Protest planned for jailed Saudi blogger

Supporters of a Saudi Arabian blogger who has been held in jail for the past two months are planning a rally Saturday in Washington to draw attention to his cause.

Fouad Al-Farhan, 32, was arrested in early December after posting blog entries critical of the Saudi Arabian government and drawing attention to a group of civil rights activists arrested last year on terrorism charges.

The American Islamic Congress (AIC), a nonprofit civil rights organization, is calling for a vigil at 1 p.m. Eastern Time Saturday in front of the Saudi embassy in Washington. To date, more than 1,200 people have participated in the group's online letter-writing campaign, asking the Saudi government to release Al-Farhan.

His arrest has rallied bloggers in the region, who have republished his work and held an international day of blogging silence to draw attention to his cause. "It's right now the hottest thing going on in the Arab blogosphere," said Nasser Weddady, the AIC's civil rights outreach director.

Unlike many other Arab bloggers, Al-Faran did not blog under an alias, making it easier for authorities to track him down. He ran an IT services company based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Weddady said.

Al-Faran had apparently been tipped off prior to his detention.

"The issue that caused all of this is because I wrote about the political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia and they think I’m running an online campaign promoting their issue," he wrote in an e-mail sent to friends before his arrest, and posted later on this blog. "All what [sic] I did is wrote some pieces and put side banners and asked other bloggers to do the same."

At the time, Al-Faran believed that in the worst-case scenario he would spend three days in jail. He has now been detained for about 60 days, and under Saudi law can be detained indefinitely, according to Weddady.

With other media in the region tightly controlled by the government, the Internet has become a home to public discussion that would otherwise never see the light of day. "Blogging becomes the ultimate frontier of freedom of expression," Weddady said. "This is where these people get to make their voices heard."

But governments have been cracking down.

In November 2006, Egyptian blogger Abdel Karim Suleiman was arrested on charges of insulting Islam and the country's president, Hosni Mubarak. He was convicted and is now serving a four-year sentence.

The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists has taken up Suleiman's and Al-Faren's causes, urging U.S. President George W. Bush to pressure regional leaders for their release.

The Saudi embassy in Washington did not return a call seeking comment for this story.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.