UC
San
Diego
Pulls
Plug
on
Controversial
Server:
BURN!
Group's
Hosting
of
Colombian
Rebel
Group
Site
Blamed
6/9/00
The BURN! Server at the University of California at San Diego was shut down by university officials on May 31, in the wake of a letter-writing campaign by self-identified Colombian citizens opposed to the FARC (Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces). BURN! had recently hosted an English-language site that translated communiques from the FARC, a peasant-based insurgency that has been at war with the Colombian government for nearly four decades. At a time when the Clinton administration is struggling to push its $1.6 Colombian counterinsurgency/drug war package through the Congress, the action by UC San Diego officials has effectively censored one side of the story. BURN! was one of the few English-language outlets making FARC materials available for public scrutiny. The FARC is internationally recognized as a "belligerent force," and is the primary negotiating partner in peace talks with the Colombian government. One need not be a supporter of FARC to recognize the importance of open access to information to Colombia's peace process, an endeavor at which Congressional drug warriors have been too quick to scoff. (See http://www.drcnet.org/wol/114.html#peaceincolombia for some background on Colombia's mass movement for peace.) The server, operated by students organized into the BURN! Collective, had been in place since 1993, and has been the host for, among other things, a wide variety of web sites and discussion lists related to various insurgencies, including the Mexican Zapatistas, the Tupac Amaru guerrillas in Peru and the East Timor liberation effort. As of June 9th, the server remains down. Visitors to http://burn.ucsd.edu are met with the following message: "To the community of users of the 'Burn' server: The server is down until further notice. The data are still intact and there will be a forwarding address posted when and if the address is changed." In typical Internet style, however, the BURN! Collective has not gone quietly into the night, but has set up shop on another UCSD server. BURN!'s archives can now be read at http://groundwork.ucsd.edu/pipermail/burn-censored/, they can be reached by e-mail at [email protected], and has a list running at [email protected]. For extensive, continuing coverage of the BURN! shutdown, see journalist Al Giordano's Narconews web site at http://www.narconews.com/censored0600.html.
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