Muscat: The anniversary of protests in Oman passed off peacefully until afternoon on Sunday even as security was beefed up everywhere.
According to reports young school students in Al Hail area of Muscat, unhappy with their results, resorted to angry protests on Saturday. The students damaged school property and even tried to set fire but today police was in total control in Muscat, Sohar as well as in Salalah.
"The protests by students shouldn't be taken seriously," Bader Al Hinai, a blogger, told Gulf News, adding that if they were purely done by students then they were too young to decide.
Al Hinai and group of other young Omanis have contributed in their own way in curbing rumours this time. "We have created a Hashtag (#NoEsha3at) on micro blogging web site Twitter, urging people not to spread rumours," he said.
According to Al Hinai the effort was largely successful. "Our Hashtag has been top for the last couple of days in Oman," he justified.
He also said that with the help of this small effort on Twitter, they were able to put off rumour mongers. "The re-tweeting of rumours reduced a lot on Twitter and they were far fewer posting on social media and forums on misleading information in the last couple of days," he said.
"We have been accused of being government supporters but our aim is to disseminate authentic information only," the popular young blogger said, adding that even government sometimes is responsible for spreading rumours.
He said that the group youngsters, who decided on running no rumour campaign, believe in transparency. "That's the best solution," he reckons.
According to other sources some leaflets were distributed among young school going children urging people to protest on the anniversary of the protests in Oman.
"We have a very young population with a lot of potential," said Al Hinai. He added that these youngsters sometimes aimlessly take part in protests. "It has become trend to go to protests, take pictures, clips and post it online," he added.
"There's no purpose but some youngsters go for protests because they like it," he opined.
He revealed that this group of youngsters, who are behind no rumour campaign, now plan to launch another campaign among young Omanis. "We want to tell youngsters to do something," he said.
"There's a lot of energy wasted by youngsters by just talking on line but we want to urge them to something positive and take a leading role in nation building," he said.
Another popular blogger from Salalah, about, also noted in her post that nothing happened in the largest town in Dhofar 1000-km south to Muscat and there were plenty of police checkpoints.
"Between February 25 and May 12, people demanded jobs, better benefits for orphans and widows, consumer protection, a new university, an end to government corruption, the ousting of several ministers. And guess what? They got what they asked for," she wrote.
"It was truly amazing to be part of that and no matter what anyone says, the protests were good for all of us," wrote Dhofari Gucci in her latest posting.
Meanwhile, it is reliably learnt that most activists, who were at the forefront of the protest last year, have been told not to speak to media, nor write anything provocative in the social media. Some of the activists avoided to talk about protests or anniversary of protests while some others didn't reply to calls from Gulf News today.
