By Tomas Mournian

The Internet’s early growth years may have done more to foster a sense of worldwide LGBT community than anything that had ever come before it. For those who could access it, the Internet was a free speech paradise. Unfortunately, that’s quickly changing. Queer bloggers are now being monitored and persecuted in countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Egypt.

Until 2006, the Internet was a lifeline that allowed many LGBT people living in oppressive regimes to contact the larger LGBT community. Recently, however, many of these countries have begun systematically blocking LGBT sites and censoring bloggers. The Open Net Initiative (ONI) is a blog devoted “to investigating, exposing and analyzing Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and nonpartisan fashion.”

ONI's blog explains how filtering and surveillance are done with techniques such as IP blocking, DNS tampering, URL and keyword blocking, dynamic content analysis, and search result censoring. They also intimidate web hosts into removing offending pages and compel bloggers to engage in “induced self-censorship.”

Iranian Internet access has increased more than any other Middle Eastern Country — an estimated 2,900 percent increase between 2000 and 2006. An estimated 7.6 million people are now online and there are approximately 400,000 Farsi blogs. If 10% of the population is LGBT, that equals 40,000 Iranian LGBT blogs. But you'll never read them. Why? Because the Iranian government won't let you.

On November 26, 2006, the Iranian government passed the Cyber Crimes Bill. ISPs became criminally liable for content and subject to prohibitions on twenty types of activities, including homosexuality.

Despite Iran's censorship, the London human rights group, OutRage!, blogs about Iran's LGBT human rights abuses and specifically about how gay and bisexual men are commonly framed for rape or kidnapping. OutRage! details lynchings by Iran's security forces, “honor killings” by families in the South Western province of Khuzestan, secret hangings in prisons, and entrapment using bogus foreign websites as honeypots.

Until two years ago, the National Gay Organization (NGO) for an Open Arab Internet reported that Internet access was widely available in the United Arab Emirates. Etisalat, the country's only Internet service provider, reported in July 2007 that sixty percent of the country's population was online. Soon after, a proxy server started blocking material deemed “inconsistent with religious, cultural, political and moral values of the country, including gay and lesbian sites.” Saudi Arabia also blocks LGBT Internet content. ONI confirmed reports by Reporters Without Borders that Gay.com, Gaydar and the Gay and Lesbian Arabic Society had all been blocked.

When a country's internal Internet access is blocked, international bloggers in other countries will sometimes take up their cause. On March 10, 2008, Louise Ashworth detailed the plight of Gareth Henry, a leading Jamaican LGBT activist who fled to Canada for political asylum. Since 2004, Ashworth reported that Henry had witnessed the murders of thirteen LGBT friends.

LGBT people have suffered particularly intense persecution since the 2003, US-led coalition invaded Iraq. Ali Hili, a U.K. based Iraqi ex-patriot and founder of the human rights group Iraqi LGBT, blogs about LBGT abuses in Iraq. He posts gruesome photos of LGBT citizens who've been murdered execution-style on the order of an October 2005 fatwa (a religious decree) issued by Iraq's leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. It explicitly forbids homosexuality and calls for LGBT citizens to be "punished. In fact, killed."

“Since then,” Hilis blogs, “LGBT people have been specifically targeted by the Madhi Army (the militia headed by fundamentalist Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr) as well as by the Badr organization. Badr is the military arm of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the leading political forces in Baghdad's western-backed ruling coalition.”

Hili had succeeded in opening five separate safehouses to protect LGBT citizens, but unfortunately three of them were recently shut down due to a lack of funding. “The world has let us down so badly,” wrote Sabah, a 29-year-old Iraqi lesbian. Until recently, she ran a safe house in Southern Iraq. On his blog, Hili asks, “Are gay people in the United States, Britain, and Australia aware of what their governments have done to our country? Their armies invaded, destroyed the infrastructure, and created the chaos and lawlessness that has allowed religious fundamentalism to flourish.”

Two U.S. legislators have demanded that the State Department act. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.), two openly gay lawmakers, sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June demanding that she investigate the attacks on Iraqi gays and pressure Maliki to respond. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) has sponsored legislation that would prioritize gay Iraqi refugees in an expanded Iraqi refugee program.

The situation is only getting worse as opportunistic, fundamentalist regimes move into strife-ridden areas and prey on the vulnerability of their frustrated citizens. Thankfully, an increasing number of world bloggers are calling attention to these horrific human rights violations. It’s much easier for evil to flourish in secret, so by raising our international voices to a roar we can perhaps spur our lawmakers into action. If you’d like to do more, make donations to charities that provide money for safehouses or write letters to your state representative.

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