The latest round of demonstrations in Diraz began on 20 June when Bahrain’s government stripped the country’s highest ranking Shia cleric and Dirza resident, Sheikh Isa Qassim, of his citizenship.
Bahraini
authorities quickly set up checkpoints around the village, refusing
entry to those attempting to enter. The heavy police presence in Diraz
also comes amid a wider crackdown that has seen human rights defenders
jailed and al-Wefaq, the largest Shia opposition group in Bahrain,
banned.
Within three days of Qassim's citizenship being revoked, Dirazis
began reporting that internet and mobile phone services in their
village were “slow, usually unusable” at night. Customers of the three
main internet firms in Diraz – Batelco, Zain and Viva – all reported
significantly slowed or nonexistent connections since 23 June.
Ali, a student who lives in the village centre, told Middle East Eye: “Every
night, we face internet disruptions and disconnections. First the whole
signal is disconnected for a few seconds, then the signal is back but
there is not cellular data, no 3G, no 4G.
"My
service provider is Batelco, there isn’t 3G. My home Wifi is provided
by Zain, it has the exact same problem. In fact, it’s worse. It takes
longer to come back [after it’s disconnected].”
Ali
said internet “comes back for less than a minute every two or three
hours," but that phone calls work normally “with slight disruptions”.
But the vast majority of communication in Bahrain – including phone
calls and messaging – is done via applications that use data.
Ali said the
internet and cell data services are cut at 7.30pm every night as people
begin to gather for prayers and Iftar outside Qassim’s home, then
returns after morning prayer at about 3am when protesters begin to
disperse.
More than a dozen
other residents reported similar service disruptions on Batelco, Zain,
and Viva, despite no visible change in the cell towers in Diraz. All
said everyone they knew in Diraz had been unable to use the internet
properly since 23 June.
Many in the village think their internet
has been slowed to prevent them from posting pictures and videos of the
ongoing demonstrations, which outsiders are no longer allowed to attend.
Activists' posts on Twitter have slowed to a crawl; the
hashtags “Diraz”, “Duraz” and “al-Diraz” in Arabic, which for five
years have been critical to monitoring and documenting violations by
security forces during protests, have been largely absent of content
posted locally.
Instead,
the hashtags have been dominated by accounts pushing out random,
anti-Shia and sectarian commentary and videos – usually the same three
videos. The content rarely has any direct connection to Diraz.
Attack of the 'bots'?
Marc
Owen Jones, a fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Tuebingen
University in Germany and member of the advocacy group Bahrain Watch,
said that many of the accounts flooding the Diraz hashtags with hate
speech were probably automated Twitter "bots".
In a report published last month
,
Jones found that apparently automated accounts tweeted thousands of
sectarian comments per day on the #Bahrain hashtag. As recently as 23
June, more than half of the tweets on the #Bahrain hashtag came from
automated accounts.
Jones
confirmed the #Diraz hashtag activity was different than previous
disruptions. "Today [July 2] 84 percent of tweets with the Diraz hashtag
are probably from automated bots tweeting sectarianism. That's about
7,400 out of 8,900 tweets.”
Translation: Video of the Safavid terrorists #Bahrain #Scholar #Leader #Ayatollah_Qasim #Diraz #Bahrain #Shut_down_of_al-Wefaq_group
The
apparent bot accounts began tweeting the Diraz hashtag one day after
Qassim’s citizenship was stripped and less than 24 hours after thousands
of Bahrainis gathered in Diraz to support him.
After two weeks of
being largely unable to report what's happening inside Diraz, villagers
said the connectivity shortages are an attempt to limit protests.
Ali
said: “The main two goals are to stop our news getting out, and our
pictures showing the amount of people still gathered. It’s also a
collective punishment, to limit participation in the protests.”
'Worse than the Chinese firewall'
Rob
Frieden, a professor of telecommunications and law at Penn State
University, said that the Bahraini government should be wary of what he
called a “sledgehammer to kill a flea” approach to censorship.
“What
these people are describing – targeting this village and weakening
their internet – is called throttling. It’s dangerous because it doesn't
just affect communicating about protests, but also about health,
commerce and emergencies. It’s a very poorly calibrated response and
punishment of that community.”
Bahrainis in other villages told
Middle East Eye that the lack of connectivity inside Diraz had affecting
their ability to communicate with relatives. One man living in
Janabiyah explained, “I moved away but my grandfather is in Diraz. I
can’t get in, he can’t get out, and now he can’t call.”
It’s also
affecting students’ ability to complete homework assignments, and
business owners who use the Internet to manage operations. One shop in
Diraz
posted a
sign on its window that read: "An announcement to our valued customers:
We do not have the card payment service in the evenings because there
is no network."
Such acts by government are not unprecedented. In January 2011, Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government shut down internet connections as calls for protests mounted on social media networks.
Later that year, public transport authorities in San Francisco, California shut down mobile-internet and phone services ahead of a planned demonstration to protest against the killing of a black man.
However,
Frieden said Bahrain’s apparent multi-week attack on communications in
Diraz, coupled with the physical barriers restricting access to the
village, was rare.
“In
some ways, it’s worse than the Chinese firewall, which uses filtering
to prevent access to and from specific websites. What Bahrain could
easily have done is to prevent access to Twitter or Facebook sites – as
opposed to throttling of connectivity.”
Nevertheless, activists inside Diraz, such as Ali, are persisting in their attempts to contact the wider world.
In
a text message received at 9.30am Bahrain time, Ali wrote: “I would
like to note that these answers were sent at 8.37am. But due to the data
disconnections it wasn’t delivered.”
Neither Zain, Batelco, Viva nor the Ministry of Interior has returned requests for comment.
