Reporters Without Borders
Press release
2 May 2008
The predators of press freedom
Reporters Without Borders is today issuing an updated of list of its “predators of press freedom” for World Press Freedom Day.
For the past seven years Reporters Without Borders has exposed the world’s “predators of press freedom” – men and women who directly attack journalists or order others to. Most are top-level politicians (including presidents, prime ministers and kings) but they also include militia chiefs, leaders of armed groups and drug-traffickers. They usually answer to no-one for their serious attacks on freedom of expression. Failure to punish them is one of the greatest threats to the media today.
There are 39 “predators of press freedom” this year. Five have disappeared from the previous list. Fidel Castro is one of them, as the “lider maximo” has definitively transferred power to his brother Raúl. Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf lost February’s parliamentary elections and, in the process, his ability to harm press freedom. In Ethiopia, the situation seems to have stabilised and imprisoned journalists have been released, so Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has been taken off the list. The same goes for Swaziland’s King Mswati III, who has not committed any serious press freedom violation for several years. Finally, Young Patriots leader Charles Blé Goudé in Côte d’Ivoire has stopped calling for violence against foreign journalists or opposition journalists.
But 10 new predators have entered the list. In the Palestinian Territories, the armed wing of Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces in the West Bank were guilty of serious press freedom violations. Each faction systematically hounded journalists suspecting of siding with the other camp.
The Israel Defence Forces were added to the list after they began again to target journalists covering their incursions into the Palestinian Territories. A Palestinian cameraman working for Reuters was killed in April by a shell fired from an Israeli tank. In July 2007, a cameraman lost the use of both legs after being fired on by an Israeli soldier as he lay on the ground.
Gurbangouly Berdymukhammedov, who has been president of Turkmenistan for more than a year, did not keep his promise to carry out democratic reforms. The media continue to be under the government’s absolute control and prisoners of conscience have not been released.
Press freedom has many enemies in Somalia. The armed group Al-Shabaab, Mogadishu governor and mayor Mohamed Dhere and national security agency director Mohamed Warsame Darwish are among those who are particularly brutal in the way they treat journalists.
In Sri Lanka, the president’s brother, defence minister Gotabhaya Rajapakse, often voices virulent attacks on the press, contributing to the appalling climate that prevails there. In the north of the country, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the long-time leader of the Tamil Tiger rebels, continues to intimidate journalists who criticise his movement.
Finally, political calm has returned in Nepal, but a few radical armed groups make life hell for the press, especially in the south. At least 90 journalists were physically attacked, threatened or force to flee their town as a result of threat from armed militants.
AFRICA
Equatorial Guinea
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, President
Everything is peaceful in President Obiang Nguema’s oil-rich “Kuwait of Africa,” where the state radio calls him the country’s “god.” He is regularly elected by just under 100% of the vote and has absolute control. No privately-owned media is allowed except for a semi-clandestine opposition newsletter regularly harassed by the regime.
The control of the economy by the president and his family goes with a suffocating personality cult. The few local journalists freelancing for the foreign media are closely watched. The regime says the lack of democracy is because of “poverty” and not intolerance of those who criticise Obiang Nguema’s power “to kill someone without being punished or going to hell,” as the state radio puts it.
Eritrea
Issaias Afeworki, President
The authoritarian President Afeworki officially suspended basic freedoms in 2001 after dissidents in the ruling party called for democracy. Every hint of opposition is described as “treason.” The privately-owned media has been shut down and only the state media are allowed, preaching a rigid line. The Red Sea country has become a prison, ruled harshly by an ultra-nationalist group around Afeworki.
At least 16 journalists have vanished into Eritrea’s 314 prisons. Four of them, including distinguished playwright Fessehaye (“Joshua”) Yohannes, have reportedly died in the harsh and cruel conditions. The government first called the journalists common-law prisoners, then spies and then simply denied their existence.
Gambia
Yahya Jammeh, President
Jammeh, a former army sergeant who seized power in 1994 when he was only 29, boasts of his contempt for journalists. He has cracked down on all critics through his personal guard and secret police, with arrests, threats and bomb attacks against the media. But journalists, grouped in a trade union, fought back until the December 2004 murder of Deyda Hydara, editor of the newspaper The Point and former head of the union. The country’s media has been cowed since then and the killers have not been arrested or punished.
Journalists are illegally arrested on the slightest pretext at the president’s whim, even though Gambia is the headquarters of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. He continues to insist that “if I want to shut down a newspaper, I will.”
Nigeria
State Security Service (SSS)
This fearsome organisation at the disposal of the president does the government’s dirty work, typically ransacking media offices, making illegal arrests and arbitrarily throwing people in prison. It routinely denies arresting journalists despite many witnesses to the fact.
It is the successor to the Nigerian Security Organisation (NSO), the secret police of the military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, and was set up in 1986 soon after Gen. Ibrahim Babangida seized power. Civilian rule was restored in 1999 but the SSS continues to obey the president’s orders. The media is bold and vigorous but the SSS is sometimes sent to intimidate journalists with raids, beatings and tough interrogations.
Rwanda
Paul Kagame, President
The provisions in the national constitution for press freedom are just empty words for President Paul Kagame, as he tolerates no embarrassing questions at press conferences, frequently insults independent journalists and dismisses all critical media outlets as “Radio Mille Collines,” the former genocidal radio station.
The government attacks any journalist, local or foreign, who puts out news it does not like or which violates the taboos of the society built by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), which came to power after overthrowing the genocidal Hutu regime and ending its massacres.
A foreign journalist was deported in 2006, a newspaper editor beaten up and another heavily sanctioned for a political commentary. Local journalists flee into exile each year, unable to work in such stifling conditions. This doesn’t bother Kagame, who calls them “mercenaries” and “down-and-outs.”
Somalia
Al-Shabaab armed group
Initially an armed wing of the Islamic Courts, which were ousted from Mogadishu by government troops and the Ethiopian army in December 2006, this group of “young combatants” has gradually emerged as the most fearsome subversive machine operating in Somalia. Rejecting the “politicking” of the Islamist leaders exiled in Eritrea, it has broken away and organises murderous attacks on the transitional government and its allies.
It also supervises a campaign of terror and targeted murders against leading members of Somali civil society who are, it says, guilty of serving the interests of the “Crusaders.” Dozens of teachers, academics, doctors and at least three journalists have been killed by these “Young Mujahideen,” who often use innocent-looking teenagers as hit-men.
Somalia
Mohamed Dhere, Mogadishu governor and mayor, and Mohamed Warsame Darwish, head of national security agency
Mohamed Omar Habeb, a former warlord better known as “Mohamed Dhere,” and intelligence chief Mohamed Warsame Darwish are in charge of security in Mogadishu. As such, they are the leading instigators of the heavy-handed raids, arbitrary arrests and deliberately shootings used to harass the few journalists still operating in Somalia, especially when the journalists expose abuses by the military or interview government opponents. Coordinating their activities with the commander of the Ethiopian forces in Somalia, Gen. Gabre Heard, they often exceed the orders they get from a civilian government that proclaims its commitment to press freedom but has little power. As they have carte blanche to combat the Islamist rebels, they see press freedom as a danger. And they are free to ignore the law.
Zimbabwe
Robert Mugabe, President
The octogenarian Mugabe, one of world’s oldest rulers, was hailed when he came to power as a “liberator” comparable with Nelson Mandela but these days he tolerates no criticism. His regime’s “slum clearance” targets opposition strongholds and made 700,000 people homeless in 2005, but he describes it as a public health operation. The 2002 information law introduced strict monitoring of the media and is used to combat supposed foreign subversion. The 2003 ban on the country’s most popular newspaper, the Daily News, was described by Mugabe as simply a bureaucratic move.
Mugabe orders the arrest of local and foreign journalists, who he accuses of spying because they do not obey the regime’s strict rules, and uses threats and legal harassment in a bid to silence them. Zimbawean radio stations based abroad are jammed, using Chinese equipment, and the former “breadbasket” of southern Africa is now one of the continent’s most repressive countries.
--------------
FROM HERO TO ZERO – A HISTORY LESSON FOR ROBERT MUGABE
By Arnold Kransdorff
Maybe a history lesson will inject some realism into Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. There is no country that has not been colonised sometime in their past, whether peaceably or through war. In the last 500 years, the Rowzi branch of the Shona people displaced the Mwanamutapa Empire of the Karangas to form the Changamire Empire, which in turn was conquered by the Ndebele’s Nguni people that culminated in King Lobengula’s rule, all forms of what, in modern terminology, is called colonialism. In short, the Ndebele did to the Shona what the British did in Rhodesia, and what Mugabe, who belongs to the majority Shona tribe, has done in Zimbabwe.
Where this history lesson becomes instructive is in the way the people who rule handle their heritage, however it turned out. Does Mr Mugabe really believe that the minority Ndebele people don’t feel that they’ve been ‘colonised’? And was the colonial period under the British worse than his state-sponsored killings of the Ndebele in the 1980s, the encouraged violence against his detractors, his election-rigging disenfranchisement, his racist appropriation of farm land, his 200,000% annual inflation, the collapse of his utilities, the imposed starvation of his people and the use of his army in another sovereign country’s internal affairs (the DR Congo), an adventure in which he enriched himself and some of his henchmen hugely.
In the colonial stakes, Zimbabwe was actually very lucky to have its British past; it could have been the Dutch, the Belgiums, the French, the Germans or the Portuguese, among others. In the event the British left the country with a superb infrastructure, a place that could feed itself and others, and a well-educated civil society that could have been adapted to a more suitable Zimbabwe character without the pain Mr Mugabe has inflicted.
If he had been a better experiential learner, Mugabe would have been able to distinguish between the good and the bad inheritance. Then he would have been able to improve on both. For an educated man, he has demonstrated little wisdom. For a religious man, he has no conscience. For a liberation hero, he has squandered himself.
All he really did was consume what he inherited, his most impressive creation being the 30-bedroom house he built for himself. Having produced naught in replacement, he has chosen to blame his mistakes on the past, just like the adult children who blame their parents for their own misdeeds. His deeds, actually, would put many other modern leaders and their henchmen in the dock. From what his political successors have said, justice is not going to be served. King Lobengula would have known what to do.
AUTHOR: Arnold Kransdorff is a 1968 refugee from Rhodesia. A specialist in experiential learning, he is the author of several books on the consequences of corporate amnesia, what happens when institutions lose their organisational memory as a result of the flexible labour market, political versions of which have crippled most of Africa.