Democratic nations can be brutal too
In the hounding of Julian Assange, the spirit of dissent is the biggest casualty.
The media fraternity should rally strongly behind this messenger of truth, says SHIVNARAYAN RAJPUROHIT.
This is the fairy tale of a hacker who came close to winning the Nobel Prize and Time Person of the Year award. He has ignited the fire, long simmering, of taking up cudgels against oppressors who are high and mighty.
Fearlessly, he unmasked the US and its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan by publishing scores of secretive cables on Wikileaks. He spared no country for its double-speak in diplomacy. That messenger is Julian Assange who is now highly disenchanted with the so-called “guardians of freedom of expression”.
Assange's speech from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been in limbo for a while, was a grim reminder of muzzling dissent. His speech was a watershed moment for all democratic countries on how a messenger’s wings can be clipped. He called on the US to stop its “witch-hunt” against him. Assange is still in the embassy surrounded by police who are waiting to arrest him.
Earlier, the apex court of the United Kingdom ruled in favour of his extradition to Sweden where he is to be questioned in relation to a rape and sexual harassment case, seemingly a trumped-up charge. He was aware if extradited to Sweden, Washington would arm-twist it to despatch him to the US under various bilateral treaties.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa came to his rescue and granted him asylum as, according to him, Assange was a victim of “political persecution”. The irony for much of the Western world is that President Correa was the man who became Assange’s saviour. The self-proclaimed guardian of freedom of expression has a very different record on press freedom in his own country, as the Guardian describes. Correa’s own anti-American stand may have also fuelled his decision to support Assange.
Threat
In this David and Goliath fight, dissent has been the biggest casualty. This casualty has been inflicted by the West, which takes moral high ground for democratic values. The First Amendment of the US has been undermined, given its overt and covert pursuit of Julian Assange on charges of espionage.
Julian Assange knows very well that Bradley Manning, a US military analyst, who leaked the military files to Wikileaks, has spent more than 500 days in jail without being convicted. He is being tried under espionage charges.
Now the question is whether the Wikileaks expose can be conflated with espionage. The US thinks so. If Bradley Manning is convicted it will set a dangerous precedent for all journalists who are committed to revealing human rights violation and war crimes by accessing official documents.
In the same vein, the Watergate scandal which forced United States President Richard Nixon to resign, thanks to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, must be treated on par with Wikileaks, because The Washington Post journalists also accessed classified documents.
The media fraternity should rally behind Julian Assange--a ferocious and high-spirited messenger—so that no other country should think of charging a journalist under flimsy grounds when it is in a state of discomfiture.
The US and its allies have shown that human rights violation is not the prerogative of African, Latin American and Asian dictators. Democratic countries too can be as brutal.
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