Our beta project – djiboutian.com – is already making waves across Djibouti and beyond. Long suffering at the hands of a brutal, autocratic regime, the strategically located country of Djibouti has witnessed a rise in governmental corruption, abuse of power and human rights violations like no country in recent times has.
Pioneered by Capt. Omar Ali Hassan, a Special Forces Commander with the Djiboutian Army, we have brought together and empowered the three most significant groups in Djibouti - Veterans, women, and activists (including opposition coalitions such as CTD Djibouti) to pave the way for a transition to democracy via peaceful revolution.
Independence Project Mission
Our plan is to actualize democracy in Djibouti via blockchain and other decentralized technologies — the first such implementation on a national scale, but one that would be drawn from prior experimentations in Sierra Leone and Colombo.
This is to be accomplished via the setting-up of:
First, by providing material help and support to human rights activists, opposition coalitions and members of the civil society. Besides promoting democracy and human rights, we regularly condemn violence, corruption and authoritarianism emanating from the regime.
Second, we provide humanitarian relief — food, drinking water, clothes, and temporary shelter — to Djiboutians in need. We also support and help rehabilitate people subjected to indiscriminate torture and violence at the hands of the regime.
Here in the United States and beyond, we create awareness about the major issues affecting Djibouti via tireless activism and networking, such as by sponsoring peaceful rallies that advocate the need for democracy, human rights, and free speech in Djibouti.
The Independence Project addresses widely-cited problems agreed upon by Americans of all ideologies and backgrounds - a military-industrial complex beholden to private wealth; a never-ending drug war that has eroded civil liberties; a criminal justice system ridiculed around the world and increasingly despised by its own high officials; and, most fundamentally, the hijacking by the wealthy of the very electoral process that might have otherwise addressed these issues. These and other issues are approached via crowd-sourced online collaboration strategies that were unavailable a generation ago but which have since proven stunningly effective in a diverse range of contexts – even despite the lack of tools designed for such work. As the subject has become better understood, it has become practical to develop platforms to amplify these dynamics and make them accessible on the same massive scale the internet has brought to every social practice, for good or bad, from dating to mass surveillance.
