24 Apr 2007 | Comment
Liberian information minister Laurence Bropleh continues to make a stalwart but surprising defence of his government’s targeting of the Monrovia Independent newspaper for publishing an obscene photograph of another cabinet minister.
Disgraced Minister of Presidential Affairs Willis Knuckles tendered his resignation on 25 February after a picture of him in a sex act with two young girls surfaced on the internet. Accepting it, President Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson said his behaviour “while not illegal, is improper and inappropriate for a public servant.”
But when the Independent newspaper in Monrovia reprinted a copy of the obscene picture in its coverage of Knuckles’s resignation two days later, the government snapped. It revoked the newspaper’s license for a year, ordered its offices closed and sent officers of the country’s National Security Agency round to Monrovia’s print houses to warn them off printing the paper.
Bropleh did not name the Independent during his comments to an April 20-21 conference on post-conflict press freedoms organised by International Media Support (IMS) and sponsored by the Danish committee of UNESCO. Instead he reserved his ire for Liberian media rights groups which had supported the paper against the ban.
In fact the Press Council of Liberia had been as critical of the Independent for republishing the photograph as Bropleh had been, and suspended the membership of the paper and editor Sam Dean for three months. Nevertheless, concerned along with others about the security services’ involvement, they still supported The Independent’s petition to Liberia’s Supreme Court for a lifting of the ban.
Sadly there were no representatives of the Liberian media rights community at the Copenhagen conference and thus able to put the minister straight.
But sat on a conference panel with Bropleh on Saturday to debate the issue of access to information in post-conflict societies, Index on Censorship did try. We defended the media rights groups’ right to protest the way the state acted against the Independent, regardless of any question about the paper’s taste and judgment.
Perhaps, this correspondent suggested, the publication of the photo was a criminal matter – possibly even a civil one – “more appropriately dealt with by a detective constable from Monrovia High Street police station than the security services.”
Bropleh reasserted that it was the NSA’s jurisdiction. The Media Foundation for West Africa reported in February that publication of the pictures could be a breach of Section 18.1 of Liberia’s Penal Code, which ‘prohibits the dissemination of obscene materials without minimizing the risk of exposure to children under sixteen,’ citing a senior police official.
In fact the rest of the Liberian government has since distanced itself from the use of NSA officers to enforce the closure. Another government spokesman, Gabriel Williams, has told the Monrovia Inquirer that “such an act will not be repeated,” as he said, Liberia ‘subscribes to the rule of law, democratic governance and free press.’
‘The government has acknowledged that it did not follow due process,’ commented the US Committee to Protect Journalists on the case. ‘We urge the Supreme Court to rescind the ban against the paper.’
Bropleh is a minister of a Liberian church as well as a minister in the Liberian government. Apart from demonstrating his possible unsuitability for at least one of those jobs, what does any of this matter?
Actually, quite a lot.
Liberia is bracing itself for the withdrawal of a multinational peacekeeping force, the largest committed to Africa in United Nations history, and in place since the end of the country’s civil war four years ago.
This month the Johnson-Sirleaf government announced plans to create a new paramilitary security force, tasked to tackle riots and other threats to national stability, independently of the country’s existing national police.
Given the way the National Security Agency besieged The Independent after its Willis Knuckles’ resignation coverage, in a manner that the Press Union described as ‘akin to intimidation,’ media rights groups are right to be concerned about how the new so-called ‘Quick Reaction Unit’ will react the next time a government minister is offended – or is caught being offensive – by the country’s press.
24 Apr 2007 | Comment
Two resolutions, one introduced in the House in January and in the Senate in March, seek to recognise the events of 1915 as genocide, but the passage of either could jeopardise the US’s political relationship with Turkey. The resolutions are pending approval from committees in both houses.
Turkey, as an American ally, has allowed the US to use its military bases and has played a significant role in American efforts in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the Turkish government have condemned the move, and though the resolutions are non-binding, if passed, they could be interpreted by Turkey as acts of hostility.
Turkey, in its quest for EU membership, has denied that what happened between 1915 and 1923 to the country’s Armenian population is genocide. Some things, however, are undisputed: in 1915, during the rule of the Ottoman Empire, authorities forced the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Turkey’s 1.75 million Armenians. The estimated number of Armenians that died ranges between 300,000 and 1.5 million.
The Armenian National Committee of America is one of the most outspoken campaign groups in support of the resolution. ANCA spokeswoman Elizabeth Chouldjian said the issue at hand is a moral one. ‘America needs to be on the right side of the issue,’ she said. ‘Not characterizing genocide as genocide is dangerous. We have to take every precaution to end the cycle of genocide.’
The hope, she said, is that if the US recognises the killings as genocide, Turkey would be forced to take a more open and honest approach in re-examining its history.
‘Recognition is not going to change the facts of what happened, but it can certainly relieve the emotional burden on Armenians and other victims of genocide,’ said Ronald Suny, a professor and historian at the University of Michigan. ‘We think of recognition as the first step of clearing the air and letting historians and politicians deal with the issue.’
But Andrew Finkel, an Istanbul-based journalist, said that the issue of addressing Armenians’ sense of injury and grievance won’t eradicate problems that hinder a discussion from taking place within Turkey. ‘It would provoke a tit-for-tat counter reaction,’ he said.
In fact, he said, a US resolution would make the struggle for human rights and free expression in Turkey more difficult. Within this overtly political debate lies the question of historical accuracy and historians’ and scholars’ ability to have open discourse about contentious issues within the country. Free expression in Turkey is curbed by draconian articles in the country’s penal code, but pressure from the US won’t effect the sort of change that the country needs. ‘The more important resolution is that Turks themselves face up to their history,’ Finkel said.
The Bush administration takes a similar stance. The state department has said the administration doesn’t want to politicise an issue that should be resolved through discussion within Turkey. On 11 April, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried said: ‘The United States doesn’t deny any of the killings. They’re an established historical fact, but historians need to discuss the details of what happened, why it happened, who did what. This needs to happen, and it needs to happen as a process of genuine national reconciliation.’
To date, 38 states in the US and 19 countries worldwide have officially recognised the genocide. The resolution in the House of Representatives is pending a decision from the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the resolution in the Senate is pending in the Committee on Foreign Relations.
23 Apr 2007 | News and features
The two, the editor and guest editor of the Clare College student magazine, had been questioned by police after an issue of the magazine dedicated to satirising religion appeared.
The magazine consisted mostly of a critique of the New Testament, but also featured several criticisms of Islam, and, most controversially, a reproduction of one of the infamous Jyllands Posten cartoons of Mohammed.
In a statement, Cambridgeshire police said: ‘The police casefile on the publication of material in the Clare College magazine was considered by the CPS but a decision was taken not to prosecute. The students involved in the publication have been offered words of advice by police.’
23 Apr 2007 | Comment
Ever since Peter Brooke as Northern Ireland Secretary of State made his 1990 statement that Britain had no selfish strategic interest for remaining in Ireland most people have come to accept that Brooke called it pretty much as it was. Northern Irish unionism rather than any imperialist imperative on the part of the British state was what ensured the continuation of partition.
Enter MI5. That situation now demands some reappraisal. With the new MI5 building at Hollywood, County Down, designed to monitor and combat ‘international terrorism’ the British state now has a long term strategic interest in keeping the North within the UK. Having a security service as the fulcrum on which long term political strategy turns is not without considerable consequences for human rights.
This becomes all the more pronounced in the wake of the Northern Ireland’s policing Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan’s damming report on collusion between RUC Special Branch and loyalist murder gangs. Special Branch emerged from that report looking pretty indistinguishable from the terrorist gang, whose murder campaign it effectively managed.
The lesson is simple – those who police society from the shadows are often more shadowy and sinister than the forces they seek to monitor. They are therefore to be trusted only reluctantly and always in the wake of a serious health and safety check which pronounces them fit for democratic purpose.
One crucial body whose task it is in democratic society to perform such health and safety checks, the press, is now being forced on the back foot by a state eager to curb the prowess of the press and enhance the powers of the security services. The recently drafted Policing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Northern Ireland Order allows PSNI personnel to seize notes and electronic records for up to 96 hours. Claiming that new powers are needed because of “the increasingly sophisticated nature of serious crime” the Northern Ireland police guided by the intelligence agencies will now be able to mount surgical strikes aimed at heading off at the pass any journalistic investigation into the activities of the security agencies. The irony of course is that the body most recently exposed as having being up to its neck in terrorism was a crucial element in the British state security apparatus, RUC Special Branch. It is a matter of public record how abusive the security services are whatever their guise. Why increase their scope for abuse?
This move comes at a time when documentation is either, depending on whose ox is being gored, a crucial asset or liability being fought over by contesting sides. MI5 currently want their documents back from the Stevens team, whose task it has been for the best part of two decades to investigate collusion between the security services and armed groups in the island of Ireland. The new legislation currently being proposed will allow the same agencies to pervert the course of justice. It is to curb journalists from publishing their findings and also to intimidate whistleblowers and other sources from providing journalists with the much needed information that would lift the lid on nefarious state activities.
There is of course nothing new about this. The British state has been involved in numerous cover ups since it sent its troops onto Northern Irish streets in 1969. In 1972 Prime Minister Edward Heath set the parameters for justice when he told Lord Widgery on the eve of his inquiry into the bloody Sunday killings to be mindful that the war being waged by the British had a propaganda dimension. Widgery duly obliged and his name has been synonymous with whitewash ever since.
The former Greater Manchester Chief Constable, John Stalker, almost had his career destroyed in the 1980s when he began to investigate RUC shoot to kill operations which were carried out at the behest of the intelligence agencies. Canadian Judge Peter Cory, who in recent years investigated security service collusion, was reportedly furious with the British government’s tardy and obstructive approach to his findings and recommendations.
In other cases, including the 2005 trial of the MI5 agent Denis Donaldson, prosecutions were aborted or alternatively, Public Immunity Certificates were issued by the British state in a bid to ensure that knowledge about informers did not come to public attention. Arguably this was less rooted in concern for the welfare of informers than it was in the need to shield from democratic scrutiny the fact that information received that could have prevented death was in fact not acted upon. This issue is at the heart of concerns over the role of MI5 in relation to the 1998 Real IRA bombing of Omagh town which produced massive civilian casualties.
If democratic scrutiny is to have any currency in Northern Ireland, an unhindered press is a necessity rather than something to be doled out or withdrawn in accordance with the self serving interests of the government of the day. Censorship complementing cover ups might suit the state; it is disastrous for society.
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