Home page of www.ehoron.com saved before the shutdown

As China’s control over the Internet has further been tightened recently, two popular Mongolian websites Ehoron (“homeland” --- www.ehoron.com ) and Monhgal (“eternal fire” --- www.monhgal.com ) were shutdown in “Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region” (IMAR) for posting what the authorities there called “separatist” contents.

As one of the most popular websites among the ethnic Mongols after the shutdown of nutuge.com in March 2004, ehoron.com became the Internet gathering place of more than 1,300 Mongolian intellectuals to allow them to exchange their views on various issues of Inner Mongolia excluding human rights, political and religious ones. Initially the site was created in September 2004 by several Mongolian students as a sanctuary for those Internet refugees from nutuge.com. According to one of the forum administrators who asked not to be identified, the forum was shutdown at 6:00 pm local time, on September 26, 2005. Mr. Sodmongol, another forum administrator of ehoron.com, has received a short message from the web hosting company through his QQ Instant Messenger, confirming that “the forum is shutdown because separatist contents were posted on it.” But no further information is given by the web hosting company to explain what particular posting is identified as “separatist” content. Many forum members including the forum administrators believe that what the authorities call “separatist” contents might be referring to the postings that strongly criticized a recently played Chinese TV Cartoon Series titled “Lapis and Ruby” (“La La and Ru Bi” in Chinese ) that deliberately demonized Mongolian spiritual figure Chinggis Khan as “Mouse King Temujin” with an ugly pig's snout and a thin red beard.

Staff members of Monhgal Law Firm

This proposition is proven to be true as another Mongolian website monhgal.com, official site of Monhgal Law Firm, was shutdown on the same day ehoron.com was closed, for on one hand encouraging the Mongols to write to the authorities for the ban of the TV Series, and on the other hand, actively collecting legal evidences to prepare for a lawsuit against the producer, Jia Xing Yi Zu Science & Technology Development (Beijing) L.L.C., and the distributor, Inner Mongolia TV Station.

Monhgal Law Firm, based in eastern Inner Mongolia’s Tongliao City, was created and run by several lawyers of Mongolian ethnic background to provide legal assistance to the indigenous Mongols and protect their legal rights that are constantly denied and violated by the state. According to its web administrator, the site was shutdown on September 26, 2005, under the web hosting company’s allegation of “posting separatist contents”. A brief message replaced the site to direct the web address to the official website of China’s Ministry of Information Industry’s ICP/IP Address Information Record Keeping & Control System (http://www.miibeian.gov.cn ) for further registration that imposes tougher restriction and stricter regulation on all kind of internet activities. On October 2, monhgal.com was allowed to reopen with the condition of “not posting separatist contents again in the future”.

Since recent years, hundreds of Internet forums and thousands of Internet cafés have been shutdown by the Inner Mongolian authorities for “providing platform for separatism”. According to China’s official press, Xinhua News, Inner Mongolia has recently launched the Internet Café Intelligent Control System, a sophisticated software that will be capable of controlling and tracking down every single internet activity within the system.

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