Fearless Blogger

When he was a child, Nasim Fekrat ’13 stood by a boulder at his parents’ farm in Afghanistan and watched other children heading off to school. His father, taking a break from tending to wheat, cows and sheep, walked over and asked, “Do you want to go to school with those children or do you want to be a shepherd? If you want to be a student, you might have a bright future, but you still have to work hard.”

 

Fekrat went to a one-room school, where he and 50 classmates shared two books. And he continued to work on the family farm for his parents, who, though not educated in schools, saw the value in education for their son.

 

Two decades later, Fekrat, 27, is enjoying the second semester of his first year as a political-science major at Dickinson, where he has replaced his tireless efforts on the farm with an equally powerful drive to educate others—through his blog, photographs and workshops—about the need for democracy, freedom of expression, independent media and improved living conditions in Afghanistan.

 

In his blog, Afghan Lord, which he started in 2004, Fekrat provides the world with his running analysis of the many issues in his homeland, including years of war and poverty and, more recently, efforts to purge the resurgent Taliban.

 

 

“I am doing this with the hope that future generations will not be neglected and will not have the same tough life I had as a child,” Fekrat says. “I am trying to highlight the problems of my society in an independent manner, without fear. I am trying to open a tiny window of hope in Afghanistan.”

 

Free-speech advocates have peered through that window and praised Fekrat for what they see. In 2008, he received the Information Safety and Freedom-Città di Siena (Italy) Prize. In 2005, France honored him with a Reporters Without Borders freedom of expression blog award. A year later, he founded the Association of Afghan Blog Writers, many of whom are, like Fekrat, tech-savvy and eager to shed light on all that is taking place in Afghanistan.

 

“There’s plenty of ‘speech,’ but much of it is necessarily biased,” says Jeffrey Stern, international engagement manager at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. “One thing that is so remarkable about Nasim is that he recognized very early after the fall of the Taliban that the way the media was evolving, it would do more to magnify political and ethnic differences than to inform the public. Regardless of whether you’re of the opinion that blogs are saving American journalism or destroying it, in Afghanistan, Nasim’s idea to democratize the exchange of information—by getting people to blog and helping them understand the basic tenets of journalism—is critical to the cultivation of anything resembling free speech.”

 

Fekrat says that while his parents know he is studying at Dickinson, they are unaware of his blog's global reach in helping others to explain what is going on in his country—including updates on a recent London-based summit on Afghanistan to details (including a video link) of a man’s public flogging of a woman in central Afghanistan last month.

 

“I’m very critical, so my parents might advise me to not say certain things and to be careful,” he says.

 

Fekrat knows from experience, in the form of countless death threats, why his parents might be wary of his work. “One man sent an e-mail describing himself as a coffin and said, ‘Soon I will hug you,’ ” Fekrat says. “I didn’t respond.”

 

 

Others, including Stern, respond with support and admiration for Fekrat and his mission.

 

“Fekrat teaches his recruits what a pseudonym is, and émigrés from Afghanistan’s mainstream press come to find out how they can write without fear or favor or filter,” says Stern, who also is a freelance journalist, in a 2008 article he wrote for Slate.com.

 

In the article, “Meet Afghanistan’s Most Fearless Blogger,” Stern presented a vivid account of one of Fekrat’s popular blogging workshops held in an Internet cafe in Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan.

 

“There’s no bathroom, just a dedicated space behind the building, and no power, so they’ve rigged the computers to a generator,” Stern wrote. Fekrat, who paid for the generator’s fuel with money donated to his Web sites, urged the capacity crowd to sign up for Gmail accounts as they gathered around the computers.

 

“His mission is simple—get as many people signed up and inspired to write as he can,” wrote Stern, who met Fekrat through the Afghan Lord blog.

 

For now, the Web is the primary outlet for practitioners of free speech in Afghanistan, Fekrat says.

 

“The Internet is a powerful tool that can lead to revolution at the individual and national level,” says Fekrat, who taught himself English, journalism, photography and how to use the Internet. “Blogging is not taken as seriously in the United States. You’re not grappling with freedom of speech. You already have the right to say what you want to say, the right to criticize. This is the basic form of democracy. If you are unable to say what you want to say, how can you have a democracy?”

 

This spring Fekrat plans to roll out a new Internet project, One Afghanistan, One Blog, available in English, Farsi and Pashto. Meanwhile, he is enjoying learning more about democracy and life in America as a student at Dickinson—a life far removed physically, but not emotionally, from his childhood dream by the boulder on his family farm.

 

“I was hoping that one day would come when I could go to college,” says Fekrat, who learned about Dickinson from two former trustees, Yale Asbell ’78 and Larry Kent P’05, whom he met in Arkansas last year. “Being at Dickinson is a milestone in my life.”