The Baghdad blogger tells all!

'I became the profane pervert Arab blogger'It began as an internet joke with a friend in Jordan. But then the media - including the Guardian - picked it up, and suddenly he was the Baghdad blogger, the most famous web diarist in the world. Salam Pax describes what it was like to play cat-and-mouse with Saddam's censors


Buy The Baghdad Blog at Amazon.co.uk

My name is Salam Pax and I am addicted to blogs. Some people watch daytime soaps, I follow blogs. I follow the hyperlinks on the blogs I read. I travel through the web guided by bloggers. I get wrapped up in the plots narrated by them. I was reading so many blogs I had to assign weekdays for each bunch, plus the ones I was reading daily. It is slightly voyeuristic, especially those really personal blogs: day-to-day, mundane stuff which is actually fascinating; glimpses of lives so different, and so much amazing writing. No politics, just people's lives. How they deal with pain or grief, how they share their happy moments with anybody who cares to read.
And I cared. We had no access to satellite TV, and magazines had to be smuggled into the country. Through blogs I could take a peek at a different world. Satellite TV and the web were on Saddam's list of things that will corrupt you. Having a satellite dish was punishable with jail and a hefty fine because these channels would twist our minds and make us do bad things. They spread immoral values. Of course he and his buddies were incorruptible so they could watch all the satellite TV they wanted.

This was the case with internet as well. While the world was moving on to high-speed internet, we were being told it was overrated. So when in 2000 the first state-operated internet centre was opened, everybody was a bit suspicious, no one knew if browsing news sites would get you in trouble. When, another year later, you were able to get access from home, life changed. We had internet and we were able to browse without the minders at the internet centres watching over our shoulder, asking you what that site you are browsing is.

Of course things were not that easy, there was a firewall. A black page with big orange letters: access denied. They made you sign a paper which said you would not try to get to sites which were of an "unfriendly" nature and that you would report these sites to the administrator. They blocked certain search terms and they did actually have a bunch of people looking at URL requests going through their servers. It sounds absurd but believe me, they did that. I had a friend who worked at the ISP and he would tell me about the latest trouble in the Mukhabarat [secret police] room.


More from the Bahgdad blogger