14 Jan 2008
“Traffic Jams”: Belarusian Style
Internet traffic often resembles the traffic on the roads. At least that is exactly what happened in Belarus on January 10th. That day there were traffic jams both in the streets and in the Internet. The streets in Minsk where blocked by protesting small businesses owners and employees. And at the same time somebody blocked the “roads” to a number of most popular information resources in the Internet, namely www.charter97.org, www.belaruspartisan.org and web-site of the Belarusian Service of Radio Liberty www.svaboda.org. Belarusian users also could not access blog-platform Livejournal.com during several hours on that day.
Traffic Jams in real
The beginning of the year has been a difficult time for Belarusian small businesses since starting from January 1st a new law came into force, which forbids small businesses to hire anyone except for their family members. This law made thousands of people unemployed in one day.
The small business owners and their employees sent lots of complains and organized numerous actions of protest at the end of the year, but all in vain. The law was not changed and took effect with the beginning of this year.
Entrepreneurs are not putting up with what is going on and they started a non-working strike when according to some estimations around 80% of small business stopped their work around the country. As a result people had problems with buying many of necessities as detergents and tooth paste and other.
On January 10th hundreds of entrepreneurs came first to the building of President’s Administration and then marched to the government building in Minsk with hope to talk to someone from the government. Negotiations with the head of Economic Department of the President’s Administration, Ina Miadzvedzieva, ended with nothing, the law will not be canceled. To attract attention to their problems protesters held the main street of Minsk blocked for almost three hours. Some time later the meeting was over with the agreement to come back on January 21st.
Who creates the “traffic jams” online?
While small businesses’ owners where protesting in the city center, Belarusian Internet users could not access any of the information resources which were giving updates about the protest. It is not a surprising thing in Belarus, since during the big protests of previous years the same sudden Internet “traffic jams” were known to happen. However, last Thursday was probably the first time when Belarusian Internet users tried to find out the reason for them and actively reacted on it.
Belarusian state monopolist Internet provider BelTeleCom denies the fact of blocking some specific Internet sites and suggests that the reason could be in a temporary problem with the foreign servers hosting those web-pages. BelTeleCom does not give any explanation for the fact that the same web-pages could be accessed from outside of Belarus or with the help of Tor – a software project that helps to overcome traffic analysis,
In the evening of the same day a Livejournal user _l_u_f_t_ posted a remake of old soviet propaganda with a modern text “BelTeleCom employee! Safely block the channels of access to the web-pages of low morality”. This picture spread around Belarusian bloggers very fast and as a revenge it was numerously posted to the BelTeleCom internet blog. Bloggers where also reminding BelTeleCom that blocking access to web-pages is a crime according to the Belarusian legislation and were living comments like “Thank you for the most expensive slow Internet in the world”.
More photos from the protest in our Belarusian report