The FCO’s World Press Freedom Day blog contains some impressive posts on press freedom in Zimbabwe, Vietnam and other countries.

Unfortunately, the British Embassy in Bahrain seems to have gone somewhat off message. They tweeted earlier:

On #WPFD we asked Bahraini journalists and commentators to write on the freedom of expression in Bahrain ow.ly/kFCFb

— UK Embassy Bahrain (@UKinBahrain) May 3, 2013

The link leads to two articles: one by Anwar Abdulrahman, of the pro-Bahraini regime Akhbar Al Khaleej and its sister paper Gulf Daily News, and one bylined “Citizens for Bahrain“, apparently a pro-government astroturfing exercise.

The pieces themselves are quite something: Abdulrahman is worth quoting at length:

From my desk as Editor-in-Chief, I believe that freedom should be based on humanness, righteousness and debate, not anarchy and terror. For in this era of open skies and the Internet, to misuse freedom is easy. Any story can be fabricated, any person or government defamed at the touch of a computer screen.

Another thought…as much as beasts cannot be left to roam freely, so in human society the feral element’s freedom should be under control.

That’s the Bahraini opposition, many of whom have been locked up for exercising their right to free expression, he’s referring to as the “feral element”.

Citizens for Bahrain, meanwhile, inform us:

It is time to practice this freedom in a suitable manner and not to abuse it. Freedom of the press is certainly a right, but it must be used with care and wisdom. When used such a manner it can be influential in developing and enlightening society, making this society more resilient both in times of trouble and times of peace.

In conclusion, we say this: Express your views openly and honestly; but put your country before your personal interests.

That is to say, “shut up”.

Why the embassy chooses to mark World Press Freedom Day by publishing two articles in support of censorship, and a regime that imprisons protesters, including Index award winner Nabeel Rajab, is a mystery.

Update: The embassy has moved to distance itself from the views expressed in the blog posts.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer for Index on Censorship. @mePadraigReidy

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Burma

A Muslim woman, Win Win Sein, has been charged with “religious defamation”, after she accidentally knocked over the alms bowl of a Buddhist monk (AFP)

France
The video for “College Boy” by rock band Indochine has been banned from TV for its portrayal of bullying and the crucifiction and shooting of a schoolboy (Huffington Post France)

(Warning: video is graphic)

Turkmenistan
Government officials searched phones and cameras of spectators at a horse racing event in an attempt to suppress footage of President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov falling off his horse at the end of a race he “won” (The Times £)

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We don’t have independent TV channels, or radio stations. Most of the free newspapers have been closed. TV journalist Zmitser Zavadski, who had at one time been a Lukashenka’s personal cameraman, was abducted and killed. Journalist Veranika Charkasova, who investigated ties between the Belarusian regime and the regime of Saddam Hussein, was murdered. Some of my colleagues were sentenced to restriction of liberty for criticizing Lukashenka in their articles. Pavel Mazheika, Viktor Ivashkevich, and Mikalai Markevich served two years of compulsory labour for this. This is a Soviet-style form of punishment — one has to live in a prison-like guarded facility, which is situated far from home as a rule, and do low-paid work, for example tree cutting.

Until recently, the internet was the only source of true information. But now the dictatorship has decided to deprive the Belarusians of an opportunity to learn the truth about the events in the country.

Two criminal cases have been opened against the Belarusian opposition’s most popular internet-resource charter97.org (which I work for). In March our office was raided and eight computers were seized. I was beaten by a masked police man. They didn’t introduce themselves; they just burst into my apartment and hit me in the face.

I am called in for interrogation all the time. It’s annoying and hinders my work. This is the aim of the authorities. Two criminal cases have been initiated against Charter 97, in connection with articles about the corruption among high officials, who had allegedly defamed a KGB regional head, and readers’ comments on the articles on our website.

I believe the attack on charter97.org is related to the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for early 2011. The authorities are afraid of the growing popularity of independent internet resources. The people, tired of lies of the official media, are looking for the truth.

Our website was attacked just after an interview with Andrei Sannikov, the European Belarus civil campaign leader, had been published, where he announced his decision to run for presidency. It’s no coincidence that Andrei Sannikov’s wife journalist Iryna Khalip is also a witness in the criminal case over “libel” against A KGB officer.

Lukashenka has a great fear of the upcoming presidential elections, the greatest fear he has ever had. He knows he lost the people’s support long ago, and realises what a dangerous exercise rigging election results for 17 years is. This fear means he could do anything.

Lukashenka’s decree on the Internet comes into force on 1 July. Under the decree, all opposition internet resources can be closed and journalists arrested.

Anything may happen to me and my fellow journalists. We need the solidarity of journalists, human rights activists, politicians, and people all over the world. The silence of the European Union, which doesn’t react to the outrageous situation in Belarus, insults us and all those who stand for European values.

Belarus doesn’t have oil and gas, but 10 million people live there. London has almost the same population. Imagine the same things are happening to you and your families, while the world stands idly by and says “at least people aren’t being killed in the streets.” Maybe Europe wants us to be murdered?

Natalia Radzina is editor of charter97.org

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Carlos Flores Borja, winner of an Index on Censorship Award, reports from Peru on how his radio station was closed down for reporting a government massacre, and his subsequent fight for justice

It was three in the morning on 5 June 2009, and the heat was already suffocating in Bagua Grande, in northern Peru. It had been virtually impossible to sleep for worrying about what might be about to happen. I said goodbye to my children, Leyla and José, giving them final instructions as they got ready to set out: “Take great care,” I told them. They were off to report on an event for my community radio station Radio la Voz that was to have severe repercussions for the region and for broadcasting.

Just 24 hours earlier, we had learned that more than 3,000 indigenous Indians from the valleys of the Marañón, Cenepa and Nieva rivers were going to be removed that day from the main road they had been occupying for the past two months. They were protesting against the government’s failure to repeal a dozen legislative decrees, following the Free Trade Agreement with the US, that were putting at risk the ownership of the land and woods where the Amazonian Indians had lived for thousands of years. President Alan García’s government had plans to appropriate these lands in order to sell them –– or concessions to them –– to national and international companies, permitting, for the first time, their commercial exploitation for minerals, gas and oil.

Some 50,000 indigenous people have lived in the district of Condorcanqui inside the Amazonian region of northeast Peru for thousands of years. They belong to the ethnic groups of the Awajún and the Wampis, formerly known as the Jíbaros. They had resisted conquest by the Chachapoyas, by the Inca and by the Spaniards, and were known as head-shrinkers. Since the establishment of the Republic of Peru, they continued living in the Amazonian highlands, guardians of the only forests still surviving.

On that day in June, I was getting ready to start transmitting from 5am onwards, opening with a programme of folkloric Andean music that preceded the La Voz news broadcast, which went out daily between 7 and 10am. The plan was to keep listeners informed of the police operation to unblock the Fernando Belaúnde highway. My son Léiter, the chief engineer of Radio La Voz, was in charge of the transmitter and opened the musical programme.

True to our principles, we had approved a radio schedule that included two news broadcasts, La Voz from 7-10am, and Sin Censura (Without Censorship) from 1-3pm, in addition to slots dedicated to the promotion of reading and literacy; the protection of the environment; solidarity with our brothers and sisters with degrees of disability; and to the spread of rural arts and culture.

At 6.10am on that fateful morning, we interrupted our music programme in order to make room for a phone call from my other son José, who announced that the removals had commenced 20 minutes earlier. The indigenous peoples were under attack from a massive quantity of teargas bombs, launched at them from both land and air. From that moment on, both José and Leyla maintained continuous communication with the radio station using their mobile phones. So it was that the population of Bagua Grande –– and of the whole of Peru –– began to learn of what became the most brutal aggression of the state against the peoples of the Awajún and the Wampis.

When news of the first deaths among both the indigenous peoples and the police began to arrive, none of us could believe it. What had first seemed a simple matter of removing people from a highway was turning into a massacre, at the end of which we might learn the precise body count for police fatalities, but would never learn the number of indigenous protesters who shared their fate. It was with great pain that I, up in my studio at Radio La Voz, and in charge of news broadcasts, had to transmit what my children were sending me from Curva del Diablo and Bagua Chica, at risk of their lives.

At 10am, our electricity was disconnected and the radio signal immediately went off air as a result. A few minutes later, we learnt from national news programmes that the Interior Minister Mercedes Cabanillas had accused us of using the airwaves to foment violence, inciting the natives to attack and kill police officers. Other senior members of the Aprista government made similar claims. They unfairly blamed us for the regrettable events that took place on that day. Silenced by the abusive exercise of police power, we were obliged to be dumb witnesses to the exercise of police violence against Bagua Chica and Bagua Grande. In both these provincial capitals, the population rose in protest against the massacre in Curva del Diablo, and it became necessary to add the number of those who sacrificed their lives in those towns to the death toll. We were not able to transmit news of any of this, but we recorded it all in photographs, which we later published in a magazine called Curva del Diablo.

In the days following the massacre, the government declared 11 indigenous people and 23 police officers dead. But according to indigenous groups, 50 protesters were killed and up to 400 disappeared.

On 8 June, the MTC published its decision to withdraw Radio Voz’s operating licence in the official daily El Peruano. Radio La Voz was shut down and my entire family, who had made huge sacrifices to invest in this small business, was left without work. A whole region that had depended on the radio station as its source of news was now deprived of independent reporting. In Peru, this is the price one pays to defend freedom of expression.

On learning of the fate of Radio La Voz, many groups came to its aid, in a show of solidarity. Over 100 broadcast stations belonging to the National Radio Network (CNR) began to cover the story and to call me for telephone interviews, in order to report developments in the Amazon region of the country. For a number of days, I was virtually chained to the phone answering calls, first from the national stations affiliated to the CNR, and then from abroad, where the news had spread thanks to the magic of the internet. Another national radio channel, incorporated by the Legal Defence Institute (IDL), called Ideelradio, also reported on what had happened at Curva del Diablo and the closure of Radio la Voz.

I would like to take this opportunity to make known my gratitude to the National Association of Peruvian Journalists (ANP); the Press and Social Institute (IPYS); the Association for Human Rights; the National Network of the Popular and Alternative Press; and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (which went so far as to invite me to Washington to make my case known); the Rory Peck Trust; and to Index on Censorship for its support and solidarity in the struggle. My lasting gratitude is also due to the grassroots and popular organisations in the Amazon region of Peru, along with all those individuals who have expressed their concern for the situation at our radio station.

For the legal fight we now face, we have been represented by the solicitor Roberto Pereyra Chumbe, whose services IPYS has loaned us for free. So far, two of the representations he put before the MTC have been rejected. Those rejections bear witness to the viciousness of the government’s campaign against Radio La Voz, which it is determined to punish for having transmitted news of the massacre at Curva del Diablo and for bearing witness to its plan to appropriate land from the indigenous communities in the region.

Freedom of expression in Peru has been seriously violated by the present government, despite its boasts of being democratic. By trying to comply in every detail with the free-trade treaties he has signed with numerous countries, most notably the US, Alan Garcia will not hesitate to shut down the media that challenges his policies, not only Radio La Voz, but also other radio stations, including Oriente, Capline, Orión, Vecinal and many more. He is responsible for imprisoning journalists, including our colleague Alejandro Carrascal Carrasco, who is in the San Humberto jail at Bagua Grande. He attempts to take control of national television channels, as in the recent instance of América Televisión –Canal 4. He intimidates provincial newspapers, with the overriding intention of silencing those in the countryside, and has redistributed the radio stations between a group of businesses known to lack all respect for the environment. The majority of the mass media keep the businessmen as either allies or accomplices, thanks to the state publicity machine which offers them generous tax exemptions. None of us can afford to buy or subsidise the tiny provincial radio stations, so they close us down, impound our equipment, freeze our bank accounts and threaten to strangle us economically through a system of fines and other sanctions.

However, it remains the case that the government never imagined that a tiny radio station such as Radio La Voz would stand up to it. We do so because we deem freedom of expression as a fundamental and inalienable right that we will fight to the death to defend.

Translated by Amanda Hopkinson

This is an edited extract of an article that appears in the next edition of Index on Censorship, Radio Redux, out in June

Carlos Flores Borja is winner of the Guardian Journalism award at the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards 2010. All charges against Radio La Voz were dropped in February

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Michael Foley
It might be fanciful, but what better way to celebrate World Press Freedom Day than for governments to acknowledge the fundamental and central role journalism plays in democracy and in creating a democractic culture. Would it not be good if on this day governments said they would desist from announcing legislation that slowly chips away at press freedom?

In Ireland we are about to have a blasphemy law and privacy legislation introduced, unless, in the unlikely event, there is a successful campaign against it. We have seen our freedom of information legislation made less effective and editors have been harrassed in order to have sources revealed. The press has waited 18 years for libel reform, since a Law Reform Commission recommended changes in 1991. Still Ireland is about fourth in the world ranking of countries with a free press. What does that say about the rest of the world?

With such an acknowdegment from governments must come actions and the creation of an environment that allows good journalism to flourish. Ownership of the press must be addressed. Governments must legislate to ensure diversity of ownership and not be afraid to challenge those coporations that would monopolise and cheapen journalism for profit. The media that supports journalism is not like other enterprises; it must be supported and encouraged to flourish because without diversity, debates and conversations in society do not take place. Cheap journalism relying on public relations, publicists, press officers and a narrow range of sources is nothing but propaganda that serves a ruling elite and is inherently anti-democratic.
Michael Foley is senior lecturer in journalism at the Dublin Institute of Techology School of Media

William Horsley
No one change in the law would bring more press freedom, because governments everywhere have shown their determination to take more powers at the expense of the values they pay lip service to in public. They have used the threat of terrorism to enact a host of laws restricting press freedom. The killing of Anna Politkovskaya, Hrant Dink and Lasantha Wickrematunge shows how easily journalists can be destroyed with impunity, and the press cowed into self-censorship or submission. Press freedom has become an endangered species. As governments have seized more formal powers in the name of state security, and clandestine powers of surveillance and unseen pressures, hundreds of media freedom groups have grown up to defend the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But their voices are divided and too often ignored. Leading media around the world, and influential pressure groups including Index on Censorship, must take action themselves, using the weapons of the press — arguments, proof, publicity and every form of pressure, in new and stronger ways. The crisis of survival for press freedom calls for a new worldwide alliance of free media organisations and groups that monitor and contest the pandemic of press freedom violations. The world movement for freedom of the press should learn from Charter 77 and Helsinki Watch, which helped bring freedom of expression to populations trapped in the monopoly of state propaganda. Press Freedom needs its own CND, its Live Aid, its Greenpeace. It needs to bring down hypocrisy using truth as its weapon.
William Horsley is editor of the Association of European Journalists
Media Freedom Survey

Natalia A Koliada
It is scary that in the year 2009 there are still ‘black zones’ where press freedom does not exist. It is necessary to get rid off of thoze zones. Only freedom of the media can guarantee open dialogue and public discussion. This is vitally important in this time of potentially long-running crises. It is important to keep in mind that only with a help of free press it is possible to prevent the spread of dictatorial regimes like those in Belarus, Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe to the rest of the world. A free press is the bodyguard of real democratic and moral values, which are too easily dismissed in the world today.
Natalia A Koliada General Director and Co-Founder of the
Belarus Free Theatre

Julian Petley
The one single thing that would improve press freedom internationally would be if all governments, in democratic and non-democratic countries alike, would honour their obligations under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which, let’s just remind ourselves, states that: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’

European countries are equally obliged to honour the more or less identical Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which Britain incorporated into domestic law in the Human Rights Act 1998. And yet, wherever one looks, these obligations appear to be honoured more in the breach than the observance, and in a largely rhetorical and token fashion. It has recently been said that freedom of expression faces a ‘counter reformation’ across the world, and the friends of free expression need to do our utmost to expose all the different ways in which this malign trend is working and to combat them with all their might.
Julian Petley is professor of Screen Media and Journalism in the School of Arts at Brunel University

Find out more about World Press Freedom Day at www.worldpressfreedomday.org/

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