to oppose the $30 million for the Nepalese government). Clearly the call for action is different to wikipedia, where a request for action regarding specific claims of human rights violations would clearly be unacceptable.

However, this is a newswire article, not a centre-column feature (AFAIK - if this is wrong, please show this), and there is a place to add comments.

There are at least three different questions here: are the stated facts correct? Does the selection of facts leave out facts that should have been included in order to be more balanced? Should the article be uniquely a list of facts or is it acceptable to include a sentence recommending action?

Firstly, AFAIK, the claims of systematic human rights violations by the Nepalese government are credible (certainly Amnesty International reports agree with these). And i don't see any particular reason not to believe the claims of advances in education, clean drinking water, women's rights, and land reform. Overtly communist parties (though not Maoist) in Kerala and West Bengal have been elected (and often reelected) to government in state elections and nobody seems to dispute the high literacy in Kerala nor the success of land reform in West Bengal. Moreover, there have not been any massacres by either of these parties in government. AFAIK, the communist party in West Bengal is fairly authoritarian, but the danger is that of not getting a promotion etc, not of being assassinated. The situations in these two states do not constitute not evidence that the statement regarding the nepalese maoists' claimed accomplishments is correct, but it does put the statement in the category of something which could well be true, pending further information.

Secondly, however, there are clearly missing facts: the Amnesty reports also show systematic human rights violations by the Maoists.

Thirdly, whether or not calls for action should be included in an article is something that varies among different local indymedia collectives. Many people active in indymedia wish more than simply to be informed, they wish to oppose human rights violations (including the violations of the right to eat, the right to have a job, the right to have housing, the right to have a family, etc.), not just sit in front of a scomputer screen. Traditional newspapers and media often do call for action, though often subtly, e.g. they say that "we" should do this or that, or that "we, the X-an people" (where X is a nation-state) should do this or that. But should an independent medium use the same tactics? Should an independent medium avoid all suggestions for action? Or is it more honest to have overt calls for action rather than covert ones? There is probably no clear consensus on this among different indymedias - the local circumstances and history and people dynamics are different in each case, but there is generally an idea that in the role of indymedia, people should stick to the role of journalism; if they wish to get into the action, they should not claim this to be an indymedia action. In practice, the variety of people involved generally provides pressure to stick to this, since generally there simply would not be consensus on what actions are justified.

Moreover, given that most readers are capable of telling the difference between statements of supposed facts and calls for action, and that other readers are likely to add corrections either to the facts or to the calls for action, this is probably a moot point: readers synthesise for themselves.


Can you in good conscience continue to support this? You claim to be in favor of peace and love, but...

If you look at e.g.

you can see my personal attempts to support concrete attempts in building anti-authoritarian communication structures for people living in Nepal, and if you look more generally at:

you'll see the concerns others had about whether the maoists are involved and whether or not reports can come directly from people living in maoist areas, despite the danger they would put themselves in.

So yes: i support attempts to develop grassroots communication indymedia style and i'm in favour of peace and love. And yes: i am aware that the nepalese maoists, who claim to be developing a society which encourages education and women's rights and overcomes caste barriers, but systematically use violence and associate themselves with a person (Mao Tse Tung) who was associated with large-scale massacres, spam many local indymedia newswires with reports.

How do i reconcile these? i have spent some (not a huge amount, but a little) effort in trying to support people wanting to develop a local indymedia collective in Nepal. Some people do have internet access there, but not all, and given the poverty and lack of literacy, those people in Nepal who are most disadvantaged most certainly have much poorer internet access than a small elite. All the same, illiteracy is a surmountable problem: audio and video are highly accessible to people who are illiterate, provided they have the financial and technological resources.

So how about a positive proposal: Imagine that the wikipedia contributors convinced the Wikimedia Foundation to support a nepal-wikimedia project - without being associated with indymedia, but with similar principles to what indymedia claims to want for any local group (http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/NewImcHowTo). The project would aim to:

  • finance 1000 permanent broadband access connections to 1000 villages and city locations around Nepal, with a public access internet place with at least 3-4 GNU/Linux machines
  • make sure that these 1000 locations are distributed among government controlled areas, maoist controlled areas, and places which are independent from both
  • ensure some process so that people going to these internet places are secure and can contribute anonymously but with "nicknames" (nicks) - how to do this process is not obvious: unless the locals want it and believe it to be secure, it would not work
  • ensure that there are meta-processes, e.g. via wiki pages, so that people from the 1000 places can constructively communicate together, avoid sterile edit wars, etc.
  • ensure that these places do not end up being dominated by an elite - surely poor people should have the same human rights (e.g. to not be killed) as rich people
    • for example, sociocological barriers in favour of the brahmin caste would have to be overcome so that people labelled as being in this caste would not be able to prevent others from using these internet places

This is clearly beyond what i can do personally - and it's a plan missing many real factors in human relations - but if wikipedia contributors want to have independent reporting from Nepal, it seems to me that something like this would be much more constructive than trying to make some sort of filter to remove maoist articles from all local indymedia newswires.


bugzilla scratchpad

i wanted to add this to http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95 but it requires a login via mail which i haven't got working yet. So for the moment it's just a paste of the text so as not to lose it. Boud 15:41, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC) 

> Dat> Date: 2004-06-09 04:28
> Sender: SF user hashar
> 
> This is hardcoded site wide. I don't think a template should
> be used that much.

IMHO there is a major weakness - an inconsistency - in wikipedia at the moment,
which is that in the many, many excellent articles regarding mathematics,
physics etc, there are very rarely any links to '''software''' which is free
under the GPL or other free (as in speech) licences. It's a bit like a democracy
where every political party is itself internally a dictatorship. Well, maybe
that's a poor analogy. In any case, i've got started on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system

and i haven't thought up of any more elegant method than templates. (i'm not
totally happy with the template either - something like a GNU or Penguin would
be nice, but not really fair since not all free software is, strictly speaking,
GNU or Linux, even if the authors would probably not mind being associated.
Anyone with a better idea please propose it or try it). 

Anyway, since there are more than five free (as in speech) software packages in
the list, the template fails for the sixth and further.

IMHO the limit should be increased, surely 20 or even 30 is probably OK. 

Hmmm. A short term solution would be to put the Free software template as a
header and regroup the packages.e: 2004-06-09 04:28
> Sender: SF user hashar
> 
> This is hardcoded site wide. I don't think a template should
> be used that much.

IMHO there is a major weakness - an inconsistency - in wikipedia at the moment,
which is that in the many, many excellent articles regarding mathematics,
physics etc, there are very rarely any links to '''software''' which is free
under the GPL or other free (as in speech) licences. It's a bit like a democracy
where every political party is itself internally a dictatorship. Well, maybe
that's a poor analogy. In any case, i've got started on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_algebra_system

and i haven't thought up of any more elegant method than templates. (i'm not
totally happy with the template either - something like a GNU or Penguin would
be nice, but not really fair since not all free software is, strictly speaking,
GNU or Linux, even if the authors would probably not mind being associated.
Anyone with a better idea please propose it or try it). 

Anyway, since there are more than five free (as in speech) software packages in
the list, the template fails for the sixth and further.

IMHO the limit should be increased, surely 20 or even 30 is probably OK. 

Hmmm. A short term solution would be to put the Free software template as a
header and regroup the packages.
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