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| Senafe, Eritrea (2003) Photo by backwards7 |
Following ugly scenes of
online carnage, which saw ordinarily-innocuous capital letters
sharpened into improvised weapons capable of inflicting actual
physical harm, the United Nations has vowed to step up its protection
for a group of women who have been identified by self-styled experts
as among the most vulnerable in world.
In a powerful testimonial
given to the UN assembly earlier this week, the persecuted women,
most of whom are well-heeled, white Americans, unburdened themselves
before a rapt audience who were largely absorbed by the contents of
their mobile phones.
During the hour-long
presentation the victims of oppression described how they had borne
the brunt of a tsunami of cyberviolence so serious that it was on a par
with the most grievous acts of physical violence. This included
so-called “peer-to-peer groping” (attempts by other internet
users to engage them in debate) and “comment rape” (open
disagreement with their opinions) via social media.
Summing up the event, one
of the speakers told the assembled world press:
“When harassers
willfully deploy rational arguments that effectively demolish the
lazily-assembled, self-serving hotch-potch of barely-formed ideas that
comprise our collective mindset, they are literally engaging in an
attempt to erase our voices from the internet. For too long the
actions of these shitlord apostates have been tacitly sanctioned by
those in charge of our online spaces.
“As one of a small band
of women recognised by the UN as being among the most oppressed of my
gender, I insist that we are granted moderator powers over the
internet as a whole. In line with the current female incarnation of
the Marvel superhero, Thor, we demand literal IP ban
hammers that will allow us to to tackle cyberviolence quickly, and
without recourse to established checks and balances.”
The address before the UN
came a day before fresh skirmishes (described by one of the victims
as “a literal one-sided rape war”) erupted on Twitter between the UN
delegation and their supporters, and an Eritrean women who writes a
blog and posts on Twitter under the name - Senafe_Fighter.
In a post highly critical
of the UN and its priorities in regard to ensuring the safety of
women worldwide, Senafe_Fighter wrote:
“I lived the first 21
years of my life under Ethiopian occupation. When I was 11 years old,
soldiers loyal to the Mengistu regime came to the cafe that was owned
by my parents. They took away my father and my uncle. Years later we
learned that they had been executed for aiding the resistance
movement. They were strangled to save bullets.
“When I was 13 I joined
the EPLF (the Eritrean People's Liberation Front). I fought at Nakfa.
My sister, who was also a fighter, lost her leg to a landmine. My
younger sister and two brothers were killed in the fighting. I do
not know what happened to my third brother. My first husband was captured and executed by Ethiopian forces.
“After independence I
settled in Senafe. In 2000 the town was attacked by soldiers from
across the border. They destroyed every building. Because of a
shortage of construction materials, three years later, we are still
forced to live in tents. I was raped repeatedly in front of my
husband. The injuries that I sustained during this prolonged attack
required hospital treatment and have left me with long-term health
problems.*
“These over-privileged
American women have elbowed their way to the front of a global debate
and demanded that their voices be heard over and above the voices of
the genuinely oppressed. By equating any verbal disagreement with their
opinions with the most extreme manifestations of physical violence
they have trivialised the very real violence that is inflicted upon women in my
home country and which manifests itself in many different forms.
These women have
never looked on helplessly as the blood pours from the mangled leg of a
loved one, while field surgeons frantically attempt to cauterise the
wound. They have never watched a man, his expression glazed-over in
abject horror as if he has absorbed the collective atrocities of a
thirty year war, vomit a viscous tide of red saliva, while with
trembling hands, he instinctively attempts to gather the pieces of
his lower jaw from between the stones at his feet that are slick with
his blood. They have not seen the plains of their home nations strewn with the bleached bones of their kin and the rusting shells of tanks -
the antiquated hand-me-down downs from decades-old western wars.
These dreadful women who
are driven by material gain and a grotesquely proportioned sense of self-entitlement,
are vile and disgusting human beings, who are either unwilling or unable to
contemplate the experiences of their gender beyond the limited context of
their own intellectually repressed, morally bankrupt social circles.”
The incendiary post has drawn outrage
among online social justice communities and has seen its author bombarded with hate mail and death threats:
“A wild troll
appears...” remarked one commentator in a widely shared tweet, which
shared a link to Senafe_Fighter's blog.
“Ugh... so distressing,
your internalised misogyny,” said another.
An internet user named
'Sister_I'm_a_Progressive131' posted an image of Star
Trek's Captain Kirk, evidently in the throes
of alien mind control, captioned “Must... resist... urge... to...
feed... troll.”
Another wrote:
“Don't tone police –
You life (sic) in
africa and have no idea what's its like in San Francisco.”
Some, emboldened by the
UN's tough new stance against the perpetrators of cyberviolence, took
a more proactive approach towards their tormentor. Among these was
Doxed_Frodo who wrote:
“Have acquired SF's real
name. Have just direct messaged that if they don't delete their blog
and apologise, I will post details.”
A minute later the same
Twitter user posted a second tweet publishing the real name of
Senafe_Fighter and her approximate location, before adding in a
subsequent tweet:
“Not doxing. Sharing
information about a known harasser.”
Others have also joined
the campaign to bring Senafe_Fighter to justice:
Another commented:
“She says in her blog that she's a shepherd. Does anybody have contact details for the Head Shepherd in Senafe?”
A brief statement issued
to the press by the UN said that the organisation was aware of the
offending blog post and would be meeting to discuss an appropriate response.
At the time of going to
press Senafe_Fighter was unavailable for comment. A neighbour, who
asked not to be identified, told MODE 5 that, following publication
of the blogger's name online, government soldiers had entered her
home and she had later been witnessed being led away to a nearby
truck. This was subsequently observed being driven out of the town in the direction of Adi Keih,
and leaving the main road shortly after.
The eye-witness added:
“We found the remains of
the smart phone that she used to make blog posts on our nation's
snail-paced excuse for an internet, which is slower than conventional
mail. We do not know where the soldiers took her. There are many
unofficial prisons in this country. People here disappear all the
time.”
* Although
this is intended as a work of satirical fiction the experiences
touched upon in these paragraphs and those that follow were relayed to
me by male and female Eritreans who had either experienced these
things directly, or had witnessed them happening to others.
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