The Amateur
Computerist
Fall 2012 Netizen Journalism and International Relations Volume 22 No. 2
Table of Contents
Netizen Journalism and International Relations. . . . . . .
Page 1
Netizens Expose Media Fabrications and Distortions. . Page 2
UN, China and Journalism in the Era of the Netizen . . . Page 6
Korea and the Era of the Netizen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 12
Netizen Journalism in the Media War at the UN. . . . . Page 17
UN Role in Korea 1947-1953: Is it Being Repeated? . Page 32
Netizen Journalism and
International Relations
This issue of the Amateur Computerist brings
together some of the papers and presentations about
the emergence and development of the netizen and
netizen journalism that were presented by Ronda
Hauben and Jay Hauben on a trip to China and South
Korea in the summer of 2012.
The impetus for the trip was a request by their
colleague Yunlong that they present a panel about the
UN and international relations at the 2012 Annual
Conference on International Relations and Political
Science held every year in Beijing in July.
The panel they proposed, which was accepted for
the conference, was titled, “The UN is a Dilemma.”
One of the papers for this panel “The Role of Netizen
Journalism in the Media War at the United Nations”
is included in this issue as is the talk “The UN Role in
Korea 1947-1953: Is it Being Repeated Today?”
Once they were in Beijing for the conference,
Ronda and Jay received invitations from several other
organizations to give presentations about Netizens
and the Internet and its impact on China. These
invitations included one from a research institute at
the Chinese Academy of Science, another from a
research institute at the Chinese Academy of Social
Science, and an invitation to give a presentation about
netizen journalism at a cultural event sponsored by
media group April Media.
The articles in this issue, “China and Syria:
Netizens Expose Media Fabrications and Distortions”
and “The United Nations, China and Journalism in the
Era of the Netizen” are versions of the talks given at
the cultural event sponsored by April Media on the
last day of the visit to Beijing. These talks were
followed by a lively question and answer and discus-
sion period.
From China, Ronda and Jay went to South
Korea. There they were invited to give a presentation
on “Korea and the Era of the Netizen” at the Hope
Institute, an NGO in Seoul. At the end of the presen-
tation, the hosts surprised them with a birthday cake
with 15 candles to celebrate the 15
th
anniversary of
the print edition of the book Netizens: On the History
and Impact of Usenet and the Internet.
The many invitations to speak about netizens and
netizen journalism and the enthusiastic responses to
the talks in Beijing and Seoul demonstrated the
interest in the development of a consciousness about
the important impact that netizens are having in
Northeast Asia. The concept of netizen as it was
originally conceived of in 1993 by Michael Hauben
has continued to spread both online and offline
around the world. This is indeed a tribute to the
recognition by Michael that the Internet is not just a
technology but, as importantly, it gives raise to the
emergence and empowerment of the netizen and to
the better world the Net and Netizen will make
possible.
Webpage: http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/
Page 1
[Editor’s Note: The year 2012 marks the 15
th
Anni-
versary of the publication of the English and Japanese
print editions of the book Netizens: On the History
and Impact of Usenet and the Internet by Michael
Hauben and Ronda Hauben. To help celebrate this
anniversary Ronda and Jay Hauben participated in a
salon on July 22 in Beijing which launched the April
Salon. What follows is the presentation by Jay and an
edited excerpt from the presentation made by Ronda.]
China and Syria: Netizens
Expose Media Fabrications
and Distortions*
by Jay Hauben
My story is about netizen activity in China. But
to be sure there is netizen activity in virtually every
society. I will add an epilogue about the Syrian crisis.
Netizen activity takes many forms. Anti-CNN and my
epilogue about Syria are examples of netizens as
watchdogs over the mainstream and online media.
Anti-CNN is also an example of the value of discus-
sion forums.
Netizen as a vision of something new emerging
and as a concept of scholarly interest was first ana-
lyzed in the research of Michael Hauben at Columbia
University starting in 1992. Michael Hauben wrote
that he became aware of “a new social institution, an
electronic commons developing.”
1
He found social
and political issues being discussed with seriousness
in this online community which the conventional
media and his school courses rarely if ever covered or
covered only from a narrow angle.
Hauben found that there were people online who
actively use and take up to defend public communica-
tion. They support open communication and oppose
disruptive online behavior. He recognized this as a
form of network citizenship. At the time, a net user
who defended the net was often referred to as a
‘net.citizen’. Hauben contracted net.citizen into
‘netizen’ to express something new. It is an online,
non-geographically based, social identity and net
citizenship. He wrote, “My research demonstrated
that there were people active as members of the
network, which the words net citizen did not precisely
represent. The word citizen suggests a geographic or
national definition of social membership. The word
Netizen reflects the new non-geographically based
social membership.…”
2
The online self-identity and practice of netizen-
ship spread around the world. Two uses of the word
netizen emerged. To be clear, not all net users are
netizens. In 1995 Michael Hauben wrote: “Netizens
are not just anyone who comes online. Netizens are
especially not people who come online for individual
gain or profit. They are not people who come to the
Net thinking it is a service. Rather they are people
who understand it takes effort and action on each and
everyone’s part to make the Net a regenerative and
vibrant community and resource. Netizens are people
who decide to devote time and effort into making the
Net, this new part of our world, a better place.”
3
It is necessary to distinguish between all net
users and those users who participate constructively
concerning social and political issues in forums and
chat rooms or on their blogs and microblogs. This
second category of net users comes online for public
rather than simply for personal and entertainment
purposes. They act as citizens of the net and are the
users I feel deserve the name netizen.
My usage is that of Michael and similar to that of
Haiqing Yu who writes, “I use ‘netizen’ in a narrow
sense to mean ‘Net plus citizen’ or ‘citizen on the
Net.’ Netizens are those who use the Internet as a
venue for exercising citizenship through rational
public debates on social and political issues of com-
mon concern.”
4
I add, also, that netizens are not only
‘citizens on the net’ but also ‘citizens of the net’
signifying those who actively contribute to the devel-
opment and defense of the net as a global communi-
cations platform.
With this concept of netizen, I want to argue that
anti-CNN was a netizen activity and prototype of the
watchdog function that netizens are beginning to play
in China and around the world.
On March 14, 2008, Tibetan demonstrators in
Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in
China, turned violent. A Canadian tourist and the one
or two foreign journalists who witnessed the situation
put online photos, videos and descriptions document-
ing the ethnically targeted violence of the rioters
against citizens and property.
5
That was even before
the Chinese media started to report it. The Chinese
media framed the story as violence against Han
Chinese and Muslim Chinese fomented by the Ti-
betan government in exile. Much of the mainstream
international media like BBC, VOA, and CNN
Page 2
Figure 1 Annotated screenshot of the German Channel N24.
framed the violence as the result of discriminatory
Chinese rule and Chinese police brutality.
Wide anger was expressed by many Chinese
aboard when they discovered that some of the media
in the U.S., Germany, France, and the U.K., were
using photos and videos from clashes between police
and pro-Tibetan independence protestors not in China
but in Nepal and India to support that media’s claim
of violence by Chinese police. One poster wrote,
“Xizang terrorists raided Lhasa (Lhasa), they killed
more than 10 innocent people and destroyed others’
properties. But Western media called such a terror a
‘peaceful’ protest. Ridiculous, isn’t it? Many Western
media simply say: People died in the protest. This
implicitly tells their audience or readers that Chinese
government killed protests. Do they dare mention
who died? who attacked whom? and who killed
whom? Amazing, isn’t it? Other than that, they
distorted the facts by using pictures from violence in
other countries and commented as what happened in
China.” The poster followed his post with links to 15
examples of distortions.
6
A digital slide show was put online which con-
t a i n e d a n a r r a t e d p r e s e n t a t i o n
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQnK5FcKas
&feature=related)
7
of 11 mislabeled photos inappro-
priate for the articles with which they appeared. It
spread widely in cyberspace in and outside China.
The slide show contains some of the photos that were
put online to show the distortions and false narrative
of many international mainstream media. Very
crudely, the major media used photos from elsewhere
to support their false story of Chinese police brutality
in Lhasa in March 2008.
Within a few days of the appearance of the
inaccurate reports, Rau Jin a recent Tsinghua Univer-
sity graduate launched the anti-CNN website
being part of netizen anger and discussion, he wanted
to “speak out our thoughts and let the westerners learn
about the truth.”
8
The top page of anti-CNN featured articles,
videos and photos documenting some of the alleged
distortions in the coverage of the Lhasa events. The
website also had forum sections first in Chinese then
also in English.
The organizers set as the goal of anti-CNN to
overcome media bias in the Western media by foster-
ing communication between Chinese netizens and
netizens outside of China so that the people of the
world and of China could have accurate knowledge
about each other. They wrote on their website, “We
are not against the Western media, but against the lies
and fabricated stories in the media.”
9
Anti-CNN was
chosen as the site name, Qi Hanting, one of the
organizers said, “because CNN is the media super-
power. It can do great damage so it must be watched
and challenged when it is wrong.”
10
But the site was
not limited to countering errors in the reporting of
CNN. It invited submissions that documented bias or
misrepresentations of China in the global media.
Rau Jin quickly received from net users hundreds
of offers of help to find examples of media distor-
tions. He gathered a team of 40 volunteers to monitor
the submissions for factualness and to limit emotional
threads. Rau Jin and his group decided on some rules.
Name-calling or attacks on individuals or groups were
to be deleted. Emotional posts were not allowed to
have follow-up comments.
Forum discussions were started on the topics:
“Western Media Bias,” “The Facts of Tibet” and
“Modern China.” In the first five days the site at-
tracted 200,000 visits many from outside of China. At
its maximum, the site received millions of daily hits.
Over time, serious threads contained debates between
Han Chinese and both Westerners and Tibetan Chi-
nese and Uyghur Chinese trying to show each other
who they were and where they differ or where they
agree.
Many visitors from outside China posted on the
anti-CNN English forum. Some expressed their
criticism of Chinese government media censorship. In
the responses to such criticism, some Chinese posters
Page 3
acknowledged such censorship but argued (1) it was
easy to circumnavigate, (2) that all societies have
their systems of bias or censorship and (3) that
netizens everywhere must dare to think for them-
selves and get information from many sources. One
netizen with the alias kylin wrote, “I can say free
media works the same way as less-free media. So
what’s most important? The people I’d say — …. If
people dare to doubt, dare to think on their own, do
not take whatever comes to them, then we’ll have a
clear mind, not easily be fooled. I can say, if such
people exist, then should be Chinese… the least likely
to be brainwashed, when have suffered from all those
incidents, cultural revolution, plus a whole long
history with all kinds of tricks.”
11
Often there are expressions of nationalist emo-
tions in Chinese cyberspace, for example calls for
boycotting Japanese or French products. After the riot
in Lhasa, there was an upsurge of nationalist defense
of China including on anti-CNN. At least some
moderators on anti-CNN however were opponents of
nationalism, arguing that it is a form of emotionalism
and needs to be countered by rational discourse and
the presentation of facts and an airing of all opinions.
Moderators often answered Chinese nationalists with
admonitions to “calm down and present facts.” While
nationalist sentiment and love of country and anger
appeared often on the anti-CNN forums, the opportu-
nity for a dialogue across national and ethnic barriers
is an expression of the internationalism characteristic
of netizens.
Chinese citizens in general know that the main-
stream Chinese media have a long history as a con-
trolled and propaganda press. On the other hand, there
was a wide spread assumption among people in China
that the mainstream international media like CNN and
BBC are a more reliable source of information and
alternative viewpoints. The widespread online expo-
sure of distortions and bias in major examples of the
international mainstream media called into question
for many Chinese people their positive expectation
about Western media. The exposures also attracted
the attention of others who questioned whether the so
called Western mainstream media is any less a propa-
ganda or political media than the Chinese mainstream
media.
Over its first year, the anti-CNN website had
become a significant news portal. After a year, there
was a debate to determine its future. Some of the
founders left. The site continued with separate forum
sections in Chinese and English but became less
focused than it was before on exposing media bias.
Today, the April Media Group founded by Rau
Jin is a continuation of anti-CNN. It has Chinese and
English language websites both known as M4
(http://www.m4.cn/, http://www.4thmedia.org/).
Recently M4 had its comment section closed while
the Chinese government decided how it would deal
with a major political scandal.
For me the special significance of anti-CNN was
that it took up the important task of a media watch-
dog, but especially a watchdog over the most power-
ful media like CNN and BBC. In an article “The
Computer as a Democratizer”
12
Michael Hauben
argued for the crucial role in a society of a watchdog
press. In every society, major sectors of the media
serve the current holders of power. Now, with the
Internet, there is an emerging media and journalism
which tries to serve society by watching and criticiz-
ing the abuses of those with power. Anti-CNN pro-
vided for the whole world an alternative to the estab-
lished media which was distorting the truth about the
Lhasa riot. The net users who launched anti-CNN
took for themselves a public and international mis-
sion, using the net to watch critically the main inter-
national media. In the process there was discussion
and debate on difficult social and political questions.
They and those from China and around the world who
take up the exposures and discussion and debate are
examples for me of netizens.
I want to add a short epilogue to the story of anti-
CNN. This is about Syria.
Some time in early March 2011, protest demon-
strations in Dara’a in Southern Syria were given a
violent component. On March 17 or 18, 2011 armed
people attacked policemen in Dara’a, killing seven.
Media reports said at least four other people were
killed at that time
13
. The Syrian state media framed
the story as “armed gangs attacking security forces
and public property.” Western and Gulf satellite
media quickly framed the story that “the Syrian
government is killing its own people.”
This time there was very early a massive use of
videos and photos purporting to document the “crimes
of the Syrian government,” not only in or on the
Western and Gulf satellite media, but also on websites
and facebook and Youtube and with tweeted links. As
in the case of Tibet, many net users realized that
much of this so called documentation was suspicious.
Using online search engines, original sources were
Page 4
Figure 2 Wounds from an explosion in New York City posted
online labeled as the result of a Syrian government attack on
Syrian protestors.
Figure 3 Photo of pro-government demonstration presented as
an anti-government demonstration by adding an extra star to
the flag.
found and posted to prove that many supposed
“crimes of the Syrian government” were distortions
and fabrication. Often crimes were traced to the
armed opposition itself.
I did a brief online search using a search engine
and in microblogs and facebook on the phrase ‘Syria
Distortions.’ I found net users and groups in the U.S.,
Tunisia, Palestine, Syria and elsewhere who were able
to show that many of the videos and photos were from
many places other than Syria. At blogs like Tunisian
Quest for Truth and Uprooted Palestinians
14
and on
their related facebook pages I found exposures of
online media distortions that were very similar to
those done at the beginning of anti-CNN. These sites
also turned up as links sent out as tweets and the
photo exposures on these sites then also appeared on
many websites. The photos were found to be from the
Civil War in Lebanon, from gang murders in Mexico,
from Israeli atrocities in Palestine, rebel crimes in
Libya, but they were all labeled as Syrian government
atrocities. Some were found to be photos of mass
demonstrations in support of the Syrian government
doctored to claim these were in support of the armed
uprising.
I found an ongoing online war between the
fabricators and the exposers. The exposures often
attract a set of comments supporting the effort to have
an accurate narrative. But I have not yet found where
the exposures have been turned into discussion
forums as happened on anti-CNN.
In my short search I also found the website
Moon of Alabama.
15
On that site a detailed exposure
appeared when the U.S. Government distributed
satellite photos claiming to show military shelling of
the city of Homs. Moon of Alabama looked at Google
Maps and Google Earth satellite photos to demon-
strate for example that some of the satellite photos
were of a Syrian military training base not of shelling
of the city of Homs. Similarly the blogger argued that
each of the claims by the U.S. government about
these photos was false. The same blogger also viewed
a video purported to be a one hour live video cast
from the shelling of the city of Homs. The blogger
wrote a script to guide viewers so that the level of
fabrication was apparent.
In addition to the research bloggers who find and
expose fabrications and distortions, there is a growing
number of journalists, websites and news sources
which provided an alternative account of the crisis in
Syria and a critique of the Western and Gulf state
media narrative about Syria. Among these are the
Center for Research on Globalization, Voltairenet,
Syria360, Russia Today (RT), Prensa Latina from
Cuba, to name a few.
A serious analytic, research journalism with a
public purpose is emerging which attempts to give a
solid base so net users can arrive at an accurate
understanding of crises and situations like that in
Syria. Ronda Hauben calls such journalism ‘netizen
journalism’.
My conclusion is that the vision of netizens
becoming more and more a force in society continues
to be relevant and powerful. The net continues to
empower people toward a greater participation in
more and more aspects of their societies. As with the
anti-CNN website and with the opening of an alterna-
tive channel of information, news and analysis in the
Syria crisis, netizens are becoming a force not only in
domestic politics but also in international politics.
Page 5
Notes:
1. “Preface: What is a netizen” in Netizens: On the History and
Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Michael Hauben and Ronda
Hauben, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1997,
p. ix. Also, an earlier version is online at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.xpr.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. “From Active Audience to Media Citizenship: The Case of
post-Mao China” in Social Semiotics, Vol. 16 (2), June 2006,
page 304. Online at:
http://unsw.academia.edu/HaiqingYu/Papers/849981/From_act
ive_audience_to_media_citizenship_The_case_of_post-Mao_
China
5. See for example the blog entry by Kadfly, March 15, 2008
http://kadfly.blogspot.com/2008/03/lhasa-burning.html, (access
restrictive), the report on March 15 by Al Jezeera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfnBVKrzX6Y, and the video
posted on YouTube by cali2882 on March 15, 2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZLzKBvvGMg. There was
also a reporter for The Economist, James Miles, who was in
Lhasa and described on March 20 the riots in a CNN interview
as ‘ethnically-targeted violence’ and the Chinese police response
as gradual and cautious. See,
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-03-20/world/tibet.miles.interview
_1_tibetans-ethnic-groups-lhasa?_s=PM:WORLD
6. See for example post by FIA_cn, March 23, 2008, “Who Lie
about Xizang (Tibet) Violence and How!” at:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-130
727-p-6.html
7. “Riot in Tibet: True face of western media” posted by
dionysos615 on YouTube on March 19, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQnK5FcKas&feature=re
lated.
8. Quoted in China Daily, April 2, 2008,
http://www.chindaily.com.cn/china/2008-04/02/content_65871
20_2.htm
9. Quoted in:
http://jmsc.edublogs.org/2008/04/03/chinese-netizens-war-agai
nst-western-media/.
10. Interview with anti-cnn webmaster Qi Hanting, April 19,
2008, translated from Chinese. See Ronda Hauben, “Netizens
Defy Western Media Fictions of China”
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no
=382523&rel_no=1
11. http://www.anti-cnn/forum/en/thread-2316-1-1.html
12. Online at: http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106.x18.
13. See, May 1, 2011, The Center for Research on Globalization
in video at:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24576 and
May 3 article at:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24591.
14. Tunisians Quest for Truth
http://tunisianquestfortruth.wordpress.com/ and
Uprooted Palestinians http://uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com/.
15.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/
*This presentation was accompanied by slides which can be seen
at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/j-china2012-
april-cafe.ppt
The United Nations,
China and Journalism
in the Era of the Netizen
by Ronda Hauben
[This is an updated and edited excerpt from a talk
given in Beijing in July 2012 at the April Salon.
Please contact Ronda if you are interested in a copy of
the longer talk.*]
Introduction
I am happy to be here today and to accept Rao
Jin's invitation to make one of the first presentations
at April Café and Salon.
The title of my talk is “The United Nations,
China and Journalism in the Era of the Netizen.”
As Jay mentioned in his talk today, this year,
2012 is the 15
th
anniversary of the publication of the
English and the Japanese print editions of the book
Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and
the Internet.
To mark this occasion I wanted to try to under-
stand the significance of this anniversary with respect
to ongoing development of the Internet and the
Netizen. Coming to China this year was an impetus to
review my previous visits to China and the interesting
events I was able to take part in related to netizens
during these visits.
In 2005 when I first came to Beijing, it was
because Beijing was the host of the International
Congress on the History of Science. At the conference
I presented a paper on “The International and Scien-
tific Origins of the Internet and the Emergence of the
Netizens.” At the time there was a lot of new con-
struction going on in Beijing and the city appeared to
be new and developing. It appeared to be an appropri-
ate place to present a talk on the importance of
Internet development. With the continuing develop-
ment of the Internet the phenomenon of the netizens
was becoming more important to understand.
My second trip to Beijing was in April 2008
when I was invited to give a talk at the Internet
Page 6
Society of China. In my talk I asked the question “Is
this is a new Age, the Age of the Netizen?” Also
during this trip I was invited to give a talk on “the
Global Media and the Role of Netizens In Determin-
ing the News.” This talk was for a journalism class at
Tsinghua University. On the day the talk was sched-
uled, there was a meeting between students at
Tsinghua University and several journalists from the
International Federation of Journalists. The students
at Tsinghua University were angry about the Western
media coverage of China. They told the journalists
their complaints. The journalists seemed surprised
and found it difficult to respond. In the process I met
students who were part of the Anti-CNN web site that
was created to challenge the falsifications about
China that were then appearing in the Western press.
One of the reasons for my next trip, in September
2009 was to participate in a Netizens’ Day event
sponsored by the Internet Society of China. This
Netizens Festival Day was observed on September 14,
2009.
For this Netizen day event, a stage was set up in
front of the CCTV Tower. I was invited to present
background on the development of the Netizen. I gave
a short introduction about the discovery of the emer-
gence of the Netizens. This was presented in English
with a Chinese translation and the event is captured
on Youku.
I described how in 1992-1993, Michael Hauben
who was then a Columbia University student, sent out
a set of questions across the networks asking users
about their experiences online. He was surprised to
find that not only were many of those who responded
to his questions interested in what the Net made
possible for them, but also they were interested in
spreading the Net and in exploring how it could make
a better world possible. Based on his research Mi-
chael wrote his article “The Net and Netizens.”
The netizen, Michael recognized, was the emer-
gence of a new form of citizen. This was a citizen
who was using the power made possible by the Net
for a public purpose, and who was not limited by
geographical boundaries. The Net for Michael was a
new social institution and the discovery of the emer-
gence of the netizen was the special contribution that
he made to the field of network study.
The first Netizen day event held in China was the
first official recognition of the netizen anywhere in
the world. It was a celebration to honor the fact that
the phenomenon of the netizen continues to develop
and spread and to be recognized as a new and impor-
tant achievement of our times. It was fitting that it
was in China with its many millions of netizens
pioneering the use of the Internet that there is a day to
celebrate Netizens.
When I returned to New York in 2009 after my
visit to China, I went to an event at the Chinese
Mission to the UN. On the way into the Mission, there
was a rack with magazines about China. A magazine
in the rack caught my attention. It was the July 5,
2009 edition of the magazine NewsChina The title of
the issue was “The Netizens’ Republic of China.”
The magazine was filled with articles document-
ing the impact of the Net and Netizens on what is
happening in China. It presented several examples of
netizens speaking out in discussions in online discus-
sion groups and forums. In an article titled “Netizens,
the New Watchdogs,” the writer, Yu Xiaodong wrote,
“It is the newly emerging Internet media, in particu-
lar, citizen journalism that has filled the need to
kindle political discussion in China leading many to
conclude that Internet media has become the main-
stream itself rather than a peripheral form of commu-
nication.”
Based on these experiences I wrote an article
with the title “China in the Era of the Netizen.” In the
article I explained my sense that something signifi-
cant is happening in China. Beijing, I wrote, was
being developed as a world class city with the benefit
of contributions made possible by the Internet and by
netizens. “So perhaps a special characteristic of
Beijing has to do with the emergence of the Netizen.”
The NewsChina issue of the magazine helped to
clarify that there were those in China who also recog-
nized that netizens were crucial actors in the develop-
ment of China.
I have had subsequent visits to China, in which
I have been encouraged to give talks about Netizens
and about the development and spread of the Internet
and its potential impact on China.
What seems significant about these experiences
is that there is interest and support for netizen devel-
opment in China that I have not found elsewhere in
the world.
This introduction brings me to the subject of the
talk I want to give today. This talk is about a problem
with the mainstream western media and how the
Internet and netizens are creating a needed alternative
to solve this problem.
Page 7
Part I The UN and General Mood’s Miss-
ing Report on Conflicting Accounts of the
Houla Massacre
The Houla massacre occurred in Syria on May
25, 2012. This was but a few days before Kofi Annan,
who was at the time the joint Arab League-UN envoy,
was scheduled to visit Syria.
Immediately after the massacre, there was a
media campaign in much of the Western media to
blame the Syrian government for the deaths. There
were 108 deaths reported which included men,
women and children. A short time after the massacre,
an alternative account was made available by a
Russian online media group, Anna News.
1
The day
following the massacre, a news team for this online
site visited the area where the massacre had occurred.
Their report appeared on a number of alternative news
sites soon after the massacre.
The reports from the Anna News team, and other
netizen news reports, challenged the mainstream
Western media claims that the Syrian government
was responsible for the killings.
Similarly, the Syrian government conducted a
preliminary investigation. They provided witnesses
that the massacre was carried out by armed insurgents
and criminal elements.
The mainstream Western media accounts of the
massacre (and some Arab satellite tv channels) have
mainly presented what they claim is happening from
the point of view of the armed opposition in Syria.
The armed oppositions account of events demonizes
the Syrian government and campaigns for foreign
intervention. There have been a number of instances
when the accounts from the armed opposition have
been shown to be false.
Differing from the reports in the mainstream
Western media is information presented by the Syrian
government. Also there is the information in the
alternative media that I refer to as netizen journalism.
Netizen journalism exposes distortions and misrepre-
sentations in the news coverage provided by the
mainstream Western media, and does the investiga-
tion required to present an accurate narrative. For
example, in the aftermath of the Houla massacre, a
number of articles documenting the role of the armed
insurgents in carrying out the Houla massacre ap-
peared on alternative media sites. Similarly there
were articles comparing what had happened in Houla
with media campaigns advocating foreign interven-
tion in the Yugoslavian conflict in the 1990s. Also
there were articles considering what the motive was
behind the massacre and the clues this provided
toward determining who was responsible.
I want to propose that this form of alternative
media is setting up a communication channel different
from that of the mainstream Western media.
What has been interesting has been to consider
not only the two different channels that these different
forms of news represent, but also to look at how
different actors at the UN relate to these different
communication channels.
In April, the UN Security Council authorized a
mission of 300 unarmed observers to monitor what
was happening in Syria and to try to encourage a
cease fire between the conflicting parties. This mis-
sion was called the UN Supervisory Mission in Syria
(UNSMIS). When the Houla massacre first occurred,
UNSMIS observers went to investigate the massacre.
The initial response of UNSMIS was that there were
presented to them two views of what had occurred
and who was responsible. UNSMIS said it was not yet
possible to make a determination which was accurate
and which was a falsification.
The UN Security Council issued a press state-
ment after the Houla massacre requesting that
UNSMIS do an investigation.
2
In June, Major General
Robert Mood, the commander of UNSMIS told
journalists that a report had been prepared and sub-
mitted to UN headquarters.
In the article “General Mood: ‘Two Versions’ of
the Houla Massacre,” John Rosenthal writes, “At the
June 15 press conference General Mood went on to
say that the mission had assembled a report about the
massacre, including the details of witness interviews
and that this report had been submitted to UN head-
quarters in New York. This raises an obvious ques-
tion,” writes Rosenthal, “Why has this report not been
rendered public?”
3
Rosenthal does a service pointing
to General Mood’s June 15 press conference in
Damascus. The press conference is online only in a
video format. I have transcribed the part of the press
conference where General Mood talks about the
report on the Houla massacre that he says was given
to UN headquarters.
4
Describing the investigation by UNSMIS into the
Houla massacre and the report UNSMIS submitted to
UN headquarters, General Mood tells journalists:
“The statement we issued after el
Houla is still valid. Which means we have
Page 8
been there with an investigating team. We
have interviews, interviewed locals with one
story, and we have interviewed locals that
has another story.
The circumstances leading up to el
Houla and the detailed circumstances, the
facts related to the incident itself, still re-
mains unclear to us.
We have put this together, the facts that
we (can) could establish by what we saw on
the ground. We have put together the state-
ments, the witness interviews and we have
sent that as a report to UN headquarters,
New York.
And then the assessment on what is the
way forward. Will there be a different inves-
tigation? [This] is a matter for headquarters
in this context. But if we are asked, obvi-
ously we are on the ground, and could help
facilitate that.”
According to General Mood’s statement during
this press conference, UNSMIS provided UN head-
quarters with a report on the Houla massacre. This
report included the facts on the ground that UNSMIS
was able to establish, and also witness statements and
interviews from “locals with one story” and from
“locals that have another story.” This report, accord-
ing to General Mood, was not able to establish “the
circumstances leading up to el Houla, and the detailed
circumstances, the facts related to the incident itself,”
as these still remained unclear to UNSMIS.
But General Mood explained that if there was to
be “a different investigation,” UNSMIS was “on the
ground and could facilitate that.”
UN Security Council members have said that the
Security Council did not receive the report nor does
it appear that there was general knowledge at the
Security Council that this report presented two
conflicting accounts of what happened and that
UNSMIS, which was on the ground in Syria at the
time, was able to help conduct a more expansive
investigation to determine who was responsible for
the massacre.
The question is raised as to why the UN Secretar-
iat did not make the UNSMIS report available to the
Security Council? Why didn’t the UN pursue the
course of a further investigation into the circum-
stances leading up to the Houla massacre and the facts
related to the incident itself by taking up the offer that
General Mood made to facilitate such an investiga-
tion?
When journalists asked the Secretary-Generals
spokesperson what happened to Mood’s report and
why it wasn’t given to the Security Council, the
spokesman told the press the report had been given to
various members of the UN Secretariat. But as several
people at the UN and online have asked, “Why not to
the Security Council?”
One of the original purposes for the UNSMIS
mission, according to Kofi Annan, was “to see what
is going on” so as to be able to “change the
dynamics.
”5
This past April, outlining the need for UNSMIS,
Annan said, “We continue to be hampered by the lack
of verified information in assessing the situation. We
need eyes and ears on the ground. This will provide
the incontrovertible basis the international community
needs to act in an effective and unified manner,
increasing the momentum for a cessation of violence
to be implemented by all sides.” This “eyes and ears
on the ground” function was to be filled by UNSMIS.
UNSMIS was deployed to Syria and was on the
ground at the time of the Houla Massacre and was
able to do an investigation.
Yet when UNSMIS submitted a report to UN
headquarters documenting its investigation, it was
withheld from the Security Council. Though Ban
Ki-Moon’s spokesperson acknowledged that the
report was received, the report was not given to the
Security Council. It was not made available to the
media and the public. Thus it could not be part of the
eyes and ears on the ground that Annan said was
needed. One can only wonder about the fact that
shortly after this report was received by the Secretar-
iat, General Mood left UNSMIS, and not long after
that, UNSMIS was ended. The UNSMIS report on
Houla did not blame the Syrian government for the
massacre, but instead presented two conflicting views
of the massacre and offered to facilitate a further
investigation.
At least some Security Council members indi-
cated that they wanted the kind of information Gen-
eral Mood explained was in his report. For example,
on June 4, at a press conference to mark the beginning
of the Chinese Presidency of the Security Council for
the month of June 2012, China’s Ambassador Li
Baodong, referring to the Houla massacre, said
6
:
“Now we have different stories from different angles.
Now we have the story from the Syrian government,
and from the opposition parties, and from different
Page 9
sources. Since the Security Council has a team…on
the ground,” he said referring to UNSMIS, “We want
to see first-hand information from our own people.”
He hoped this would make it possible to put the
different pieces of information together and to “come
to our own conclusion with our own judgment.”
The acknowledgment by China’s UN Ambassa-
dor that there were different views of what had
happened in the Houla massacre and that there was a
need to get accurate information from an on the
ground investigation was an important step for a
member of the Security Council to make. This chal-
lenged mainstream media claims that their account
was the only account of what was happening in Syria.
The UNSMIS report was the kind of additional
information the Chinese Ambassador indicated he
was seeking.
The fact remains, however, that the report from
UNSMIS that General Mood presented to Ban
Ki-Moon’s UN headquarters was withheld from the
Security Council, the press and the public. Instead of
the UNSMIS report, and any in-depth independent
investigation conducted by the UN, which General
Mood said UNSMIS could facilitate, something
different happened. On August 3, the UN General
Assembly passed a resolution condemning the gov-
ernment of Syria for the violence in Syria. In his
speech in support of the resolution, Abdallah Y
Al-Mouallini, the Ambassador representing Saudi
Arabia at the UN, blamed the Syrian government for
the Houla massacre.
Similarly, in August, the Geneva based UN
Human Rights Council issued a report blaming the
Syrian government for the violence in Syria. The
Human Rights Council made no effort to reconcile the
conflicting facts or interviews submitted by UNSMIS
to the UN, nor any effort to take up the offer made by
General Mood that UNSMIS would provide on the
ground assistance to do the needed investigation. The
report of the Human Rights Council inaccurately
claimed that
7
: “The lack of access significantly
hampered the commissions ability to fulfill its man-
date. Its access to Government officials and to mem-
bers of the armed and security forces was negligible.
Importantly, victims and witnesses inside the country
could not be interviewed in person.”
Such a statement by the Human Rights Council
misrepresented the fact that indeed the UN had had
observers on the ground in Syria, and that those
observers not only gave a report to the UN, but also
said that they could facilitate a more thorough investi-
gation if the UN desired to do so. Hence the claims of
the Human Rights Council that the UN was unable to
conduct an investigation “inside the country” are
contrary to General Mood’s statement to the press.
Then in August the Security Council, without
being able to review the UNSMIS report or to con-
sider the need for the additional investigation that
General Mood said was possible in order to determine
who was responsible for the Houla massacre, allowed
the mandate authorizing UNSMIS to expire. Though
there was an effort by some nations on the Council to
introduce a resolution to extend UNSMIS, others on
the Council refused to do so unless Syria was penal-
ized, even though the issue of who was responsible
for the violence against civilians, as had happened at
Houla, had not been determined by the Security
Council nor by any other UN body through an
UNSMIS facilitated and impartial investigation.
Commenting on the Security Council action
withdrawing UNSMIS from Syria, Archbishop Mario
Zenari, the Vatican Nuncio to Syria, said that the
withdrawal of UN forces from Syria was a “sad blow.
Three or four months ago, there was a good bit of
hope for their mission, and now their departure
plunges us back into this reality….”
8
His disappointment is understandable. The
Annan plan was based on having eyes and ears on the
ground as a way to discourage violence against
civilians. The failure of the UN to make the UNSMIS
report on Houla available to the Security Council and
to the public, and to recognize the need for a more
extensive pursuit of the facts of what happened in
Houla, was a failure dooming the Annan mission in
Syria.
Commenting on what she referred to as “fake”
news reports about what is happening in Syria,
Mother Agnes Mariam of the Cross, a Superior of the
community at the monastery of St James the Muti-
lated in Qara, Syria, explained that the news reports
were “forged with only one side emphasized.”
9
In her
comments to the Irish Times, she included a criticism
of UN reports that she said, were “one sided and not
worthy of that organization.” Though she didn’t
specify any particular reports, one would not be
surprised if it were particularly the Human Rights
Council Report she had in mind.
In a paper titled, “The Role of Netizen Journal-
ism in the Media War at the United Nations” pre-
sented in July at the International Relations and
Page 10
Political Science Conference in Beijing, I documented
more of the particularities of netizen journalism in the
media war at the UN over Syria.
10
There have been
many articles and videos posted on a number of web
sites challenging the Western mainstream media
version of the events in Houla and providing facts that
make a convincing case that the massacre was carried
out by armed insurgents and local criminals.
With these articles acting as a catalyst, the
mainstream German newspaper, the Frankfurter
Allgemeiner Zeitung published two articles docu-
menting how the armed insurgency was responsible
for the Houla massacre. The titles of the articles
translated into English were “Syrian Rebels Commit-
ted Houla Massacre” and “On the Houla Massacre:
The Extermination.”
In my paper on “The Role of Netizen Journalism
in the Media War at the UN,” I also consider the
netizen journalism coverage of two other examples of
conflicts that were under consideration by the Secu-
rity Council and consider the impact on the Security
Council of the netizen journalism on these issues.
II Conclusion
The problem raised by this preliminary presenta-
tion concerns the importance of facilitating an accu-
rate channel of communication about the conflicts
under consideration by the Security Council.
In the example of the Syrian conflict, the fact that
General Mood’s report on the Houla massacre could
be withheld from the Security Council, and UNSMIS
ended by the UN Security Council without any
consideration of the issues raised by the report,
represents a serious dilemma. This indicates that there
is a problem with the communication channels at the
UN. There is a problem with the integrity of these
communication channels. This is an example of what
happens when a communication channel can be
blocked.
In a press conference held in March of 2011
when China assumed the month long rotating Security
Council presidency, Ambassador Li Baodong referred
to the international media as the “16
th
member of the
Security Council.
”11
While Ambassador Li Baodong was then refer-
ring to the mainstream media, it is important to
recognize that there is a new form of journalism
emerging. This new form of journalism is being
created by netizens dedicated to doing the research
and analysis to expose the interests and actions that
are too often hidden from view in the reporting of the
news. As a result of the failure at the UN to provide
the Security Council with the conflicting facts of the
UNSMIS investigation and to take up the UNSMIS
offer to help carry out a more substantial investigation
on the ground, an impartial investigation, the ability
of the Security Council, and ultimately the UN, to
determine what is an accurate narrative about the
Houla massacre has been blocked.
This situation demonstrates in a graphic manner,
the need for a netizen journalism that can help to
create a channel for communication to provide a more
accurate understanding of the conflicts the Security
Council is considering. Such a journalism can help to
make more likely the peaceful resolution of these
conflicts.
* The longer talk can be accessed at
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/r-china2012-a
pril-cafe.doc
Notes:
1. Anna News- Houla Report
Early reports were on Syrianews.cc but later many alternative
web sites carried Anna Reports. Following is one url for an early
report:
http://www.syrianews.cc/syria-what-really-happened-in-al-hul
a-homs/
2. Security Council Press Statement on Attacks in Syria, May 27,
2012. “Those responsible for acts of violence must be held
accountable. The members of the Security Council requested the
Secretary-General, with the involvement of UNSMIS [United
Nations Supervision Mission in Syria], to continue to investigate
these attacks and report the findings to the Security Council.”
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/sc10658.doc.htm
3. John Rosenthal, “General Mood: Two Versions of the Houla
Massacre.” The Western media was quick to blame Assad. But
does an unpublished UN report tell a different story?, June 26,
2012. Rosenthal writes: “What is perhaps most remarkable about
General Mood’s comments is that they have been almost
universally ignored and this despite the fact that the video of the
press conference has been made publicly available by UNSMIS
on the mission’s own website.”on “Korea and the Era of
the Netizen.”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/general-mood-two-versions-of-the-ho
ula-massacre/
4. June 15, 2012, General Mood Press Conference, Video part 2.
The section where General Mood describes the UNSMIS report
on Houla starts at min: 3:10 and ends at 4:17.
5. See “Kofi Annan tells UN We Need Eyes and Ears on the
Ground,” April 26, 2012.
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2012/04/26/kofi-annan-briefing/
6.Video of Li Baodong press conference marking the Chinese
Presidency of Security Council for the month of June 2012. June
Page 11
4, 2012.
http://www.unmultimedia.org/tv/webcast/2012/06/li-baodong-
china-president-of-the-security-council-on-the-programme-of-
work-for-the-month-of-june-2012-press-conference.html
7. Report of the Independent International Commission of
Inquiry on Syria. Human Rights Council, August 15, 2012.
http://un-report.blogspot.com/2012/08/report-of-independent-i
nternational.html#more
8. Cindy Wooden and Sarah MacDonald, “Nuncio in Syria:
People stunned worried for the future,” The Tidings, 24 August
2012.
http://www.the-tidings.com/index.php/news/newsworld/2548-
nuncio-in-syria-people-stunned-worried-for-the-future
9. Patsy McGarry, “Media Coverage of Syria violence partial
and untrue, says nun,” The Irish Times, Monday Aug 13, 2012,
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0813/12243
22099930.html
10. “The Role of Netizen Journalism in the Media War at the
UN”. See this issue page 17.
Draft Paper:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/r-china2012-p
aper.doc
Talk:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/r-china2012-ta
lk.doc
11. Press Conference: Li Baodong (China) President of the
Security Council for the month of March, 2 March 2011.
http://www.unmultimedia.org/tv/webcast/2011/03/press-confer
ence-li-baodong-china-president-of-the-security-council-for-th
e-month-of-march.html
[Editor’s Note: Also in celebration of the 15
th
Anni-
versary of the print edition of Netizens: On the
History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Ronda
Hauben made the following presentation at the Hope
Institute in Seoul South Korea on Aug 10, 2012.]
Korea and the Era of the
Netizen
by Ronda Hauben
Part I – Introduction
In my talk today I want to provide some back-
ground to how the concept of the netizen came to be
recognized and how the understanding and practice of
netizenship has spread around the world.
Then I want to focus on developments by
netizens in South Korea and try to begin a discussion
of the significance of this development and its impli-
cations for the future of democracy.
Fifteen years ago, on May 1, 1997, the print
edition of the book Netizens was published in English.
Later that year, in October, a Japanese translation of
the book was published. Netizens was the first book to
recognize that along with the development of the
Internet, a new form of citizenship had emerged. This
is a form of citizenship that has developed based on
the broader forms of political participation made
possible by the Net.
The book Netizens documents the emergence of
this new political identity. It also explores the poten-
tial for how netizens will change the social structures
and institutions of our society.
A recent article in the Reader’s Opinion section
of the Times of India newspaper referred to a paper I
wrote about South Korean netizens in 2006. Quoting
my paper, the Times of India article said, “Not only is
the Internet a laboratory for democracy, but the scale
of participation and contribution is unprecedented.
Online discussion makes it possible for netizens to
become active individuals and group actors in social
and political affairs. The Internet makes it possible for
netizens to speak out independently of institutions or
officials.”
The writer in the Times of India article pointed to
the growing number of netizens in China and India
and the large proportion of the population in South
Korea who are connected to the Internet.
“Will it evolve into a 5
th
estate?” the article asks,
contrasting netizens’ discussion online with the power
of the 4
th
estate, which is the mainstream media.
“Will social and political discussion in social
media grow into deliberation?” asks Vinay Kamat, the
author of this article, “Will opinions expressed be
merely ‘rabble rousing’ or will they be ‘reflective’
instead of ‘impulsive’?”
Both South Korea and China are places where
the role of netizens is important in building more
democratic structures for society. South Korea ap-
pears to be more advanced in grassroots efforts to
create examples of netizen forms for a more participa-
tory decision making process. But China is also a
place where there are significant developments
because of the Internet and netizens.
Later in my talk I will refer to Chinese netizen
developments, but first I want to look at the work that
the co-author of the netizens book Michael Hauben
did to develop and spread an understanding of
netizens. Then I want to look at some of the netizen
achievements I have observed in South Korea.
Page 12
Part II – About Netizens
First, some background.
In 1992-1993, Michael Hauben, then a college
student who had gotten access to the Net, wondered
what the impact of the Net would be.
He decided to do his research using the Net itself.
He sent out several sets of questions and received
many responses. Studying the responses, he realized
something new was developing, something not
expected. What was developing was a sense among
many of the people who wrote him that the Internet
was making a difference in their lives and that the
communication it made possible with others around
the world was important.
Michael discovered that there were users online
who not only cared for how the Internet could help
them with their purposes, but who wanted the Internet
to continue to spread and to thrive so that more and
more people around the world would have access to
it.
He had seen the word ‘net.citizen’ referred to
online. Thinking about the social concern he had
found among those who wrote him, and about the
non-geographical character of a net based form of
citizenship, he contracted ‘net.citizen’ into the word
‘netizen’. Netizen has come to reflect the online
social identity he discovered doing his research.
Here is an excerpt from one of the questions he
posted on line during this period in the early 1990s
when the Internet was just spreading and becoming
more widely available:
“Looking for Exciting Uses of the Net”
“…I would like to know about people’s uses of
the network(s) that have been especially interesting,
valuable and/or exciting. I want to hear about peo-
ple’s delights and also disappointments.”
Gathering all the replies he had received, he
wrote a paper describing his research. The paper was
titled, “The Net and Netizens: The Impact the Net has
on People’s Lives.” This research was done in
1992-1993. At that time, the Internet was spreading to
countries and networks around the world.
He posted his paper on July 6, 1993 on several of
the discussion forums known as Usenet and on
several Internet mailing lists. It was posted in four
parts under the title “Common Sense: The Net and
Netizens: the Impact the Net is having on people’s
lives.” People around the world found his article and
helped to spread it to others. The term netizen quickly
spread, not only in the online world, but soon it was
appearing in newspapers and other publications
offline.
This paper initiated the conscious awareness of
netizenship as a new form of citizenship.
The concept and consciousness of oneself as a
netizen has continued to spread around the world.
In a talk he gave in Japan in 1995, Michael
explained that there were two uses of the word
netizen that had developed:
Netizens are not just anyone who comes online.
Netizens are especially not people who come
online for individual gain or profit. They are not
people who come to the Net thinking it is a
service. Rather they are people who understand
it takes effort and action on each and everyone’s
part to make the Net a regenerative and vibrant
community and resource. Netizens are people
who decide to devote time and effort into mak-
ing the Net, this new part of our world, a better
place. (Hypernetwork ‘95 Beppu Bay Confer-
ence)
This usage of netizens is the usage I am referring
to in my talk today as well.
“The Net and Netizens” was but one of a number
of articles Michael wrote about the research he was
doing about the Net.
During this period I collaborated with Michael,
also doing research and writing. Our different articles
were often based on what we had learned from people
online and which we subsequently posted online.
In January 1994 we collected our papers into an
online book we titled Netizens and the Wonderful
World of the Net, or in its shortened title “The
Netizens Netbook.”
In 1997 a second version of the book was pub-
lished in a print edition titled Netizens: On the History
and Impact of Usenet and the Internet in English in
May, and then in a Japanese edition in October.
Among the responses Michael had received to
his work was one from a professor in Japan, Shumpei
Kumon. The professor wrote: “I am a social scientist
in Japan writing on the information revolution and
information oriented civilization. Since I came across
the term ‘netizen’ about a year ago, I have been
fascinated with this idea.”
Professor Kumon wrote, “It seems that the age of
not only the technological understanding but, also
political-socio-revolution is coming, comparable to
the citizen’s revolution in the past. I would very much
Page 13
like to do a book on that theme.”
When Professor Kumon’s book on netizens was
published in Japanese, its title in English was The Age
of Netizens. The book begins with a chapter by
Michael on the birth of the netizen.
In the 1992-1994 period, a significant critique of
the professional news media was developing among
netizens. In the chapter of the Netizens book, “The
Effect of the Net on the Professional News Media,”
there are a number of observations made by people
online who recognize that this new media makes
possible the participation of a broader set of people in
reporting the news and that the range of news is also
considerably expanded.
Part III – Some Examples of New Forms
of Netizens Reporting the News
In order to consider in more concrete terms the
new form of citizenship and the new form of media
that the Internet makes possible, I want to describe
some examples drawn mainly from South Korea
(though there are other examples from China, and
other countries that it would be valuable to discuss
during the question period if we have time.)
A. South Korea and the Netizens Movement
My first experience with netizens in South Korea
was in 2003 when I saw an article in the Financial
Times that the new president of South Korea at the
time, Roh Moo-hyun, had been elected by the
Netizens.
This was, as you can imagine a very striking
news article for me to find, not previously knowing
anything about the struggles of the netizens in South
Korea. But subsequently I learned that the Netizens
book was known by several in the academic commu-
nity. For example, Professor Han Sang-jin of Seoul
National University (SNU) told me he used the book
in a class at SNU. Professor Kang Myung-koo also of
SNU learned of the book from the Japanese edition
and it had an influence on his thinking, and Professor
Yun Yeon-min of Hanyang University learned of the
book from its online edition, and it inspired him to
write his early book about South Korean networking
titled “A Theory of Electronic Space: A Sociological
Exploration of Computer Networks” (Seoul:
Jeonyewon).
When during a trip to Seoul in 2005, I asked a
number of different people that I met if they are
netizens. They all responded “yes” or “I hope so.”
There have been a number of important netizen
developments in Korea. These include:
1) Helping to build what became large candlelight
demonstrations against the agreement governing the
relations between the U.S. government and South
Korea. This agreement is known as the Status of
Forces Agreement (SOFA for short) in Nov., 2002.
2) Helping to build the campaign for the presidency
of South Korea for a political outsider Roh Moo-hyun
in Nov-Dec 2002.
3) Helping to create a climate favorable to the devel-
opment of online publications.
In 2002 the Sisa Journal, a Korean weekly,
named ‘Netizens’ as the person of the year. This
represented a rare recognition at the time of a new and
significant phenomenon that is represented by the
emergence and development of the netizen.
A subsequent example demonstrating how
netizens have been able to have an impact on science
policy is the case involving the stem cell scientist
Hwang woo-suk in South Korea. Hwang had been
considered a top Korean scientist and his scientific
achievements were celebrated by the Korean govern-
ment. Netizens in South Korea were able to demon-
strate that Hwang had doctored photographs of his
research to present fraudulent results.
Lee Myung-bak won the South Korean presi-
dency in 2007. In April 2008, he went to the U.S. and
agreed to a beef agreement ending the former restric-
tions on the import of U.S. beef into South Korea.
Starting on May 2 there were 106 days of candle-
light demonstrations in South Korea protesting the
administration of Lee Myung-bak and calling for his
impeachment. (I was in South Korea when the first
candlelight demonstration occurred on May 2 but
wasn’t able to go to it.)
One of the most remarkable events of the 2008
Candlelight demonstrations occurred on June 10-11.
A big demonstration was planned for June 10 to
celebrate the victory over the military government in
South Korea in June 1987 that led to direct popular
election of the ROK president.
To try to keep the demonstrators from marching
on the Blue House, the presidential residence, the Lee
Myung-bak administration set up shipping containers
as barriers and filled them with sand. Then they were
covered with grease so that people would not be able
Page 14
to climb over them.
Netizens named these structures the Lee
Myung-bak castle. They made a Wikipedia entry for
it as a landmark of Seoul. They decorated this new
landmark of Seoul with graffiti.
On the other side of the shipping containers there
were buses filled with police inside and outside the
buses, guarding the president’s house.
Blocks of styrofoam were used at the demonstra-
tion to build a structure to be able to go over the
police barricade.
There was a 5-1/2 hour discussion with people
supporting the different positions in the debate.
Through the discussion people decided not to go over
the barricade for a number of reasons. Many people
felt it was too dangerous to go over it. Instead several
people with their banners went up on the barricade.
The people who went up on it did so to show that
they could have gone over it if they wanted to, but
that it had been decided not to.
The situation presented the contrast between
what is supposed to be democracy, which is the side
of the barricade protecting the President from com-
municating with the people. And what is democracy,
which is the people communicating with each other
on the other side of the barricade. People online wrote
how important this all was to them, to see that there
could be a discussion where people who had real
differences came to a decision taking those differ-
ences into account.
This was significant, I feel, in two ways. First
they figured out how to resolve their differences to
come to a decision. Second they cooperatively deter-
mined how to construct a structure that would enable
them to carry out their decision. They took what they
could do online and they did it offline.
The discussion and decisions carried out on June
11 were by a combination of people acting as netizens
and as citizens. What they did, I want to propose,
represents an important achievement.
There is one other netizen development that I
want to mention in this talk.
This is the situation that happened with respect to
the South Korean war ship Cheonan in 2010. The ship
broke in two and sank on March 26, 2010. At the
time, it had been involved in naval exercises with the
U.S. military in an area of the West Sea/Yellow Sea
between North Korea and China. This is a situation
that soon became the subject of much discussion
among netizens.
Initially the South Korean government and the
U.S. government said there was no indication that
North Korea was involved. Then at a press conference
held on May 20, 2010 in Seoul, the South Korean
government claimed that a torpedo fired by a North
Korean submarine had exploded in the water near the
Cheonan, causing a pressure wave that was responsi-
ble for the sinking. Many criticisms were raised about
this scenario.
First, there is no direct evidence of any North
Korean submarine in the vicinity of the Cheonan. Nor
is there any evidence that any torpedo was actually
fired causing the pressure wave phenomenon. Hence
there was no actual evidence that could be presented
in court of law to support the South Korean govern-
ment’s claims.
In fact, if this claim of a pressure wave phenome-
non were true even those involved in the investigation
would have to acknowledge that this would be the
first time such an action was used in actual fighting.
What I am interested in, however, is how
netizens responded to this situation.
What is unusual and something I find especially
interesting is that netizens who live in different
countries and speak different languages took up to
critique the claims of the South Korean government
about the cause of the sinking of the Cheonan. It
appears, also, that such netizen activity had an impor-
tant effect on the international community. And it
appears to have acted as a catalyst affecting the
actions of the UN Security Council in its treatment of
the Cheonan dispute.
Such activity is the basis for what I refer to as a
new form of news.
There were substantial analyses by NGO’s like
Spark, PSPD, Peaceboat and others posted online in
English as well as Korean. These were distributed
widely online.
There were also discussions and critiques at
American, Japanese and Chinese websites that I saw
when searching online during the period that the
Security Council was discussing the Cheonan inci-
dent.
One example of such a critique was by an Amer-
ican blogger, Scott Creighton, who uses the pen name
Willy Loman. He wrote a post titled, “The Sinking of
the Cheonan: We are being lied to.”
In a post he titled “A Perfect Match?,” he
showed that there was a discrepancy between the
diagram displayed at the press conference held by the
Page 15
South Korean government and the torpedo part that
the South Korean government claimed it had found
near where the ship sank.
The South Korean government claimed that the
diagram was from a North Korean catalogue offering
this as proof that the torpedo part was of North
Korean origin.
On his blog, Loman showed how the diagram
was of a torpedo different from the part of the torpedo
the South Korean government had put on display. The
diagram was of the PT97W torpedo, while the part of
the torpedo on display was of the CHT-02D torpedo.
Much discussion followed this post on Loman’s
blog, both from Americans and also from Koreans. At
first the South Korean government denied these
claims. But three weeks later in response to a question
from a journalist, the government acknowledged that
Loman was right.
In a post titled “Thanks to Valuable Input”
Loman wrote: “Over 100,000 viewers read the article
and it was republished on dozens of sites all across
the world (and even translated). A South Korean
MSM outlet even posted our diagram depicting
glaring discrepancies between the evidence and the
drawing of the CHT-02D torpedo…. But what we
had, was literally thousands of people across the
world committed to the truth….” It was signed Willy
Loman.
Such online discussion and posts appeared to
have acted as a catalyst to encourage the UNSC to act
in a neutral way toward the two Koreas, with the
Security Council giving time to hear from both sides
of the dispute and encouraging the two Koreas to
settle the dispute peacefully. A Presidential statement
issued by the Council on July 9, 2010 took a balanced
view, stating the different views of both sides, but
without assigning blame to anyone.
Part IV – Implications
Describing the ability of citizens to discuss issues
online on the Chinese Internet, an Australian re-
searcher, Haiqing Yu, a researcher at the University
of Melbourne, realized that there was an important
phenomenon developing among some of the people
online in China who identified as netizens. They were
exploring how the Internet could help them to contrib-
ute to their society.
She explains in her book From Active Audience
to Media Citizenship that there is a new manifestation
of what it means to be a citizen and to express one’s
citizenship developing on the Internet, that it is a
more mobile and flexible manifestation than previ-
ously. (p. 307)
She maintains that the virtual space of the net has
become a public forum that makes it possible for
ordinary people to take part in the traditional media’s
agenda setting and government decision making and
law-making functions. Haiqing Yu writes, “Citizen-
ship is not an abstract concept discussed in ivory
towers among elite intellectuals. It is a mediated
social reality where ordinary people can act as citi-
zens of a nation when they use the Net to talk, dis-
cuss, petition and protest.”
In a similar observation, Michael Hauben noted
that, “The collective body of people assisted by Net
software, has grown larger than any individual news-
paper.”
The implication from these two different obser-
vations is that a new form of global media and a new
form of citizenship are developing. Instead of the
traditional news reporting which is actually the news
of a certain set of elite economic and political inter-
ests, there is the ability developing among netizens to
have real debate on issues on the Net. This new media
includes the participation of a broader set of people
who hold a wider more encompassing set of diverse
perspectives.
Actually the ability to have this broader set of
perspectives that the Net makes possible is helping to
create a new media and a new role for the citizen.
These are gradually supplanting the traditional forms
of journalism and of citizenship.
Part V – Conclusion
I want to point to an analysis of the netizen by
media historian Mark Poster in his book Information
Please. The book considers the effect of globalization
on the citizen and argues that with globalization the
citizen loses the power to be able to have any influ-
ence on government officials. The concept of the
netizen, however, intrigues Poster, as he sees in this
concept the potential to forge a new identity that is
capable of opposing and challenging the harmful
effects of globalization.
Poster explains, “This new phenomena will
likely change the relation of forces around the globe.
In such an eventuality, the figure of the netizen might
serve as the critical concept in the politics of globaliza-
tion.”
I want to support Poster’s argument but I propose
Page 16
our time can best be described as the Era of the
Netizen. The ability of the netizen to focus on com-
munication and participation to affect the institutions
of the society, is a critical characteristic of this new
Era.
In his article comparing the impact of the Net on
our society, with the impact of the printing press to
bring revolutionary changes to the society after it was
introduced, Michael wrote, “The Net has opened a
channel for talking to the whole world to an even
wider set of people than did printed books.”
In conclusion, considering the examples of the
response of netizens to the problems raised by the
investigation of the Cheonan incident, I want to
propose that the importance of the collaborative
response of netizens supporting each other from
diverse countries and cultures is but a prelude to the
potential of netizens around the world in different
countries to work together across national borders to
solve the problems of our times.
Thank you for your attention and we welcome
your questions and comments.
[Editor’s Note: On July 14-15, the annual meeting of
the Chinese Community of Political Science and
International Relations (CCPSIS) was held in Beijing.
The following paper was prepared for this confer-
ence.]
The Role of Netizen
Journalism in the Media War
at the United Nations
by Ronda Hauben
Preface
The history of journalism includes many different
forms of publication and many different methods of
organization of those publications. Journalism schol-
ars like Chris Atton and Tony Harcup of the U.K.
point to a wide continuum of how the news is pro-
duced and who are the journalists who produce it.
These scholars argue that it is too narrow to restrict
the definition and consideration of journalism to
commercially or government produced media. Instead
these scholars propose that the many forms of alterna-
tive journalism should be considered as part of the
spectrum of journalism and those who produce for
these publications are to be considered in any study of
journalists.
Traditionally, alternative journalism provides for
a broader set of issues to be raised than is common in
commercially produced mainstream media. Often,
too, alternative publications allow for a broader set of
sources to be utilized. Such a media often reflects not
only a criticism of the limitations of the mainstream
commercial media, but also a demonstration that
another form and practice of journalism is viable.
With the creation and the spread of the Internet,
the emergence of a new form of citizenship, know as
netizenship, has developed. Also a critical and vibrant
form of online journalism has begun to develop. I call
this journalism, netizen journalism. A more detailed
exploration of this phenomenon is beyond the scope
of this paper as the paper is for a panel on questions
related to the United Nations. As such, the paper will
focus on the impact of netizen journalism on the
United Nations and on issues related to the United
Nations. But an awareness of the emerging phenome-
non of netizen journalism can help to provide a con-
text for issues investigated in this paper.
Introduction
In this paper I take three conflicts which are or
have been on the agenda of the United Nations
Security Council. The paper will explore the role of
netizen journalism in relation to the efforts to resolve
these conflicts in a peaceful manner. The three
examples the paper will consider in relation to the UN
are 1) the Cheonan conflict in South Korea (2010), 2)
the war against Libya (2011), and 3) the crisis in
Syria (2011-2012).
I Medvedev and the Challenge of Media
Manipulation to International Relations
In a recent speech, Dmitry Medvedev, Prime
Minister of the Russian Federation, spoke about what
he called “the new security dimensions” in interna-
tional relations.
1
“Today,” he said, “we are witness to persistent
attempts to make mass manipulation of public opinion
a tool in international relations.”
He offered as an example what he calls the
media campaign against Syria.
“Syria’s case is illustrative in this respect,”
Page 17
Medvedev said. “A very active media campaign
unfolded with respect to Syria.” He explained, “What
is clear is that this media campaign had little to do
with ending the violence as rapidly as possible and
facilitating the national dialogue that we all want to
see there.”
He attributed this media campaign to the nature
of what is considered the politics of certain countries.
Describing this politics, he explained, “This sees a
country or group of countries instill their own aims
and objectives in the consciousness of others…with
other points of view rejected.”
2
What I propose is important about his talk for our
panel on “The UN is a Dilemma” is that Medvedev
argues that media manipulation by certain political
actors presents a serious problem for the field of
international relations. He argues that such a media
campaign against Syria interferes with the goal of
international relations “to concentrate on professional
and serious discussion rather than propaganda ef-
forts,” so as to be able to work out “a common ap-
proach to settling this conflict.”
While he does not see journalism as able to help
solve this problem, I want to propose that there is
development of an alternative form of journalism that
is taking on the problem. This is the journalism I call
netizen journalism. Netizen journalism seeks to
challenge the misrepresentations and distortions of
mainstream Western journalism that Medvedev
presents as a serious challenge to international rela-
tions. Netizen journalism encourages not only the
exposure of the distortions in the mainstream media,
but research and writing to provide the background
and information needed to determine how to settle a
conflict. By challenging the media campaign foment-
ing a conflict, netizen journalism becomes a partici-
pant in the media war at the UN.
II The Cheonan Incident, the UN, and
Netizen Journalism
I first turn to the details of what happened with
the Cheonan incident which was brought to the UN in
2010, to examine how netizen journalism affected the
media war in that situation and helped to make a
significant contribution to the peaceful resolution of
the conflict that was embraced at the Security Coun-
cil.
The Cheonan incident concerns a South Korean
war ship which broke up and sank on March 26, 2010.
At the time it was involved in naval exercises with the
U.S. military in an area in the West Sea/Yellow Sea
between North Korea and China. This is a situation
that had been the subject of much discussion on the
Internet.
Initially the South Korean government and the
U.S. government said there was no indication that
North Korea was involved. Then at a press conference
on May 20, 2010, the South Korean government
claimed that a torpedo fired by a North Korean
submarine had exploded in the water near the
Cheonan, causing a pressure wave that was responsi-
ble for the sinking. Many criticisms of this scenario
have been raised.
There was no direct evidence of any North
Korean submarine in the vicinity of the Cheonan. Nor
was there any evidence that a torpedo was actually
fired causing the pressure wave phenomenon. Hence
the South Korean government had no actual case that
could be presented in a court of law to support its
claims.
In fact, if this claim of a pressure wave were true
even those involved in the investigation of the inci-
dent acknowledge that “North Korea would be the
first to have succeeded at using this kind of a bubble
jet torpedo action in actual fighting.”
3
The dispute over the sinking of the Cheonan was
brought to the United Nations Security Council in
June 2010 and a Presidential Statement was agreed to
a month later, in July.
4
An account of some of what happened in the
Security Council during this process is described in an
article that has appeared in several different Spanish
language publications.
5
The article describes the
experience of the Mexican Ambassador to the UN,
Claude Heller in his position as president of the
Security Council for the month of June 2010. (The
presidency rotates each month to a different Security
Council member.)
In a letter to the Security Council dated June 4,
the Republic of Korea (ROK) more commonly known
as South Korea, asked the Council to take up the
Cheonan dispute. Park Im-kook, then the South
Korean Ambassador to the UN, requested that the
Security Council consider the matter of the Cheonan
and respond in an appropriate manner.
6
The letter
described an investigation into the sinking of the
Cheonan carried out by South Korean government
and military officials. The conclusion of the South
Korean investigation was to accuse North Korea of
Page 18
sinking the South Korean ship.
Sin Son Ho is the UN Ambassador from the
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),
which is more commonly known as North Korea. He
sent a letter dated June 8 to the Security Council,
which denied the allegation that his country was to
blame.
7
His letter urged the Security Council not to be
the victim of deceptive claims, as had happened with
Iraq in 2003. The letter asked the Security Council to
support his government’s call to be able to examine
the evidence and to be involved in a new and more
independent investigation on the sinking of the
Cheonan.
How would the Mexican Ambassador as Presi-
dent of the Security Council during the month of June
handle this dispute? This was a serious issue facing
Heller as he began his presidency in June 2010.
Heller adopted what he referred to as a “bal-
anced” approach to treat both governments on the
Korean peninsula in a fair and objective manner. He
held bilateral meetings with each member of the
Security Council which led to support for a process of
informal presentations by both of the Koreas to the
members of the Security Council.
What Heller called “interactive informal meet-
ings” were held on June 14 with the South Koreans
and the North Koreans in separate sessions attended
by the Security Council members, who had time to
ask questions and then to discuss the presentations.
At a media stakeout on June 14, after the day’s
presentations ended, Heller said that it was important
to have received the detailed presentation by South
Korea and also to know and learn the arguments of
North Korea. He commented that “it was very impor-
tant that North Korea approached the Security Coun-
cil.” In response to a question about his view on the
issues presented, he replied, “I am not a judge. I think
we will go on with the consultations to deal in a
proper manner on the issue.”
8
Heller also explained that, “the Security Council
issued a call to the parties to refrain from any act that
could escalate tensions in the region, and makes an
appeal to preserve peace and stability in the region.”
Though the North Korean Ambassador at the UN
rarely speaks to the media, the North Korean UN
delegation scheduled a press conference for the
following day, Tuesday, June 15. During the press
conference, the North Korean Ambassador presented
North Korea’s refutation of the allegations made by
South Korea. Also he explained North Korea’s
request to be able to send an investigation team to the
site where the sinking of the Cheonan occurred. South
Korea had denied the request. During its press confer-
ence, the North Korean Ambassador noted that there
was widespread condemnation of the investigation in
South Korea and around the world.
9
The press conference held on June 15 was a
lively event. Many of the journalists who attended
were impressed and requested that there be future
press conferences with the North Korean Ambassa-
dor.
During June, Heller held meetings with the UN
ambassadors from each of the two Koreas and then
with Security Council members about the Cheonan
issue. On the last day of his presidency, on June 30,
he was asked by the media what was happening about
the Cheonan dispute. He responded that the issue of
contention was over the evaluation of the South
Korean government’s investigation.
Heller described how he introduced what he
refers to as “an innovation” into the Security Council
process. As the month of June ended, the issue was
not yet resolved, but the “innovation” set a basis to
build on the progress that was achieved during the
month of his presidency.
The “innovation” Heller referred to, was a
summary he made of the positions of each of the two
Koreas on the issue, taking care to present each
objectively. Heller explained that this summary was
not an official document, so it did not have to be
approved by the other members of the Council. This
summary provided the basis for further negotiations.
He believed that it had a positive impact on the
process of consideration in the Council, making
possible the agreement that was later to be expressed
in the Presidential statement on the Cheonan that was
issued by the Security Council on July 9.
Heller’s goal, he explained, was to “at all times
be as objective as possible” so as to avoid increasing
the conflict on the Korean peninsula. Such a goal is
the Security Council’s obligation under the UN
Charter.
In the Security Council’s Presidential Statement
(PRST) on the Cheonan, what stands out is that the
statement follows the pattern of presenting the views
of each of the two Koreas and urging that the dispute
be settled in a peaceful manner.
In the PRST, the members of the Security Coun-
cil did not blame North Korea. Instead they refer to
the South Korean investigation and its conclusion,
Page 19
expressing their “deep concern” about the “findings”
of the investigation.
The PRST explains that “The Security Council
takes note of the responses from other relevant
parties, including the DPRK, which has stated that it
had nothing to do with the incident.”
10
With the exception of North Korea, it is not
indicated who “the other relevant parties” are. It does
suggest, however, that it is likely there are some
Security Council members, not just Russia and China,
who did not agree with the conclusions of the South
Korean investigation.
Analyzing the Presidential Statement, the Korean
newspaper Hankyoreh noted that the statement
“allows for a double interpretation and does not blame
or place consequences on North Korea.”
11
Such a
possibility of a “double interpretation” allows differ-
ent interpretations
The Security Council action on the Cheonan took
place in a situation where there had been a wide
ranging international critique, especially in the online
media, about the problems of the South Korean
investigation, and of the South Korean government’s
failure to make public any substantial documentation
of its investigation, along with its practice of harass-
ing critics of the South Korean government claims.
12
One such critique included a three part report by
the South Korean NGO People’s Solidarity for
Participatory Democracy (PSPD).
13
This report raised
a number of questions and problems with the South
Korean government’s case. The PSPD document was
posted widely on the Internet and also sent to the
President of the United Nations Security Council for
distribution to those Security Council members
interested and to the South Korean Mission to the UN.
There were many blog comments about the
Cheonan issue in Korean.
14
There were also some
bloggers writing in English who became active in
critiquing the South Korean investigation and the role
of the U.S. in the conflict.
One such blogger, Scott Creighton who uses the
pen name Willy Loman, wrote a post titled “The
Sinking of the Cheonan: We are being lied to.”
15
On
his blog “American Everyman,” he explained how
there was a discrepancy between the diagram dis-
played by the South Korean government in a press
conference it held, and the part of the torpedo on
display in the glass case below the diagram.
He showed that the diagram did not match the
part of the torpedo on display. The South Korean
government had claimed that the diagram displayed
above the glass case was from a North Korean bro-
chure offering the torpedo identified as the CHT-02D.
There were many comments on his post, includ-
ing some from netizens in South Korea. Also the
mainstream conservative media in South Korea
carried accounts of his critique.
Three weeks later, at a news conference, a South
Korean government official acknowledged that the
diagram presented by the South Korean government
was not of the same torpedo as the part displayed in
the glass case. Instead the diagram was of the PT97W
torpedo, not the CHT-02D torpedo as claimed.
Describing the significance of having docu-
mented one of the fallacies in the South Korean
government’s case, Creighton writes
16
: “(I)n the end,
thanks to valuable input from dozens of concerned
people all across the world…. Over 100,000 viewers
read that article and it was republished on dozens of
sites all across the world (even translated). A South
Korean MSM outlet even posted our diagram depict-
ing the glaring discrepancies between the evidence
and the drawing of the CHT-O2D torpedo, which a
high-ranking military official could only refute by
stating he had 40 years military experience and to his
knowledge, I had none. But what I had, what we had,
was literally thousands of people all across the world,
scientists, military members, and just concerned
investigative bloggers who were committed to the
truth and who took the time to contribute to what we
were doing here.”
“‘40 years military experience’ took a beating
from ‘we the people WorldWide’ and that is the way
it is supposed to be.”
This is just one of a number of serious questions
and challenges that were raised about the South
Korean government’s scenario of the sinking of the
Cheonan.
Other influential events which helped to chal-
lenge the South Korean government’s claims were a
press conference in Japan held on July 9 by two
academic scientists. The two scientists presented
results of experiments they did which challenged the
results of experiments the South Korean government
used to support its case.
17
These scientists also wrote
to the Security Council with their findings.
Also a significant challenge to the South Korean
government report was the finding of a Russian team
of four sent to South Korea to look at the data from
the investigation and to do an independent evaluation
Page 20
of it. The Russian team did not accept the South
Korean government’s claim that a pressure wave from
a torpedo caused the Cheonan to sink.
18
Such efforts along with online posts and discus-
sions by many netizens provided a catalyst for the
actions of the UN Security Council concerning the
Cheonan incident.
The mainstream U.S. media for the most part
chose to ignore the many critiques which have ap-
peared. These critiques of the South Korean govern-
ment’s investigation of the Cheonan sinking have
appeared mainly on the Internet, not only in Korean,
but also in English, in Japanese, and in other lan-
guages. They present a wide ranging challenge of the
veracity and integrity of the South Korean investiga-
tion and its conclusions.
An article in the Los Angeles Times on July 28
noted the fact, however, that the media in the U.S. had
ignored the critique of the South Korean government
investigation that is being discussed online and spread
around the world.
19
On August 31, an Op. Ed. by
Donald Gregg, a former U.S. Ambassador to South
Korea, appeared in the New York Times, titled “Test-
ing North Korean Waters.” The article noted that “not
everyone agrees that the Cheonan was sunk by North
Korea. Pyongyang has consistently denied responsi-
bility, and both China and Russia opposed a U.N.
Security Council resolution laying blame on North
Korea.”
20
Netizens who live in different countries and
speak different languages took up to critique the
claims of the South Korean government about the
cause of the sinking of the Cheonan. Such netizen
activity had an important effect on the international
community. It also appears to have acted as a catalyst
affecting the actions of the UN Security Council in its
treatment of the Cheonan dispute.
In his Op Ed in the New York Times, Gregg
argued that, “The disputed interpretations of the
sinking of the Cheonan remain central to any effort to
reverse course and to get on track toward dealing
effectively with North Korea on critical issues such as
the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
North Korea referred to the widespread interna-
tional sentiment in its June 8 letter to the Security
Council. The UN Ambassador from North Korea
wrote: “It would be very useful to remind ourselves of
the ever-increasing international doubts and criti-
cisms, going beyond the internal boundary of south
Korea, over the ‘investigation result’ from the very
moment of its release….”
The situation that the North Korean Ambassador
referred to is the result of actions on the part of South
Korean netizens and civil society who challenged the
process and results of the South Korean government’s
investigation. Also, there was support for the South
Korean netizens by bloggers, scientists and journalists
around the world, writing mainly online but in a
multitude of languages and from many perspectives.
Several of the non-governmental organizations and
scientists in South Korea sent the results of their
investigations and research to members of the Secu-
rity Council to provide them with the background and
facts needed to make an informed decision.
21
The result of such efforts is something that is
unusual in the process of recent Security Council
activity. The Security Council process in the Cheonan
issue provided for an impartial analysis of the prob-
lem and an effort to hear from those with an interest
in the issue.
The effort in the Security Council was described
by the Mexican Ambassador, as upholding the princi-
ples of impartiality and respectful treatment of all
members toward resolving a conflict between nations
in a peaceful manner. It represents an important
example of the Security Council acting in conformity
with its obligations as set out in the UN charter.
In the July 9 Presidential Statement, the Security
Council urged that the parties to the dispute over the
sinking of the Cheonan find a means to peacefully
settle the dispute. The statement says:
“The Security Council calls for full adherence to
the Korean Armistice Agreement and encourages the
settlement of outstanding issues on the Korean
peninsula by peaceful means to resume direct dia-
logue and negotiation through appropriate channels as
early as possible, with a view to avoiding conflicts
and averting escalation.”
Ambassador Gregg is only one of many around
the world who have expressed their concern with the
course of action of the U.S. and South Korea as
contrary to the direction of the UN Security Council
Presidential Statement. Gregg explained his fear that
the truth of the Cheonan sinking “may elude us, as it
did after the infamous Tonkin Bay incident of 1964,
that was used to drag us (the U.S.) into the abyss of
the Vietnam War.”
22
Despite this dilemma, the Security Council
action on the Cheonan dispute, if it is recognized and
supported, has set the basis instead for a peaceful
Page 21
resolution of the conflict.
23
While the netizen community in South Korea and
internationally were able to provide an effective
challenge to the misrepresentations by the South
Korean government on the Cheonan incident, the
struggle over the misrepresentations of the conflict in
Libya was less successful.
III False Claims that Led to the War
Against Libya
A short article at the Current Events Inquiry
website lists several provocative claims which helped
to provide a false pretext for the NATO bombing of
Libya.
24
Among them were reports by Al Jazeera and
the BBC that the Libyan government had carried out
air strikes against Benghazi and Tripoli on February
22, 2011. Russia Today reports that the Russian
military who had monitored the unrest in Libya from
the beginning, “says nothing of the sort was going on
on the ground.”
25
According to the report by the Russian military,
the attacks had never occurred.
Another such claim widely circulated by major
Western media very early in the Libya conflict was
that the Libyan government “is massacring unarmed
demonstrators.” The NGO, the International Crisis
Group (ICG) in its June 6, 2011 report says that such
claims were inaccurate. The report explains that this
version of the events in Libya “would appear to
ignore evidence that the protest movement exhibited
a violent aspect from early on.” This includes evi-
dence that early in the protests, “demonstrations were
infiltrated by violent elements.”
Similarly the ICG report found no evidence for
claims that the Libyan government “engaged in
anything remotely warranting use of the term ‘geno-
cide’.”
A similar criticism was made of the claim that
“foreign mercenaries” were employed by the Libyan
government. A report by Amnesty International
which is described in an article in the Independent
newspaper in the U.K. on June 24, 2011 says that,
“The Amnesty Report found no evidence for this.”
Netizen Journalism on the Conflict in Libya
Presents a Different View
From the early days of the false media claims
targeting Libya for an outside intervention to remove
its government, a growing set of articles and com-
ments were written and published online exposing the
lack of evidence for these claims and demonstrating
that they were distortions with a political purpose.
These articles exposing the distortions were read and
distributed by a growing set of online reporters. These
examples demonstrate that a different form of journal-
ism is emerging. While such a form of journalism
may not yet appear to present an adequate challenge
to the gross misrepresentations and inaccuracies
spread by much of the mainstream Western and Arab
satellite media about the Libyan conflict, the nature of
this newly developing form of journalism is important
to explore and to understand.
This new journalism has at least two important
aspects. One is serious research into the background,
context and political significance of conflicts like that
in Libya or Syria. Another is the application of this
research to the writing of articles or to comments in
response to both mainstream and alternative media
articles.
As an example of this netizen journalism related
to the conflict in Libya, I want to refer to a small
collection of articles titled “Libya, the UN, and
Netizen Journalism.”
26
This collection contains
articles focusing on a critique of actions at the UN
that provided the authority for the NATO war against
Libya.
One article in that collection, “UN Security
Council March 17 Meeting to Authorize Bombing of
Libya All Smoke and Mirrors” is about the Security
Council meeting which passed Resolution 1973 by a
vote of 10 in favor and 5 abstentions. The article
includes some sample comments from online discus-
sions about what was happening in Libya at the time.
While the UNSC members at the March 17 meeting
speak about their support for the resolution to “protect
Libyan civilians,” there is no acknowledgment that
the resolution instead will in effect support the ongo-
ing armed insurrection against the government of
Libya.
While Security Council delegates and the main-
stream media described what was happening in Libya
as “peaceful protestors” attacked by a “brutal govern-
ment,” online discussion of the situation during this
same period describes the opposition in Libya as
engaged in an armed insurrection. The following
sample from comments from a discussion of an article
on the Guardian (U.K.) website in March 2011
provides an example of netizens questioning and
critiquing the actions of the Security Council and
Page 22
asking why the UN is protecting and supporting an
armed insurgency
27
:
“Armed civilians or ununiformed fighters have
no place being supported or protected by our air
power. They carry a gun and get targeted that is their
look out, not our job to hit the other side.”
JamesStGeorge, 22 March 2011
“The thing is the rebels are ‘civilians’ when ever it
suits us.” lundiel, 23 March 2011
“Of course once you start bombing, there will
clearly be plenty of collateral damage. This then
makes a complete mockery of the stated purpose of
the intervention, to save innocent civilians.”
contractor000, 23 March 2011
“Yes tanks are not planes! Or in the air flying.
The civilian protection has no place extending to
armed rebels, they are not civilians.”
CockfingersMcGee, 23 March 2011
“So we are supposed to accept this scenario that
the Military aggression against Libya is to do with
protecting the protesters, the revolution, innocent
civilians, the rebels etc. This sounds very reminiscent
of attacking Iraq because of WMD.”
comunismlives, 22 March 2011
Similar discussions were going on at other
websites. Here, for example, are some comments
from a discussion at the Hidden Harmonies website.
28
“Resolution 1973 is also directed at rebel force,
but we are not bombing the rebels, but usurping the
resolution to provide air cover in aid of the rebels.
Prolonging Libya’s civil war only brings more harm
to the civilians, and facilitating division of Libya’s
sovereignty, are contravening/violating the resolu-
tion.” Charles Liu, March 22nd, 2011
“We can argue technicalities, but everyone
knows the current U.S.-led bombings are toward
weakening Qadhafi and to bolster the rebel opposi-
tion. Obama and the Coalition publicly say so.”
“Its like seeing a thief caught on video sneaking
around in a store and after seeing no one around,
pockets the candy. He also says he is stealing.”
“Now we are suppose to ‘prove’ it? That’s quite
retarded.” DeWang, March 22nd, 2011
“‘under threat of attack’ clause includes threat of
attack by the rebels, yet we are not bombing them for
their incursion outside Benghazi. This violates the
preamble’s stated limit of military authorization to not
divide Libya’s sovereignty. Not withstanding any sort
of red herring and semantics wiggling, the selective
air strike in aid of the rebels violates UN resolution
1973, while 1970 gave no legitimacy to the armed
rebellion in Libya, which the legitimate government
of Libya has the sovereign right to sanction against.”
Charles Liu, March 22nd, 2011
“I just don’t understand why the bombing is
taking place at all.”
“1) It is a civil war. Why should the west take sides?”
“2) Wasn’t Qaddafi the U.S.’s pet since Bush II? Why
is the U.S. seeking to remove one of their puppets? Is
the U.S./west looking for another Iraq?”
“I wouldn’t be one bit surprised if this war was
instigated by wall street looking to make a killing on
oil and commodities.” colin, March 22nd, 2011
“It’s a historical pattern of these UN Resolutions,
including way back when the Korean War started,
that ‘all necessary force’ is the general catch phrase
for ‘unrestrained warfare’ limited only by what
weapons are available.”
“Now, even the high cost of the cruise missiles,
$1 million a pop, is not enough to deter the launching
of 100's of these.”
“Well, I guess we are going to see the cost,
sooner or later.” r v March 23rd, 2011
These two examples of selected comments from
online discussions at the time demonstrate that
netizens raised serious concerns and critiques of the
Security Council action passing UN Resolution 1973,
while the mainstream media mainly reported what
Western governments were saying.
Similar questions and critiques were raised
throughout the conflict in articles by independent
journalists who were in Libya during much of the
period of the defense of Libya from the NATO
bombing and the NATO support for the armed insur-
rection in Libya. Such journalists included Mahdi
Darius Nazemroaya of Global Research, Thierry
Meyssan, from Voltairenet, Lizzie Phalen who
reported for various outlets including Presstv, and
Franklin Lamb whose articles were carried on various
web sites.
Also a group that called itself Concerned Afri-
cans published an open letter which they also submit-
ted to the UN Secretary General, the UN Security
Council and the UN General Assembly. The letter
which was signed by over 300 concerned Africans,
described what it called the contribution to “the
subversion of international law.” The letter main-
tained that in passing UNSCR 1973, “the Security
Page 23
Council used the still unresolved issue in international
law of ‘the right to protect’ the so called R2P, to
justify the Chapter VII military intervention in
Libya.”
29
Other articles focused on the violations in
Security Council procedures represented by allowing
Libyan officials who had defected to appear at the
Security Council representing Libya.
30
Similarly, Professor Mahmood Mamdani, at
Columbia University who has studied the region and
its history, points to the “political and legal infrastruc-
ture for intervention in otherwise independent coun-
tries,” namely the Security Council and the Interna-
tional Criminal Court working ‘selectively’, that has
been created by Western powers.
31
Among the many websites at the time publishing
articles critiquing the UN’s actions in Libya were The
Center for Research on Globalization, Voltaire
Network, Libya 360, Mathaba, April Media, and
American Everyman.
32
During this period, several of the independent
journalists or the journalists writing articles challeng-
ing the Security Council actions providing for the
bombing of Libya appeared on satellite news pro-
grams like that of RT News and Press TV. Also there
were interviews and videos posted online.
While these articles, discussions, critiques and
analyses did not succeed in stopping the NATO attack
on Libya, they created an example of more accurate
reporting and analysis about the attack on Libya. A
few months later when an Aljazeera journalist ex-
plained why he resigned from Aljazeera, he pointed to
the pressure from Aljazeera to misrepresent what was
happening in his reporting. He explained that the
support of Qatar for the militarization of the Libyan
conflict was a turning point in the distortion of the
news at his station.
33
Also as the following comment by a netizen
indicates, someone who supported the attack on Libya
and who has learned lessons from what happened, is
more likely to question the media claims about Syria:
“(I)t is also important to me that I feel I was deceived
about the Libyan situation. Being like Libya would
itself be reason to oppose intervention in Syria.”
And others suggest that the experience of
NATO’s actions in Libya has been having an impact
on what some at the UN and some of the nations of
the UN will do with respect to Syria. As one Netizen
wrote after hearing of the Houla massacre
34
:
“What has changed in the last week following the
murder of more than 100 people in Houla, including
dozens of children, is that a new urgency and disgust
has been injected into an escalating crisis that has
brought the country to the verge of civil war. The role
of the Syrian opposition should also be clearly inves-
tigated as well. Rather than just blaming Assad in a
media witch-hunt. As many of those killed were
supposed to be people who refused to collaborate with
the opposition.”
“It is obvious that the Russians and Chinese have
learnt from Libya too. Where the number of people
killed by unbridled NATO bombing has been care-
fully suppressed, and the use of the UN to cover
‘regime change’, has only bought chaos in its wake.
So the Oil there has changed hands, but most of the
north of Africa is now transformed into a violent
marasme. Both of those major powers now know
from experience that – NATO with UN agreement
means the destruction of peace, the loss of their assets
in the region, and the continuation of war into other
areas (Iran, Yemen, Pakistan etc. or closer to their
own spheres of influence. China sea – the ‘Stans’, the
southern (Muslim) aligned ex-Russian states etc. or
into South America). They do not see any end. So
they must draw a line somewhere.”
“Is the object of the west once again to cause a
major mid-eastern war ?”
shaun, 2 June 2012 10:00PM
IV The Syrian Crisis and the UN: Critique
of the Reporting on Syria
Similar to the mainstream media war against
Libya, there is a set of false narratives in the main-
stream Western and Arab satellite media related to
what has been happening in Syria. While such media
essentially frames its news about Syria to demonize
the Syrian government and its President Bashar
Assad, its news stories support the armed opposition,
and its journalists rely on opposition sources for the
news that is to be reported.
In this situation, netizen journalism presents a
critique of the mainstream media support for what is
an armed insurrection against Syria. The forms this
netizen journalism takes include articles, interviews,
commentary, historical background, analysis and
discussion. Critical articles about the mainstream
media reports and misrepresentations are also com-
mon.
Page 24
The Houla Massacre
The original mainstream media account of what
has come to be known as the Houla massacre was that
an opposition demonstration was suppressed by
Syrian government shelling.
Criticism of this claim soon emerged pointing to
the fact that the majority of those murdered were
killed at close range, not by shelling. In response, the
mainstream Western media produced a new element,
a so called pro government militia that they claimed
had gone into the homes of those killed and carried
out the massacre. Why an alleged pro government
militia, the so called ‘Shabiha’ would go into the
homes of people was not explained. Whether the
people massacred were pro or anti government is an
issue still in contention.
When Alex Thomson, a British Channel 4 re-
porter, went to the village that the opposition in Houla
had said had produced the so called Shabiha accused
of the attack in Houla, he found no evidence of any
such militia. He writes, “Beyond a few languid
soldiers and the odd policeman no sign of militias. No
trace of heavy weapons. No tank tracks on the
roads…. Well these Alawites insist there are not, nor
have ever been, Shabiha in these villages.”
35
Neither do the mainstream Western media
wonder why the Syrian government would carry out
a massacre of civilians at the very time that the
United Nations General Assembly and the United
Nations Security Council are planning to discuss
Syria.
In his book Liar’s Poker which analyzes the
disinformation used to justify the NATO bombing of
Serbia, the Belgian journalist Michel Collon observes
that “Information is already a battlefield which is part
of war.”
36
Seeking Facts About the Houla Massacre
Shortly after the news spread about the Houla
massacre, netizen media sites included articles which
revealed that the area where the massacre was carried
out was under the control of the Free Syrian Army,
not of the Syrian government. A Russian news team
had gained access to the site the day following the
massacre and did interviews to determine what had
happened. Their report was originally published in
Russia but soon was translated into English.
Their account noted that Houla is an administra-
tive area, made up of three villages. Houla is not the
name of a town. Some of this area had been under
control of armed insurgents for a number of weeks.
The Syrian army maintained certain checkpoints. The
Russian journalists’ account explains that on the
evening of May 24, the Free Syrian Army launched
an operation to take control of the checkpoints,
bringing 600-800 armed insurgents from different
areas.
At the same time that there was the fight over the
checkpoints, several armed insurgents went into
certain homes and massacred the members of several
families. Among the families targeted was a family
related to a recently elected People’s Assembly
representative. This family and another family that
were killed were said by some local people to be
families that supported the Syrian government. “Other
victims included the family of two journalists for Top
News and New Orient Express, press agencies associ-
ated with Voltaire Network,” reports the news and
analysis site Voltairenet.
37
Soon after the news of the massacre appeared,
there were articles challenging the claims that it was
the work of the Syrian government. In his article
“Death Squads Ravage Syrian Town – West Calls for
‘Action’,” Tony Cartalucci of the Land Destroyer
Report blog, writes “‘Cui Bono?’ To whose benefit
does it serve to massacre very publicly entire families
in close quarters and broadcast the images of their
handiwork worldwide?”
38
He argues that this is in no
way in the Syrian government’s interest.
In another article he points to a U.K. government
official blaming the deaths on “artillery fire” by the
government. Claiming to be responding to such
reports, several governments including the U.K.
government expelled Syrian diplomats. Even though
these claims were soon demonstrated to be false,
Carlucci points out that there was no retraction from
the U.K. government or reversal of the expulsion of
Syrian diplomats. Cartalucci writes:
39
“U.K. Foreign
Office Minister Alistair Burt peddling what is now a
confirmed fabrication, told for days to the public as
the West maneuvered to leverage it against the Syrian
government. The UN has now confirmed that artillery
fired by government troops were not responsible for
the massacre, and instead carried out by unidentified
militants. Despite this, the U.K. has failed to retract
earlier accusations and has instead expelled Syrian
diplomats in an increasingly dangerous, irrational,
aggressive posture.”
Page 25
Others online recognized that a photo BBC
posted which was allegedly of the corpses from the
Houla Massacre, was actually a photo that had been
taken in 2003 of deaths in Iraq. Describing how the
misrepresentation was detected, Sy Walker explains
on his blog
40
: “The information on which it’s based
comes from a pro-Syrian tweeter called Hey Joud,
whom I’ve found to be well informed and savvy.”
“A friend of this tweeter discovered the misrepre-
sentation and tweeted about it:
‘@BBCWorld propaganda:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-image… showing a
pic of bodies from Iraq claiming it’s the
?#HoulaMassacre? ?#Syria?’”
http://shineyourlight-shineyourlight.blogspot.ca/201
2/01/9-nike-years-of-war-in-iraq.htmleyourlight-shi
neyourlight.blogspot.ca/2012/01/9-nike
BBC changed the photo, Walker explains, add-
ing: “This is not the first time I’ve reported on image
fakery with regard to Syria. The Western media’s
sustained attack on that beleaguered nation has now
been underway for more than a year. A comprehen-
sive account of all its deceptions and misreporting
over that period would fill many volumes.”
In a blog post titled “Hula Hoax,” Mathias
Broeckers also comments on the BBC presenting the
2003 Iraq photo as a photo of Houla. Broeckers
writes:
41
“It is the forbidden geopolitical agenda, the
big Picture that isn’t talked about, as opposed to the
horrors by which the wars are legitimized.”
Other online journalists comment on the bias of
the United Nations Human Rights Council and its
inability to do an objective investigation of the facts
of the Houla Massacre. Reporting about an interaction
between an anti-war activist from the “No War Net-
work”, Marinella Corregia, and Rupert Colville,
spokesman for the Human Rights Council, an article
on the Uprooted Palestinians blog is titled “UN report
on Houla massacre? But they only talk to Syrian
opposition – by phone.” Colville explains to Corregia
that the Human Rights Council will do its investiga-
tion by speaking with the local network of opposition
members they have contact with in Syria by phone,
with opposition members they have met in Turkey
and with opposition members they have met in
Geneva.
42
Martin Janssen, a Dutch Middle East expert and
journalist who reports from Damascus and whose
articles appear online is also concerned that there are
other important sources of information that have
information about what happened, but that the Human
Relations Council investigators will not speak with
them because the investigators are only interested in
hearing from opposition sources.
43
Janssen said that he was in contact with a Catho-
lic organization in the area of Houla, a monastery in
Qara in the Homs-Hana region, and the two Russian
journalists, Marat Musin and Olga Kulygina, who
were able to visit Houla the day after the massacre, on
May 25 with a TV crew. Janssen reported that Musin
and Kulygina tried to offer their findings to the UN
Special Commission on Human Rights doing the
investigation, but that the Commission was not
interested in hearing from them. Coville indicated that
the sources the investigators had were adequate
because all their other sources had already informed
them that the ‘shabibha’ were responsible for the
massacre. The Commission was not interested in
hearing from anyone with different views or with
information different from that given to them by the
opposition.
The online discussion in response to Janssen’s
article was a serious discussion critiquing the main-
stream media and putting forward the criteria of what
a media should do. The discussion is an important one
as it sets out both the failings of the current main-
stream media and the needed objectives for a more
competent media.
Netizen Journalism Coverage of Houla Massacre
Along with the account of what happened in the
al Houla region, were articles proposing a broader
perspective. This included historical background
describing where the U.S. and NATO utilized death
squads in prior conflicts. One article “Syria Under
Attack by Globalist Death Squads,” by Bramdon
Turbeville presents background on how certain U.S.
officials including Robert S. Ford, the former U.S.
Ambassador to Syria, and John Negroponte who was
U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in 1981-1985 and later
in Iraq, supported death squads first in Nicaragua
(known as the “Salvador Option”) and later in Iraq.
44
Turbeville’s article and articles by others like the
article titled, “The Salvadorian Option for Syria:
U.S.-NATO Sponsored Death Squads Integrate
‘Opposition Forces’” by Michel Chossudovsky, put
the death squads functioning in Syria in this historical
context.
Along with the articles I am describing that are
available in English, there are also a wide range of
Page 26
similar articles online in French, German, and other
languages. There are also online discussions and
comments about the Syria conflict. A collection of
articles, The Houla Massacre: The Disinformation
Campaign, available at Global Research website, lists
a number of the articles recently published on the
media war over the Syrian conflict.
45
There are various forms of online discussions.
One such discussion on an online forum was initiated
with the post, “Houla Massacre, Syria: What If?” The
discussion considered whether the Syrian government
claims that it was not responsible for the massacre
was or wasn’t a lie. Online sources referred to in
discussions like this could be either mainstream
media or alternative media sources. Through discus-
sion, referring to various articles and details, netizens
in this online forum concluded that armed insurgents
were to blame, not the Syrian government.
46
The Media and Syrian Sovereignty
Since it is rare at the current time that the main-
stream Western media deviates from a hostility
toward the Syrian government and a sympathy with
the armed insurgents, it seems significant that in
Germany one of the mainstream national newspapers,
the Frankfurter Allgmeine Zeitung has printed a
significant story documenting the role of the Free
Syrian Army in the Houla massacre. The journalist,
Rainer Hermann, speaks Arabic. He has been report-
ing from the Middle East for over 22 years and he did
his thesis on modern Syrian social history. His article
“Abermals Massaker in Syrien” appeared in the
Frankfurter Allgmeine Zeitung on June 7.
47
His article has been welcomed by many netizens
and has been reprinted at various online news sites.
Several online sites featured the article and offered an
English translation of it. The story corroborated the
report of the Russian journalists that the Free Syrian
Army insurgents were behind the Houla massacre.
Similarly there was an anonymous criticism of
Rainer’s article on the Houla massacre from opposi-
tion forces, and Rainer wrote a second article “The
Extermination” responding to the criticism.
48
His
article appears to be his response to sources troubled
over the attacks and discrimination that the armed
insurgents have been introducing into the Syrian
struggle. But perhaps it is also an indication that
netizen journalism is having some effect in the
current media war over Syria.
Similarly, there is a report by the British media
criticism site, Media Lens on the low key recognition
by a BBC journalist that it is not adequate to blame
the Houla massacre on Syria’s President Assad, as
several of the media are doing, without more knowl-
edge of what actually happened, and with an approach
which includes more shades of gray rather than just
treating it as a stark black or white issue.
Netizen Journalism and the UN
Since the Houla massacre, the Syrian conflict,
some say, appears to be at a turning point. Russia’s
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has a recent article
arguing that there are lessons that have been learnt
from what happened with Libya and that the UN has
to take into account these lessons. In his op-ed, “On
the Right Side of History,” Lavrov writes:
49
When deciding to support UN Security
Council Resolution 1970 and making no objec-
tion to Resolution 1973 on Libya, we believed
that these decisions would help limit the exces-
sive use of force and pave the way for a political
settlement. Unfortunately, the actions undertaken
by NATO countries under these resolutions led
to their grave violation and support for one of the
parties to the civil war, with the goal of ousting
the existing regime-damaging in the process the
authority of the Security Council....
It is clear that after what had happened in
Libya it was impossible to go along with the UN
Security Council taking decisions that would not
be adequately explicit and would allow those
responsible for their implementation to act at
their own discretion. Any mandate given on
behalf of the entire international community
should be as clear and precise as possible in
order to avoid ambiguity. It is therefore impor-
tant to understand what is really happening in
Syria and how to help that country to pass
though this painful stage of its history.
Along with such comments from diplomats,
netizens are covering and discussing what the UN is
doing about the Syrian conflict. A summary on the
Moon of Alabama blog of the General Assembly
meeting discussing the Houla Massacre described
how the UN Secretary General, the Secretary General
of the League of Arab States and other officials, along
with many of the representatives of the nations at the
UN, blamed the massacre on the Syrian government,
even though there were few facts available as to what
had happened and who was behind the events.
50
Page 27
Though rarely mentioned in the mainstream media,
there were comments by the ambassadors of several
member states including the Syrian Ambassador and
the Ambassador of the Russian Federation, those of
Venezuela, of Nicaragua, and a few others calling for
an investigation, into the details of the massacre,
before making any rush to judgment.
51
V Conclusion: Channels of Communica-
tion for International Relations
In the Libyan and Syrian conflicts, the misrepre-
sentations by the mainstream Western media and
Arab satellite media have seemed difficult to counter
effectively. In the Cheonan situation, the misrepresen-
tations were effectively countered both internally and
on an international level. In his presentation to jour-
nalists at the press conference marking the start of
China’s presidency of the UN Security Council in
March 2011, China’s Ambassador to the UN, Li
Baodong, recognized the impact of the international
media on the work of the Security Council. He went
so far as to refer to the international media as the “16
th
member of the Security Council.”
52
The Cheonan
conflict is one where the international critique of the
South Korean Cheonan report was an encouragement
to at least some members of the Security Council, to
act diplomatically to calm the conflict. Similarly, the
North Korean Ambassador held a rare press confer-
ence and indicated that he found encouragement in
the international support for the critique. Along with
the many online articles by netizens critiquing the
role of the South Korean government in the Cheonan
conflict, progressive media in South Korea covered
the activities of those challenging the Cheonan report
and also reported on the Russian investigation of the
problem. There were also articles in the Chinese
media and the Russian media that critiqued the South
Korean efforts to blame the breakup of the ship on
North Korea.
The actions of the Security Council in the Libya
and the more recent Syria conflict show the serious
nature of the problem Medvedev referred to in his talk
in March.
Looking at the problem it is important to analyze
the nature of the media manipulation and the means
of responding to such distorted information.
In his book The Nerves of Government Karl W.
Deutsch writes that: “Men have long and often
concerned themselves with the power of govern-
ments, much as some observers try to assess the
muscle power of a horse or an athlete. Others have
described the laws and institutions of states, much as
anatomists describe the skeleton or organs of a body.
This book concerns itself less with the bones or
muscles of the body politic than with its nerves – its
channels of communication and decision.”
53
Deutsch goes on to explain that “it might be
profitable to look upon government somewhat less as
a problem of power and somewhat more as a problem
of steering and communication.” He maintains that,
“It is communication, that is, the ability to transmit
messages and to react to them, that makes organiza-
tions….” He proposes that this is true for the cells in
the human body as it is for the “organizations of
thinking human beings in social groups.”
54
The significance of this perspective is that
distorted messages are the basis for distorted social
organization. A social organization that can make an
accurate assessment of the conditions on the ground
in a conflict, is in a position to analyze what is needed
for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.
There are a number of scholarly articles studying
the impact of the Internet on media and on communi-
cation among netizens. Some of the articles focus on
the communication channels created, and the nature
of not only the transmission of information, but also
its reception.
Deutsch makes a distinction between power and
information. He writes that “Power, we might say,
produces changes, information triggers them in a
suitable receiver.”
55
It is not the amount of what is
transmitted that is necessarily significant, but rather
the nature of what it is, what the receiver is, and the
effect of the information on the receiver. Deutsch
gives the example of the relative weakness of the
Nazi quisling government in Norway at the end of
WWII, and the relative strength of the resistance
because it had better channels of communication.
56
Joseph S. Nye in an article, “The Future of
American Power,” argues that information is indeed
important in the battle for the U.S. to try to maintain
its power.
57
He writes that, “Conventional wisdom
holds that the state with the largest army prevails, but
in the information age, the state (or the nonstate actor)
with the best story may sometime win.”
58
He advises,
“It is time for a new narrative about the future of U.S.
power.”
59
But for him, whether or not the story helps
to obtain the desired goal is important, not the truth or
accuracy of the narrative.
Page 28
At a program at the Japan Society in New York
where Nye spoke about his book The Future of
Power, he was asked a question about his view of
U.S. actions in the NATO war against Libya. Nye
responded that what President Barack Obama had
done with respect to the NATO war against Libya was
exactly right.
60
Obama had waited until he had the
needed narrative to justify the military action against
Libya. It was important, Nye explained, that the U.S.
not be seen as once again attacking a Muslim country
as had happened with Iraq. Instead the Arab League
and the UN Security Council resolutions provided a
narrative “of a legitimate enforcement of humanitar-
ian responsibility to protect civilians.” This provided
Obama with the ability to claim that the U.S. was
taking “collective responsibility,” not that the U.S.
was undertaking a military intervention.
The problem with Nye’s argument is that he is
focusing on how the world perceives the action he is
taking, not on the actual nature of the action itself.
But what happened in Libya was a military action
to support an armed insurgency. The NATO bombing
of Libya was not for the protection of civilians, but
for the protection of an armed insurrection against the
government and people of Libya.
Similarly, when the UN Security Council passed
UN Resolution 1973, many of the ambassadors who
spoke said the resolution was to protect peaceful
protesters in Libya. A few days later the Russian
Federation’s President Vladimir Putin, who was then
the Prime Minister of Russia, said that the “protection
of civilians” was but a pretext by which to intervene
in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.
61
Nye’s contention that a convincing narrative can
gain support for actions, fails to recognize the harm in
lives lost and the devastation wrought that results
from the use of “convincing narratives” to justify
actions that are contrary to the obligations of the UN
Charter and the pursuit of the peaceful resolution of
conflicts. Also such duplicity sullies the image of the
United Nations amongst peace loving people around
the world.
I have briefly surveyed research in English about
netizens and have found important scholarship devel-
oping in this field. Similarly, there is scholarship in
journalism which explores the relationship of alterna-
tive journalism and citizenship. I want to propose that
there is a need for research in the field of international
relations and communication which explores the new
forms of online media and discussion that are devel-
oping, often across geographic borders. Those who
have taken up the struggle against the misinformation
in the Cheonan case or against the media attacks on
Libya and Syria are pioneering this relatively new
form of alternative journalism, netizen journalism.
Speaking about the potential for such a journalism
Michael Hauben, whose pioneering research on the
social impact of the Internet recognized the emer-
gence of the netizens, writes:
62
“As people continue to
connect to Usenet and other discussion forums, the
collective population will contribute back to the
human community this new form of news.”
Hauben recognized that a new form of news was
evolving which would include both the contributions
of netizens and the capabilities of the Internet. De-
scribing the frustration of many netizens with the
traditional media that they had to rely on before the
Internet, Hauben wrote, “Today, similarly, the need
for a broader and more cooperative gathering and
reporting of the News has helped create the new
online media that is gradually supplementing tradi-
tional forms of journalism.”
What Hauben realized is there was a symbiosis
developing between the news, netizens and the
Internet. These were evolving into an interdependent
partnership which had become substantial. He wrote,
“the collective body of people assisted by (Usenet)
software, has grown larger than any individual
newspaper….”
There are many examples that have developed of
netizens making their contributions to the News and
the Net.
One important example of this new media was
the anti-cnn web site created in China in 2008.
63
The
website was created in response to Western media
distortions of the Tibet demonstrations and riots and
the website critiqued these distortions.
Netizens in South Korea and in various online
sites around the world took on to challenge the
inaccuracies and serious problems in the South
Korean government investigation into the sinking of
the Cheonan. Their work had an effect at the UN. In
2011, there was an online critique by netizens of the
UN Security Council misrepresentation of the armed
insurgency in Libya as peaceful demonstrators need-
ing foreign military intervention for protection. The
UN can only benefit from such input. It is still too
soon to know whether netizens will be able to have a
significant impact on the UN in its handling of the
crisis in Syria, but those defending Syrian sovereignty
Page 29
have received support and encouragement from the
increasing spread of netizen journalism.
The significance of this new form of journalism
is that there are netizens who are dedicated to doing
the research and analysis to determine the interests
and actions that are too often hidden from public
view. By revealing the actual forces at work, netizens
are making it possible to have a more accurate grasp
of whose interests are being served and what is at
stake in the events that make up the news.
Notes:
1. “Conference organized by the Russian Council for Interna-
tional Affairs,” 23 March 2012, Moscow.
http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/3582
2. He refers to how Libya and more recently Syria have been the
victim of this politics. “How are we to see the mantras repeated
by particular countries that consider themselves the main
exporters of democracy if, say in the Libyan and now the Syrian
cases, countries whose internal political lives are governed by
completely different norms are chosen as models to follow for
democratic development?”
3. “Questions linger 100 days after the Cheonan sinking,”
Hankyoreh, July 3 2010, online at:
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/428715.
html
4. Ronda Hauben, “In Cheonan Dispute UN Security Council
Acts in Accord with UN Charter, 9-5-2012”
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2010/09/05/in_cheonan_dispute
_un_security_council_discovers_un_charter/
5. Maurizio Guerrero, “Heller mediacion de Mexico en conflict
de Peninsula de Corea,” Notimex, July 5, 2010 (published in la
Economic),
http://enlaeconomia.com/news/2010/07/05/69561
6. Security Council, S/2010/281, “Letter dated 4 June 2010”
http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6
D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/DPRK%20S%202010
%20281%20SKorea%20Letter%20and%20Cheonan%20Repo
rt.pdf
7. Security Council, S/2010/294, June 8, 2010 Letter,
http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6
D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/NKorea%20S%20201
0%20294.pdf
8. “Media Stakeout: Informal comments to the Media by the
President of the Security Council and the Permanent Representa-
tive of Mexico, H.E. Mr. Claude Heller on the Cheonan incident
(the sinking of the ship from the Republic of Korea) and on
Kyrgyzstan.”
[Webcast: Archived Video - 5 minutes ]
http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/stakeout/2010/so1006
14pm3.rm
9. Video of North Korean Ambassador Press Conference
http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/ondemand/pressconference/2010
/pc100615am.rm
10. UN Security Council, S/PRST/2010/13
http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N10/443/11/P
DF/N1044311.pdf?OpenElement
11. Lee Jae-hoon, “Presidential Statement allows for a ‘double
interpretation,’ and does not blame or place consequences upon
N. Korea.” Hankyoreh, July 10, 2010.
www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/429768.html
12. Ronda Hauben, “Netizens Question Cause of Cheonan
Tragedy,” OhmyNews International, June 8, 2010.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no
=386108&rel_no=1
Ronda Hauben, “Questioning Cheonan Investigation Stirs
Controversy,” OhmyNews International, June 29, 2010.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_sangview.asp
?no=386133&rel_no=1
13. PSPD Report Sent to Security Council,
http://blog.peoplepower21.org/Peace/31028,
h t t p : / / b l o g . p e o p l e p o w e r 2 1 . o r g / P e a c e / 3 1 0 2 9 ,
http://blog.peoplepower21.org/Peace/31030
14. Yeran Kim, Irkwon Jeong, Hyoungkoo Khang and Bomi
Kim, “Blogging as ‘Recoding’: A Case Study of the Discursive
War Over the Sinking of the Cheonan,” Media International
Australia, November 2011, No 141, pgs 98-106.
15.
http://willyloman.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/not-a-perfect-
match-updated2.jpg
16. “From PCC-772 Cheonan: South Korean Government
Admits the Deception (and then Lies about It),” June 30, 2010.
http://willyloman.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/pcc-772-cheonan
-south-korean-government-admits-the-deception-and-then-lies
-about-it/
17. The press conference was held on July 9 at the Tokyo
Foreign Correspondents Club. The program was titled “Lee and
Suh: Inconsistencies in the Cheonan Report.”
http://www.fccj.or.jp/node/5810. See also, David Cyranoski,
“Controversy over South Korea’s Sunken Ship,” Nature, July
8,2010, online at:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100708/full/news.2010.343
.html?s=news_rss
18. The Russian team proposed a different theory for how the
Cheonan sank. They had observed that the ship’s propeller had
become entangled in a fishing net and subsequently that a
possible cause of the sinking could have been that the ship had
hit the antennae of a mine which then exploded. “Russian Navy
Team’s Analysis of the Cheonan Incident,” Posted on July 27,
Hankyoreh, modified on July 29.
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/43223
0.html The Russian Experts document is titled “Data from the
Russian Naval Expert Group’s Investigation into the Cause of the
South Korean Naval Vessel Cheonan’s Sinking.”
See also “Russia’s Cheonan Investigation Suspects that Sinking
Cheonan Ship was Caused by a Mine,” posted on July 27, 2010,
Hankyoreh, modified on July 28, 2010.
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/43223
2.html
19. Barbara Demick and John M. Glionna, “Doubts Surface on
North Korean Role in Ship Sinking,” Los Angeles Times, July
23, 2010.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/23/world/la-fg-korea-torpe
do-20100724/2
20. Donald P. Gregg, “Testing North Korean Waters,” New York
Times, August 31, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01iht-edgregg.html
Page 30
21. Records at the UN show that the practice of sending such
correspondence to the Security Council dates back to 1946. This
is the date when the symbol S/NC/ was introduced as the symbol
for “Communications received from private individuals and
non-governmental bodies relating to matters of which the
Security Council is seized.” The Security Council has the
practice of periodically publishing a list of the documents it
receives, the name and organization of the sender, and the date
they are received. The Provisional Rules of Procedure of the
Security Council states that the list is to be circulated to all
representatives on the Security Council. A copy of any commu-
nication on the list is to be given to any nation on the Security
Council that requests it.
There are over 450 such lists indicated in the UN records.
As each list can contain several or a large number of documents
the Security Council has received, the number of such documents
is likely to be in the thousands.
Under Rule 39 of the Council procedures, the Security
Council may invite any person it deems competent for the
purpose to supply it with information on a given subject. Thus
the two procedures in the Security Council’s provisional rules
give it the basis to find assistance on issues it is considering from
others outside the Council and to consider the contribution as
part of its deliberation
22. Tae-ho Kwon, “South Korean Government Impeded Russian
Team’s Cheonan Investigation: Donald Gregg,” Hankyoreh,
September 4, 2010.
http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/438
299.html
23. See for example “PSPD’s Stance on the Presidential State-
ment of the UNSC Regarding the Sinking of the ROK Naval
Vessel Cheonan”
http://blog.peoplepower21.org/Peace/31086
24.
ibya
25. Russia Today, “Airstrikes in Libya did not take place –
Russian military,” 1 March 2011
http://www.rt.com/news/airstrikes-libya-russian-military/
26. “Libya, the UN, and Netizen Journalism,” The Amateur
Computerist, Winter 2012, vol. 21 No. 1
http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn21-1.pdf
27. Comments from discussion of article on “Comment Is Free”
at the Guardian (U.K.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/23/libya-
ceasefire-consensus-russia-china-india
28.
http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2011/03/libya-whats-going-o
n/#comments
29. “An Open Letter to People’s of Africa and the World from
Concerned Africans.”
http://www.concernedafricans.co.za/
30. “Abuse of UN Processes in Security Council Actions Against
Libya” http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn21-1.pdf
31. See for example “What Does Gaddafi’s Fall Mean for
Africa?” http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn21-1.pdf
32. See Introduction, “Netizen Journalism and the Story of the
Resistance to the NATO Aggression Against Libya”
http://www.ais.org/~jrh/acn/ACn21-1.pdf
33. See for example, Ali Hashem, Interview at the Real News
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&tas
k=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8106
34. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/02/syria-
intervention-observer
35. Alex Thompson’s blog, Sunday June 3, 2012.
http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/search-houla-ki
llers/1811
36. Michel Collon, Liar’s Poker, International Action Center,
New York, 2002, p. 45. (This is an English translation. The book
is originally published in French.)
37. Marat Musin, “The Houla Massacre: Opposition Terrorists
Killed Families Loyal to the Government,” Detailed Investiga-
tion, Global Research, June 1, 2012, Anna News (Original
Russian) and syrianews.cc,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31184.
See for example, Thierry Meyssan, “The Houla Affair Highlights
Western Intelligence Gap in Syria,”
http://www.voltairenet.org/The-Houla-affair-highlights.
Investigators from Vesti24: Marat Musin, Olga Kulygina
(Al-Houla, Syria)
38. May 26, 2012 “Death Squad’s Ravage Syrian Town – West
Calls for Action,” May 27, 2012.
http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/05/death-squads-ravag
e-syrian-town-west.html
39.
http://www.infowars.com/wests-houla-syria-narrative-crumble
s-expels-syrian-diplomats-anyway/
40.
http://sydwalker.info/blog/2012/05/27/houla-horror-truth-is-el
usive-lies-are-easier-to-spot/
41. Mathias Broeckers, “Der Hula-Hoax”
http://www.broeckers.com/2012/06/05/der-hula-hoax/
42. http://www.rt.com/news/houla-massacre-un-syria-635/
43. June 2, 2012, The Horrors of Houla (The blog is in Dutch De
verschrikkingen van Houla)
http://opinie.deredactie.be/2012/06/02/de-verschrikkingen-van
-houla/
44. Bramdon Turbeville, “Syria under Attack by Globalist Death
Squads,” May 27, 2012, Syria360 blog:
http://syria360.wordpress.com/the-syrian-uprising-in-context/
“The Salvador Option for Syria”: U.S.-NATO Sponsored Death
Squads Integrate “Opposition Forces” - by Prof. Michel
Chossudovsky - 2012-05-28
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31359
45. The collection of articles, The Houla Massacre: The Disin-
formation Campaign, at Global Research
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31399
46. Forum with discussion, “Houla Massacre, Syria: What If?”
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=237195
47. “Abermals Massaker in Syrien” Frankfurter Allgmeine
Zeitung, 6-7-2012
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/neue-erkenntnisse-zu-getoet
eten-von-hula-abermals-massaker-in-syrien-11776496.html
Partial English translation, “Prime German Paper: Syrian Rebels
Committed Houla Massacre,” Moon of Alabama, 6-9-2012
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/06/prime-german-paper-
syrian-rebels-committed-houla-massacre.html
Another article appears on the National Review website ,
6-9-2012 by John Rosenthal
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/302261/report-rebels-r
Page 31
esponsible-houla-massacre-john-rosenthal#
48. “New FAZ Piece On Houla Massacre: ‘The Extermination,’”
Moon of Alabama, 6-15-2012
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/06/new-faz-piece-on-ho
ula-massacre-the-extermination.html
49. Lavrov, “On the Right Side of History,”
http://www.mid.ru/bdomp/brp_4.nsf/0/D54B1EB2726D75F54
4257A1E003935A8
50. See for example, the summary on the Moon of Alabama
blog,
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/06/the-syria-discussion-
at-the-un-general-assembly.html See also “The UN and the
Houla Massacre: The Information battlefield”
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2012/06/12/un-and-houla-mass
acre/
51. See “The UN and the Houla Massacre: The Information
Battlefield.”
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2012/06/12/un-and-houla-mass
acre/
52. Ronda Hauben, “International Media ‘the 16
th
Member of the
Security Council’”
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2011/03/15/media_and_security
_council/
53. Karl Deutsch, Nerves of Government, The Free Press, New
York, 1966, p. xxvii.
54. Ibid., p.77.
55. Ibid., p. 146.
56. Ibid., p. 153.
57. Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2010 Vol 89, Issue 6, pp. 2-12.
58. Ibid., p. 2.
59. Ibid., p.10.
60. Ronda Hauben, “On Libya, Soft Power, and the Protection of
Civilians as Pretext,” Global Times, April 18, 2011.
http://opinion.globaltimes.cn/foreign-view/2011-04/645498.html
61. Ronda Hauben, “UN Security Council March 17 Meeting to
Authorize Bombing of Libya all Smoke and Mirrors.”
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2011/03/30/un_march_17_meet
ing_res1973/
Pavel Felgenhauer, “Putin and Medvedev Lead Opposing
Coalitions in the Russian Elite,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, March
26, 2011
http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task
=view&id=21271&Itemid=65
62. Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the
History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet, Los Alamitos,
CA, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997, Chapter 13, p. 233.
See also the Preface and Chapter 1.
63. See for example, Ronda Hauben, “Netizens Defy Western
Media Fictions of China,” OhmyNews International, May 9,
2008,
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no
=382523&rel_no=1
Updated: June 24, 2012 - with minor corrections added July 5,
2012.
[Editor’s Note: The following presentation was made
at the 2012 annual meeting of the Chinese Commu-
nity of Political Science and International Relations
(CCPSIS) held in Beijing.]
The UN Role in Korea
1947-1953: Is it Being
Repeated Today?*
by Jay Hauben
This presentation is based on a paper I wrote
with the title, “Is the UN Role in Korea 1947-1953
the Model Being Repeated Today?” I will first speak
about the UN role in the election in 1948 that created
a separate South Korea and in the Korean War. Then
I will look briefly to see if the UN is still playing the
same role in the recent Libyan and Syrian situations.
One question I am asking is what prevents the UN
from living up to its Charter?
After WWII, the question of the future of Korea
was addressed internationally at the Moscow Confer-
ence of Foreign Ministers in Dec 1945. It was agreed
that a U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission would meet to
assist in forming a provisional Korean government.
There were no Koreans at the Moscow Conference or
at any previous discussion by the allies about Korea.
Apparently ignored in Moscow was the fact that the
Korean nationalists and socialists had already formed
in September 1945 a Korean People’s Republic based
on Peoples Committees throughout the Peninsula.
The UN and the Creation of a Separate
South Korea
By the summer of 1947, it was clear that the
bilateral Joint Commission set up by the Moscow
Conference was failing. According to a plan it had
been working on for a year, the U.S. brought the
“problem of Korean independence” to the UN. Not to
the Security Council where a Soviet veto was possible
but to the General Assembly, which has, according to
the Charter, only the powers to “discuss” and “recom-
mend.”
The Soviet Union offered a counter proposal:
Both sides remove their troops to allow “the Korean
people itself the establishment of a national govern-
ment.”
1
But the U.S. had made the strategic decision
to involve the UN before it would remove its troops.
Page 32
The Soviet Union made known that it rejected the
legitimacy of the General Assembly debating this
question. The majority of the General Assembly
members passed a resolution
2
recognizing the “right-
ful claims of the people of Korea to independence”
but also establishing a United Nations Temporary
Commission on Korea (called UNTCOK) to travel,
observe and hold consultations throughout Korea. The
language of the resolution seemed to treat the Korean
people as one nation and set as its purpose the inde-
pendence of that nation. But the action of sending the
commission could also be seen as an intervention in
the internal affairs of the Korean people.
When the UNTCOK commission arrived in Seoul
it adopted a resolution “that the sphere of this Com-
mission is the whole of Korea and not merely a sec-
tion.”
3
It immediately found two obstacles. First, the
Soviet Union stood firm. UNTCOK could not consult
or observe in the Soviet zone. Second, the social and
political situation in the U.S. zone meant UNTCOK
could not consult with most leftist parties due to the
suppression of left wing activity by the U.S. military
government. Despite the suppression, some leftists
and others did convey to the Commission their
opposition to creating a separate South Korean state
which they saw as the likely result of UNTCOK’s
activity.
After less than one month, UNTCOK decided it
could not observe the national election it was sent to
conduct and should report this back to the General
Assembly. For the U.S., the UN was crucial to its
plans to be able to have a presence on the Asian
mainland while also able to withdraw it troops from
Korea. Many nations friendly to the U.S. feared that
what the U.S. wanted “would actually result in
permanent division and two hostile governments.”
4
Even after high level consultations, the U.S. failed to
convince Australia and Canada to drop their opposi-
tion. Despite negative votes by Australia and Canada,
UNTCOK was sent back by the General Assembly to
implement the program that had been meant for the
whole peninsula but now only in the southern zone.
Back in Korea, one half of the commissioners
argued that elections in South Korea alone would
contribute nothing to the unifying of Korea, so the
United Nations has no right to participate in them.
5
That included the Indian commissioner who stated
that supporting an election only in the U.S. zone was
not legally sound. However, he was under instructions
from his government to proceed with supporting the
election. The General Assembly decision he was
instructed was a political not a legal decision.
6
With
instructions from their governments which were under
U.S. economic and ideological pressure, all the
commissioners aligned themselves with giving the
U.S. support for an election in its zone alone and thus
the creation of a separate South Korean state. Legal
questions or UN principles had been put aside.
The 35 members of UNTCOK had the impossi-
ble task to observe an election among 20 million
people living in the U.S. zone. The U.S. military
government and right wing paramilitary groups
controlled the entire election process. Most major
political parties and politicians in southern Korea
opposed the elections. There were strikes, demonstra-
tions and protests against creating a separate South
Korea. The repression of this opposition resulted in
over 10,000 arrests and hundreds of deaths.
The election was held on May 10, 1948. On the
basis of its minimal observations, without giving
significance to the overwhelming evidence of coer-
cion and military control of the election process, the
commission sent its report to the General Assembly
calling the election “a valid expression of the free will
of the electorate of those parts of Korea which were
accessible to the Commission.”
7
From that time on,
that election has been described in UN and U.S.
documents as “sanctioned” or “supervised” by the UN
despite the extremely limited and compromised role
of UNTCOK in the election process.
A rush of events followed the election, including
the convening of an assembly in the south but calling
itself a ‘National Assembly’ and the writing of a
constitution for a ‘Republic of Korea.’ The creation of
the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the U.S. zone was
followed shortly by the creation of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the Soviet
zone. UNTCOK had thus helped solidify a division of
Korea which haunts the world until today.
The UN role in the creation of the ROK in 1948
also set the basis to label the DPRK an aggressor
across an international border two and one half years
later.
The UN and the Korean War
When hostilities broke out at the 38
th
parallel on
June 25, 1950, the U.S. had a general plan ready:
Request that the UN Security Council call for a cease
fire. If the fighting does not stop immediately, request
that the UN authorize military and other sanctions.
Page 33
Twelve hours after the start of hostilities in
Korea, the U.S. State Department called UN Secretary
General Trygve Lie and read to him an edited version
of the cable it received from the U.S. Ambassador in
Seoul. It hid from the Secretary General that the
Ambassador was not yet clear how the hostilities
started. Did the North attack the South or did the
South attack the North which repelled the attack on
then went on the offense?
8
Later in the morning the U.S. requested that the
Security Council call an emergency meeting for that
day. At the meeting, the Council president recognized
the Secretary General as the first speaker. Trygve Lie
said he believed the North Koreans had violated the
UN Charter, was the aggressor and had breached the
peace. That statement contradicted the report he had
received from the UN commission in Korea which
provided no evidence yet about how the hostilities
began.
9
The U.S. then introduced its resolution
condemning North Korea for a breach of the peace.
To protest the non seating of the People’s Republic of
China, the Soviet Union was boycotting Security
Council meetings. The representative of Yugoslavia
unsuccessfully offered an alternative resolution
calling for a cease-fire and the invitation of North
Korea to voice its complaint to the UN. He explained
that “there seemed to be a lack of precise information
that could enable the Council to pin responsibility.”
This agreed with the recommendation from the UN
commission in Korea that the Security Council urge
mediation between the two sides to negotiate peace.
10
The U.S. ordered its military to give air and sea
support and all possible military aid to South Korea.
Then the U.S. offered a draft resolution calling for
sanctions against North Korea. No mediation as
advocated by the UN Commission was going to be
tried. The resolution passed requiring that “members
of the U.S. resolution furnish such assistance to the
ROK as may be necessary to repel the armed attack.”
In a later resolution, the command of all operations
was given to the United States under a Unified Com-
mand not subject in anyway to UN control or over-
sight.
For this talk, the next relevant event was the
decision the U.S. made to send its military north
across the 38
th
Parallel with a push toward the Yalu
River and the eventual carpet fire bombing of all of
North Korea. It can be argued that crossing the 38
th
Parallel and such bombing was an aggression in
violation of the UN Charter and of the Security
Council resolution “to restore international peace and
security.” Even the Secretary Trygve Lie began more
urgently to call for negotiations.
Finally on July 27, 1953 an armistice was signed
without the ROK. Until today there is yet to be a
peace treaty. Korean is still divided at the 38
th
Paral-
lel. U.S. troops have been stationed in South Korea as
a sign that the war-like situation continues. And as we
saw in 2010 in the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong inci-
dents a resumption of hostilities is always a possibil-
ity.
Fifty-eight years later the UN was involved in
authorizing another war. This time in Libya.
The UN and the Libyan War
The conflict in Libya broke out in mid February
2011. Two UN resolutions and NATO bombing
internationalized the conflict. All 15 Security Council
member states explained their votes as protection for
Libyan civilians. None mentioned non-interference or
other UN Charter principles.
Soon after the U.S. started bombing Libya, U.S.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich gave a speech to the
U.S. Congress.
11
I will use that speech to show
parallels between the Korean and Libyan Wars. “Let
us make no mistake about it,” Kucinich told the
Congress “dropping 2000 lb. bombs and unleashing
the massive firepower of our air force on the capital
of a sovereign state is in fact an act of war.” Up until
the Korean War, every U.S. president seeking to order
the U.S. military into major action followed the
Constitution and asked Congress for a declaration of
war. In the Korean case in 1950 and the Libyan in
2011, instead of Congress, the U.S. president went to
the UN Security Council for authorization of war.
In February 2011, the Security Council met to
consider the crisis in Libya. Outside of all precedent,
two defectors from the government of Libya were
allowed into the consultation sessions with Council
members. Their emotional appeals rather than any
first hand report from UN personnel in Libya were
taken as the basis for a resolution condemning
Libya.
12
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon spoke after
the votes. He too offered no evidence or Charter
principles to justify military action against a sover-
eign state not threatening any other nation.
The no-fly zone authorized by the Security
Council
13
was immediately transgressed by U.S. and
the NATO missile and air strikes at all manner of
targets and structures. Like in the Korean War so also
Page 34
in the NATO bombing of Libya, the UN exercised no
political or other control over the military measures it
authorized.
In the Libya crisis, the Russia Federation played
the same role that the Soviet Union played in the
Korean crisis. It did not veto the rush to intervene.
What about China? Had the People’s Republic of
China been on the Security Council as it deserved in
1950, could the UN sanction of a U.S.-lead war
against North Korea have been avoided? But even
then, the U.S. was prepared to use the General As-
sembly to authorize the war it wanted. And if we look
at the invasion of Iraq, we see the U.S. made its war
even without UN sanction. Still the question needs to
be raised, why did not China or Russia veto Resolu-
tion 1973 authorizing an air war against Libya? Is the
world stuck with the division of Korea and instability
in Libya because the UN cannot be a force to chal-
lenge the U.S./Western European powers?
This brings me to the case of the crisis in Syria
which started in March 2011 and continues today.
The UN and Syria
During 2012, of the 15
th
Security Council
members there were five members of NATO (U.K.,
U.S., France, Germany and Portugal). Like in the
Libyan case, the NATO Security Council members
sought to bring resolutions for UN sanctioned inter-
vention to change the government in Syria. But this
time, China and Russia vetoed the resolutions. The
U.S. Ambassador expressed outrage that the tough
sanctions and arms embargo needed she said to
“protect the population” were not enacted.
14
She was
introducing a different principle, the Responsibility to
Protect (often call, R2P) which is not in the Charter
and she was faulting Russia and China for not abiding
by it. But R2P is in conflict with the Charter principle
of non-interference in the internal affairs of a sover-
eign nation.
15
The representative of China emphasized
this principle, saying any action the UN took should
contribute to peace and stability and comply with the
United Nations Charter principle of non-interference
in internal affairs.
16
Not able to get UN backing from the Security
Council, the forces seeking a change of the Syrian
government turned to the General Assembly. Two
meetings of the General Assembly were called. Both
were outside normal procedure. Some General As-
sembly members protested, suggesting that the
president of the General Assembly was using his
office to further the political goals of his country. To
balance the picture of the source of violence, several
delegates referred to an Arab League Observer
Mission Report which went a long way to confirm
Syrian government claims about armed groups and
terrorists operating in Syria.
17
The Nicaraguan Am-
bassador stressed that there is “armed violence by
irregular groups supported by foreign powers against
the Syrian people.” She feared a Libya style UN
solution. She urged that the General Assembly not
allow Responsibility to Protect (R2P) “to become a
devious argument to justify intervention in the domes-
tic affairs of states.”
18
On February 16
th
, the General Assembly passed
a resolution for full support for regime change in
Syria. But the General Assembly did not and could
not call for member state action. The UN Charter
reserves requiring action of member states for the
Security Council. Based on the General Assembly
resolution a Special Envoy was appointed and the
Security Council passed two resolutions establishing
a United Nations Supervisory Mission in Syria called
UNSMIS to monitor and report violations of a cease-
fire.
In the Korean situation, the Soviet Union re-
jected the legitimacy of UNTCOK and UNTCOK
ended up serving the interests of the U.S. In the
Syrian situation, Russia welcomed UNSMIS as
offering a chance to help stop the violence while
avoiding external intervention. The U.S. Ambassador
greeted the UNSMIS with the warning, “Let there be
no doubt, we, our allies and others in this body are
planning and preparing for those actions that will be
required of all of us….”
19
When this presentation was prepared it was too
soon to know what role UNSMIS and the UN will
continue to play in the Syrian crisis. Russia and China
have so far supported the UN Charter principles of
respect for state sovereignty. Several member states
of the UN oppose R2P and its justification of interfer-
ence by external forces into internal strife and crises.
But having helped the world to have a divided Korea
and a ruined Libya is there any chance the UN’s role
will lead Syria to a better fate?
To me the UN is a dilemma. It provides a forum
for more than one side or just the major powers to be
heard. It provides for the gathering of all nations and
the possibility with its deliberations for compromises
or new networks of nations to emerge. But still one of
the world’s major powers, dominated the UN in the
Page 35
Korean situation and with its allies in the Libyan
situation. In the Syrian crisis, Russia and China have
so far challenged and resisted that dominance. The
challenge is not just from those two states and several
others. That challenge is also taken up by some very
few journalists at the UN and by the much greater
body of netizen journalists who have begun to analyze
and circulate the voice of the challengers and add
their own research and voice. The Syrian crisis leaves
me with the question is it possible that the UN can
shake off the Korean model of manipulated elections,
wars and divisions? And if not this time, might it be
possible in the future?
*See the paper prepared for the conference at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/j-china2012-p
aper.doc.
See this presentation at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/beijing2012/j-china2012-ta
lk.doc.
Notes:
1. As quoted in Leon Gordenker, The United Nations and the
Peaceful Unification of Korea: The Politics of Field Operations,
1947-1950, The Hague, Matinus Nijhoff, 1959 (hereafter, Field
Operations), p. 17 and p. 283 note 42.
2. General Assembly Resolution 112 (II), 14 Nov 1947, online
at:
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/2/ares2.htm
3. As quoted in Soon Sung Cho, Korea in World Politics
1940-1950: An Evaluation of American Responsibility, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1967, pp. 184-185.
4. Ibid, pp. 187-188.
5. As quoted in Gordenker, Field Operations, p. 81 and note 60
p. 288.
6. Ibid, p.82.
7. As quoted in Frank Baldwin, (editor) Without Parallel: The
American-Korean Relationship Since 1945, New York, Pantheon
Books, 1973, p.12 and note 3, p.16.
8. I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, New
York, Monthly Review Press, 1952, p. 49. Many of the following
details are from Parts I and II of this book but cross referenced
where possible with other tellings of this history.
9. Ibid, pp. 48 and 50. Stone comments “It was neither honorable
nor wise for the U.N. under pressure from an interested great
power to condemn a country for aggression without investigation
and without hearings its side of the case.”
10. Ibid, p.52.
11. “Dennis Kucinich speaks to Congress about the conflict in
Libya: text of speech,” March 31, 2011, online at:
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/03/dennis_kuc
inich_speaks_to_cong.html
12. UN Security Council Resolution 1970 (2011). On line at:
http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid
=4d6ce9742
13. UN Security Council Resolution 1973 (2011), adopted by a
vote of 10 in favor to none against, with 5 abstentions (Brazil,
China, Germany, India, Russian Federation). On line with
commentary at:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm
14. Paraphrased in UN Document SC/10403, online at:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10403.doc.htm
15. See Jean Bricmont, “A More Just World and the Responsibil-
ity to Protect,” 9 July 2009, online at:
http://www.un.org/ga/president/63/interactive/protect/jean.pdf
16. Paraphrased in UN Document SC/10403, online at:
http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10403.doc.htm
17. See e.g., Ronda Hauben, “Al Observer Report Corrects
Media Narratives about Syria,” January 31, 2012, online at:
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2012/01/31/observer-mission-re
port-syria/
18. Ronda Hauben, “Using the UN GA to Endorse the AL
Regime Change Agenda for Syria,” online at:
http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2012/02/19/un-ga-meeting-syria/
19. Quoted by Edith M. Lederer in “UN authorizes 300 observers
in Syria,” The Boston Globe, April 22, 2012. Online at:
http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-22/world/31378147_1_syri
a-end-military-observers-cease-fire-observers/2
EDITORIAL STAFF
Ronda Hauben
William Rohler
Norman O. Thompson
Michael Hauben (1973-2001)
Jay Hauben
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