Words are weapons for Iranian bloggers

United Press International (excerpts):

Iran is already under attack. The opposition is at work both within and beyond its borders, restless, coordinating and sharing intelligence.

Its ranks number in the tens of thousands, most of whom are young and savvy with experience in clandestine activity. Their arsenal, however, includes neither guns nor grenades, but keyboards and flat-screen monitors.

In a country where free speech has price, Iranian bloggers are having a bonanza - and the hardliners have begun to take notice.

The blogging phenomenon has exploded in the Islamic Republic. Today an estimated 75,000 Iranians maintain online Web logs, or "blogs," for short, that engage in a brisk virtual dialogue despite an Orwellian government that has a monopoly on public news media. They are an ever-enlarging faction of the 5 million Internet users in Iran, who have taken the protest for greater social freedom from streets and newsstands to cyberspace. ...

At one level, the anonymity blogs provide has opened a conduit of free expression for legions of increasingly disaffected youth, long deprived access to music, fashion and other spoils of Western pop culture.

"Individuality, self-expression, tolerance are new values which are quite obvious through a quick study of the content of Persian Web logs," said Hossein Derakhshan, a Canadian-based Iranian journalist, in an interview with the BBC.

"The underground lives that Iranian youth have these days. Things like girlfriends, boyfriends, the music they listen to, the films they see."

A random survey of blogs showed that taboo topics, ranging from Valentine's Day celebrations to the assets of actress Angelina Jolie, are discussed in passionate detail.

This variety is itself a significant development in a closed society like Iran, where women are forbidden to expose their hair, let alone air their grievances against the ruling powers.

More notably, blogging has filled the media vacuum created by the forced closure of independent news outlets -- including 110 dailies and periodicals since April 2000 -- and breathed life into an ailing reform movement that has lost faith in President Mohammad Khatami's campaign promises to liberalize the country. ...

Some observers say the gathering revolution will be blogged, not televised, in the country Reporters Without Borders, which advocates for press freedom, has called "the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East." ...

And yet blogs have become the great equalizer in places like Iran, offering average citizens and upstart journalists the capacity to receive and make news in real time. ...

Additionally, many intellectuals and government officials now rely on blogs to employ a higher degree of nuance and expertise in their political commentaries. They include Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the former vice president of Iran turned parliamentarian, who has started his own Web log, neveshteha.com. ...

At a recent U.N. summit, Khatami himself bragged that Iran's official language, Farsi, stands as the third most popular blogging tongue in the world -- a remarkable statistic considering there are but 75 million native speakers, compared with 1.2 billion Chinese and 400 million Spanish speakers.

Once Derakhshan, the de facto father of Iranian blogging, devised a how-to-blog guide in Farsi that kicked open the door, blogs enabled Iranians to voice their opinions without fear of abuse by state-backed thugs. For the most part, critics of the regime could safely gauge the views of fellow citizens on key reform issues and mobilize collective support for opposition events and protests.

"Web logs are much used at times of crisis (in Iran), such as during the June 2003 student demonstrations, when they were the main source of news about the protests and helped students to rally and organize," according to Reporters Without Borders. ...

Unfortunately, bloggers are no longer out of reach.

The sudden arrest of online journalist Sina Motallebi in 2003 confirmed the mullahs have wised up. Motallebi, the first blogger ever imprisoned by a government, was charged with "undermining national security through artistic activity."

A petition circulated around an international network of bloggers attracted enough media coverage to bring about his release 23 days later. ...

Tehran has harshly cracked down on the online press as of late. Nearly 20 people have been arrested over the past three months, and two Web journalists, Arash Sigarchi and Mojtaba Saminejad, remain in prison.

In January, Iran's prosecutor-general ordered that a number of major reformist Web logs be blocked by Internet service providers. Dozens of others have been banned, and Web journalists continue to be harassed, illegally held in solitary confinement and even tortured for offenses the government deems "un-Islamic." ...