MEDIA: More Journalists Thrown Into Prison in 1996

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

WASHINGTON, Mar 15 1997 (IPS) - A New York-based press freedom group is urging U.S. officials to speak out against the abuse of journalists in countries like Nigeria, Turkey, and Burma.

The Committee To Protect Journalists, in its new report, ‘Attacks on the Press in 1996: A Worldwide Survey’, says that Turkey was the worst offender for imprisonment of reporters for the third year in a row, with more journalists in jail that the next five countries combined.

In a year that ended with 27 journalists killed because of their work and a record 185 journalists in prison in 24 countries, Turkey alone imprisoned 78 reporters — 27 more than they held in 1995, says the survey.

“Turkey is once again the most egregious example of a government that criminalises independent reporting,” says William A. Orme, Jr., CPJ’s executive director.

Almost all the imprisoned Turkish reporters were held for reporting on conflicts with the country’s Kurdish minority, says the CPJ. The next five countries on the CPJ’s list are Ethiopia, which imprisoned 18 journalists, China (17), Kuwait (15), Nigeria (8), and Burma (8).

Algeria is, however, “the most dangerous place in the world for journalists”, according to the CPJ report.

As the fourth year of brutal civil conflict ended, reporters continued to face grave peril. Since the army cancelled parliamentary elections in January 1992, an estimated 60,000 people have died in the ensuing violence. Since May 1993, 59 journalists have been murdered, says the CPJ. In 1996 alone, seven journalists were assassinated, while several other media employees were also killed.

“Factors such as the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) — which has claimed responsibility for nearly half the total number of journalists’ murders in Algeria — indiscriminately kill journalists for what they view as the media’s complicity with the Algerian government,” says the CPJ.

In addition to the official censorship of news relating to security forces’ casualties, human rights abuses, and the exclusion of the Islamist viewpoint, the government has further tightened its control over the press by setting up “reading committees” to ensure that stories on the civil strife conform with official accounts.

Among the journalists killed on the job in other parts of the world, six were murdered in Russia while reporting on the war in Chechnya. Journalists were also killed in Angola, Bangladesh, Colombia, Cyprus, India, Indonesia, Ireland, the Philippines, Tajikistan, Turkey and Ukraine. The 26 cases of journalists killed because of their work in 1996 compares with the 57 killed the year before.

In Colombia, Norvey Diaz of Radio Colina was found with a gunshot wound in his neck Oct. 18 in the resort town of Girardot. He had received death threats because of his reporting on alleged police involvement in the murder of street people and on investments in local resorts by drug traffickers. In Turkey, Metin Goktepe, a columnist for the daily, Evrensel, was beaten to death by police Jan. 8, 1996. He had been covering the deaths in Istanbul of two leftist inmates killed during a prison riot.

The CPJ says they arranged a meeting in the last few days with officials here at the U.S. State Department to bring the killings and imprisonment of journalists to their attention and to urge officials to speak out against the abuse of journalists.

“We urged U.S. diplomats to be more outspoken in their condemnation of imprisonments of journalists in Turkey, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Vietnam — all countries where CPJ believes that a clear show of U.S. support for these jailed reporters could help lead to their release,” says Orme.

Nigeria is again in the spotlight with the military government’s recent charge of treason against exiled Nobel laureate playwright Wole Soyinka and 14 others. The 15 have been charged with being behind a series of bomb blasts that have rocked a number of cities in Nigeria over the last few months.

The past year saw a rash of detentions of independent Nigerian journalists — all without charge — in connection with articles that were critical of the military regime and its officials, says the CPJ.

“Gen. Sani Abacha escalated his brutal tactics aimed at decimating the independent press and driving journalists out of their profession or into exile,” says the CPJ report, which adds that journalists were under constant pressure to name their sources but chose, instead, to endure indefinite prison stays.

The year ended with a number of arrests of editors and correspondents and the announcement of the introduction of a separate press court to function with the sole purpose of prosecuting journalists and media professionals.

But Ethiopia succeeded, for the fourth consecutive year, in throwing more journalists into prison than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa. The CPJ reports that journalists are regularly harassed, censored, arrested, and illegally detained for weeks or months without charge or trial. By year’s end, four editors of the Amharic daily newspaper and weekly magazine, Tobia, had suffered arrest and detention without charge. In March last year, CPJ delegates went to Ethiopia to research press freedom issues and meet with government officials and members of the press.

Following the visit, the CPJ issued a series of recommendations aimed at improved working conditions for the Ethiopian press. The press freedom group called for the immediate and unconditional release of all journalists who have been imprisoned for exercising their legal right to report the news; it called on the government to eliminate excessive bail, “which primarily serves to render private publications financially insolvent; it urged that police officers, the judiciary, and government officials be trained in the rights of journalists, the role of the press in a democratic society, and in general human rights issues.

The CPJ’s list of recommendations also included a call for the introduction of an equitable system that permits private ownership of broadcast media.

Journalists in some countries in Asia also faced major impediments.

The CPJ notes that civil strife and separatist wars provided the backdrop to most of the press freedom violations in South Asia, while regimes in East Asia impeded access to information through Internet censorship and the suppression of dissident journalism.

China blocked access to Internet sites run by Hong Kong and U.S.-based news organisations as well as by the Chinese language daily, Ming Pao. Singapore set up a body to police the Internet and required the state’s three Internet providers to install equipment capable of blocking access to certain sites.

Meanwhile, China and Indonesia continued to crackdown on dissident reporters, says the CPJ.

A Beijing court sentenced noted dissident, Wang Dan, to 11 years in prison, charging him with trying to subvert the government through articles written for overseas press. With the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China scheduled for July 1997, Hong Kong journalists are reportedly observing these developments warily.

In Burma, political arrests and repression have dramatically increased as the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) keeps a tight rein on the flow of information, says the CPJ report. On Jun. 7 last year, the SLORC introduced a law that made it an offence to instigate, protest, say, write, or distribute anything that would “disrupt and deteriorate the stability of the state, communal peace and tranquility, and the prevalence of law and order.” Persons convicted under the law face prison terms of up to 20 years.

The regime also made owning, using, importing, or borrowing a modem or fax machine a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The SLORC also barred access to the residence of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) in late September and conducted mass arrests of NLD members and supporters.