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The Siblings Fighting For Freedom Of Expression In Yemen

Nadia and Walid Al-Sakkaf
Nadia and Walid Al-Sakkaf
Flore Vasseur

For a long time, the only people interested in Yemen were Joseph Kessel and Al-Qaida. After the revolution that brought down 32 years of dictatorship, the interest of the West quickly waned, abandoning the country to its difficult political transition.

It is an exhausted country, without a vision nor a hope of something better and crippled by depressing figures: there is a 23 percent inflation rate, 35 percent of people are homeless, 40 percent live under the poverty line, 60 percent are illiterate, the majority of whom are women and therefore reduced to mere objects. One family however, a brother and sister rather, aims to reverse this trend in Yemen. Their purpose? Freedom of expression. Their army? The media they have created.

They have the same round, warm faces, the same quick gestures and natural authority that warrants respect. In the TED microcosm (Technology, Entertainment and Design), they are heroes. Their soft voices and smiles however do not betray their every-day fight.

To understand their vision, we must go back to 1991, when their father, Abdulaziz al-Sakkaf, an economics professor at the University of Sana'a and the founder of the Arab Organization for Human Rights, launched the first English-speaking weekly newspaper in Yemen, at a time when the country was going through a complicated unification.

Independent, the Yemen Times carved a place for itself in between the government run media and those of the opposition parties. Published in English in a largely illiterate country, it was aimed at the expat community. In 1997, the Yemen Times launched its online edition and in 1999, Abdulaziz organised the first Yemeni conference on human rights, where he was ready to reveal numerous cases of human rights violations. However, the day of the inauguration, he died in a suspicious car crash at the age of 48.

Finding ways around censorship

His son took over managing the online version of the weekly whilst his daughter was finishing her computing studies in India. They both carried on their father's wishes: Walid improvised as editor-in-chief whilst Nadia became the journalist. Walid created the Yemenportal.net, a parallel operation, which would become an autonomous portal to document all dissident opinion. He has been arrested, the newspaper has been put under surveillance and the Yemenportal censored. At night, he tried to invent software to get around the blocking of his site. He has become obsessed by censorship, fascinated by technology.

In 2009, he gave the reins of the Yemen Times to his little sister and decided to take action: he put his Al-Kasir software on the internet for free, improving it constantly. It has been downloaded more than 80,000 times all over the world, from Tunis to Beijing. Walid is perfecting it, whilst finishing his PhD on censorship at Orebro University in Sweden, an attempt to examine the full picture: "There's no point in getting excited over censorship if the Internet doesn't exist. So, my plan is to bring it to the Yemenis. I'm part of a multi-party, pan-Arab council on the governance of the Internet. We are going to meet in Kuwait to speed up the process of Internet access in the region. If we don't do it, no-one will." Why the web? "Because it's the only means of catching up. It's about freedom of expression, but also entrepreneurship," he exclaims. It’s a means of the getting the country out of a rut.

A bridge between cultures

The al-Sakkafs are the new faces of Yemen. They are part of a youth, often educated abroad, who instead of staying away, where life would be easier, chose to come home to make a difference in their community. But, Walid is the man in the shadows, the brother of the passionate activist that dazzled TED audiences last year. Nadia, 35-years-old, a heavy weight in independent journalism took the stage by surprise. Funny yet subtle, she explained: "I want to break stereotypes, to tell the history of my people in the language that the whole world understands. People have to stop putting labels on us." Why do they do that? "My father would often say that we are the bridge between cultures, between our country and the rest of the world. We must also defend human rights and help those that need us. We were brought up like that, both of us." Who changes the destiny of a young girl? Her father. Standing ovation.

In Sana'a, she campaigns about almost everything: her status as a woman, tribal culture, the apathetic population, the restrained freedom of expression, foreign journalists who come to Yemen for barely 24 hours and go home with clichés, an ineffective infrastructure, electricity blackouts. She knows no fear, doesn’t even think about it. "The current government is obsessed by its own survival. It doesn't have the time to bother with us."

Bringing down the veil

This small yet feisty woman has welcoming eyes, yet a razor sharp pen and an iron fist. "Within the newspaper, I'm the boss. When I arrived, I made half of the editing staff redundant because they didn't want to work for a woman.” Her role reaches way beyond the articles on terrorism, drones and corruption. She denounces arranged marriages for young girls, rapes in schools. She hires a lot of women, showing them different aspects of journalism, teaching them to express their opinions in a country that deprives them of civil liberties. "Little by little, I'm making them take off their veils. You can't interview someone if your whole face is covered."

The Yemen Times, with its 50 employees, is a press group that publishes an Arab version of the newspaper on the Internet, organizes forums, edits a monthly magazine on personal development, owns printing presses and is going to launch a radio station next autumn. It's not easy sailing: the expats all fled last year and the distribution of the Yemen Times has fallen dramatically. But Nadia is hanging on.

Entrepreneur, editor-in-chief, and mother for the second time, she is now slowly veering towards politics. Nadia has a clear idea of the next step: "If I become Minister of Information, I will campaign for the independence and the freedom of the media. Our father handed it down to us, but we have carved our own path: for Walid, his passion is technology, for me it's human rights. We want to give our people the means to have a better life. We have to change the culture, the behavior and beliefs. We want dignity." A face, a vision, a hope and an appeal, of course: "Before, I was alone, isolated, vulnerable," confesses Walid. "All that has changed with the Arab Spring. We are the first wave of activists. Please, we can't let it fail."

Walid and Nadia al-Sakkaf: remember their names. With a bit of luck, one of them will be president one day.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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