For many people, and the same number of bloggers the world over, Omid Reza Mirsyafi is an innocuous name, one that would stand out save for maybe on a queue when entering the United States. But Omid Reza is the first blogger to die in prison for blogging. I dare say though am not very sure that when he started blogging, Omid did not set out to change the world, but to get an outlet to share his thoughts with the world.
Slowly he indeed changed the Iranian society, in his small way, by saying what was hitherto ‘unsay-able’. He wrote about the ill os dictatorship and how this affected him, for his blog was a personal blog. With this came the iron fist of an authority that brooked no questions, offered no answers.
At CPB we have indeed reported on him, since his arrest, his imprisonment after a sham trial and his death, which saddened us. To this end, we quickly signed up to this project, a way of trying to ensure no blogger ever finds themselves in Omid’s situation, dying for speaking your mind.
We hope that this project will create awareness for those bloggers who remain languishing in jails all over the world, from China to Egypt to Canada. Prosecution of bloggers doesn’t happen only in the ‘developing world’ the so called civilized world is also complicity in this heinous act. It is not something that happens to ‘them’ if unchecked we will all soon be living under one form dictatorship or the other.
With this project, The March 18 Movement we hope that everybody will become aware of the perils bloggers face as they blog and galvanize that awareness into action so that what happened on March 18th 2009 never happens again.