The raid earlier this week (20 January 2003) followed a complaint to police by the youth wing of the ruling political party United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). They claimed a letter posted to the site on 9 January was 'seditious'.
The letter criticised Malaysia's affirmative-action policies, which grant special rights and privileges to the country's majority ethnic Malay population. It also compared the UMNO youth wing to the Ku Klux Klan, the US white supremacist race hate group.
Malaysiakini's management refused to reveal to police the identity of the letter writer on the grounds of upholding journalistic ethics.
Editor-in-chief Steve Gan and four sub-editors were questioned by police, and Mr Gan has been summoned to appear on 22 May to answer a complaint against the site for "sedition" and "inciting racial hatred".
Malaysiakini.com is the only state-independent news provider in Malaysia, taking advantage of the government's non-censorship pledge for the internet in a bid to boost its IT industry. Print-based news publishers require special licences from the government.
"For the past few months, I thought that the government had more or less grudgingly accepted our existence," said Mr Gan. "This has reversed that assumption.
"The government's pledge not to censor the internet has been shot to pieces."
He described the raid as an excuse to shut down the site. The letter was not seditious, he said, but only "a comparative study based on facts".
Within 24 hours of the raid, the site was back up and running, thanks to the loan of computers from supporters. Police also returned six of the computers yesterday (22 January).
Malaysiakini.com was founded in 1999 and is partly funded by the Prague-based Media Loan Development Fund, an organisation that supports independent media in developing countries.
Sources:
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=31&aid=17840
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=4755
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/EA22Ae01.html
http://sg.biz.yahoo.com/030122/72/36qrt.html
http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=20030123007
http://www.bernama.com/arch_news.shtml?2003_01_22/general/ge2201_24
See also:
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story377.html
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story190.html
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story177.html
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