13 Feb 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
The Sun’s associate editor Trevor Kavanagh has launched a stirring attack on the police in this morning’s paper. When Kavanagh lays out of what happened over the weekend, it’s hard not to agree that this looks like an assault on the press by an overzealous police force. While there is a criminal investigation ongoing and the police will need to talk to people, dawn raids at the weekend seem excessive and intimidatory.
Brian Cathcart suggests:
“As for the [Metropolitan Police], it is doing its job. It may well be doing it with a special zeal, in response to criticisms about a previous absence of zeal, but we can hardly complain about that either. “
I think I can complain, if I’m honest. The Met’s embarrassment over past unwillingness to investigate phonehacking does not give it licence to act disproportionately now, and journalists being roused from their beds by police is a bit too close for comfort to the kind of events we at Index cover and campaign on in the less free world. Moreover, one can’t help feel this is all part of an attempt to show willing ahead of the Leveson Inquiry’s scrutiny of the relations between police and the press, due to begin at the end of February.
Kavanagh correctly points out that “illegal” practices take part across the media. As Index noted in our submission to the Leveson Inquiry, these practices can be justified if there is a public interest and a clear line of accountability within the publication.
He then notes that the UK rates below Slovakia, Poland and Estonia in press freedom. The post-Soviet countries the UK is behind are not exactly Belarus or Turkmenistan, or indeed Russia, but Kavanagh is technically correct on this. The rating comes from Reporters Without Borders’ (RSF) annual Press Freedom Index. The RSF report comments:
Against the extraordinary backdrop of the News of the World affair, the United Kingdom (28th) caused concern with its approach to the protection of privacy and its response to the London riots. Despite universal condemnation, the UK also clings to a surreal law that allows the entire world to come and sue news media before its courts.
The “surreal law” referred to is English defamation law, while the “approach to privacy” is the fondness for the judicial injunction displayed by those who seek to stifle stories about them, not, as one might read it, the tendency of certain gentlemen of the press to listen to people’s voice messages.
While it may be tempting to aim a dismissive “calm down, dear” at Kavanagh, we should not pretend that there are no press freedom issues at stake in this country.
12 Feb 2012 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost
Malaysian authorities have deported a Saudi journalist accused of insulting the prophet Mohammed on Twitter, it was reported today. Newspaper columnist Hamza Kashgari fled Saudi Arabia after tweeting a mock conversation between himself and the prophet Mohammed last week that sparked thousands of responses, including death threats. He was arrested and detained upon his arrival in Malaysia last Wednesday. Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
10 Feb 2012 | Asia and Pacific
“I believe a journalist can change the world,” says exiled Sri Lankan journalist Sonali Samarasinghe, “if not why are we here then”. Sonali is one of three exiled journalists, from the minority Tamil and majority Sinhalese communities, whose stories are told in a new Norwegian film, Silenced Voices, by Beate Arnestad previewed last night at the Fritt Ord Foundation in Oslo.
All three paid an enormous price for that faith in the power of a journalist. Sonali is the widow of murdered Sinhalese journalist Lasantha Wickrametunga, who is famous for having penned his own obituary just before he was killed in January 2009 at the height of his country’s civil war. She’s shown in the film, alone in a tiny bedsit in New York, starting a news website, persevering in her profession, trying to interview a top army general over allegations of war crimes who’s now posted to the Sri Lankan mission to the UN. The scenes of the man dodging and fobbing her off will be familiar to any reporter, but this is very personal to Sonali since she still wants answers about who killed her husband in broad daylight in the capital. They’d only just got married and she could easily have been sitting next to him when he was killed.
Bashana is a Sinhalese journalist living in Germany, responsible for exposing war crimes committed by Sri Lankan soldiers from his own majority community. His organisation, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, obtained the horrific video broadcast by Channel 4 of naked, bound prisoners being executed by men wearing Sri Lankan army uniforms. While waiting for his asylum application to be processed, Bashana and his wife lose their home and are shown rolling out sleeping bags on the floor of a human rights office where they’re allowed to sleep at night. Some of the saddest scenes in the one hour film are of Bashana’s wife, Sharmila, who pours all her feelings of loneliness and sadness into beautiful but desolate photographs of frozen ice and empty winter landscapes. She says how much she just wants to go home.
Bashana’s extraordinary friendship with a Tamil journalist who worked for the pro-rebel news site, Tamilnet, is central to the film. They didn’t meet in Sri Lanka, but from exile Bashana helped Lokeesan apply for scholarships abroad, translating all the necessary documents. There are tense scenes when the film maker, Beate Arnestad, visits Lokeesan in southern India only to find out that Indian intelligence are watching her and she may have put Lokeesan at risk. He quickly goes into hiding elsewhere and she takes the next flight out. Months later Lokeesan escapes and finally meets the Sinhalese man who had helped him. Lokeesan told me he had never spoken to a Sinhalese civilian all his life, because he’d grown up in rebel territory in northern Sri Lanka and the only Sinhalese around were staring down the barrel of a gun at him.
Lokeesan and Bashana sit together in exile watching appalling footage that Lokeesan shot from inside the war zone in 2009, as hundreds of thousands of civilians were shelled and bombed by the advancing army. A young woman’s dead body is sprawled on the ground and by her side a little girl howls, asking why she’s left them all alone to wander the world as orphans.
As Silenced Voices plays out in public for the first time to a packed house in Oslo, Lokeesan cannot control himself as he watches the footage he took of dead bodies and government shell attacks. He’s inconsolable, sobbing with his face hidden in a checked handkerchief, unable to relive the tragedy he saw repeated again and again as a reporter in those dreadful months of war. Quietly Bashana, who’s also teary eyed, puts a hand on his leg in a quiet restrained gesture of human comfort that doesn’t intrude or interrupt the grief spilling out, three years later. Across the ethnic divide, they’ve stretched out the hand of friendship. It’s an example to the Sri Lankans in the audience some of whom come and thank the journalists for their sacrifices.
Silenced Voices is a very powerful film that tells the story of the invisible misery of scores of journalists forced into exile for just thinking they could change the world.
Frances Harrison’s book about the civil war in Sri Lanka Still Counting the Dead will be published by Portobello Books in the summer
10 Feb 2012 | News and features, Uncategorized
Two journalists were arrested by Palestinian Authority officials on 31 January after making comments against Mahmoud Abbas and the PLO.
Rami Samara, an editor with local news agency Wafa and radio station Ajyal, told news agency AFP that he was detained by plainclothes security agents at the Muqata, Abbas’ headquarters, following a comment that he had posted on Facebook. Underneath an article which blamed Israel rather than the PA itself for the failure of the Palestinian Executive Committee to meet in Amman last month, he wrote: “seriously, members of the central committee of the sole representative of the Palestinian people, was this decision worth the meeting in the Muqata [compound] and the heating and the electricity and the tea and coffee.”
Samara told AFP that he was held for four hours and shown “about 100 pages of comments I made on Facebook, mostly criticising the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.” Questioned by agents from both Military and General Intelligence agencies, he reported that they told him he would be released on agreeing to sign a confession that he had been the organiser of an anti-government demonstration of a group within the PLO that is critical of Abbas. Despite refusing, Samara was eventually released later that day.
In a second case, Yousef Shayeb, a journalist with the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad was reported being detained by Palestinian intelligence officials for eight hours. Officials questioned him regarding a series of stories that he had written about corruption within the Palestinian diplomatic mission to France. According to Shayeb, those interrogating him demanded that he reveal his sources, which he refused to do. Government spokesman Ghassan Khatib told AFP that Shayeb was questioned in connection with potential libel charges, in order that security services could decide whether to file charges against him.
Both journalists are members of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, a majority Fatah organisation, meaning that the political crossover between the organisation and the Palestinian Authority itself resulted in limited action being taken against the arrests by the head of the PJS, Dr Abdel Nasser Najjar.
Although a press release by the PJS stated that it would “spare no effort to defend journalists,” with Dr Najjar quoted as saying that it is “the responsibility of the Association to follow up the issues of journalists,” it is unclear what if any steps were taken by the PJS to protect the reporters concerned. Compared to the outcry in October 2010 when Hamas occupied the offices of the PJS in Hamas-controlled Gaza, it would seem that there is little political gain to be had in reacting to the arrests in a manner that was more than cosmetic. Attempts to contact Wafa and the PJS directly to discuss the cases were also ignored.
Despite local media outlets having an obvious vested interest in press freedom, coverage of the arrests was extremely limited. Wafa, the agency where Samara works, published a very short report which was also republished by the Palestinian News Network, citing its source very clearly. Bigger news agencies such as Ma’an, who have reported extensively in the past week of journalists’ detained by Israeli forces in Nablus and Bethlehem, were silent about Samara and Shayeb.
In Reporters Without Borders’ annual Press Freedom Index published last month, the Palestinian Territories ranked 153rd out of 179 countries, dropping three places lower than last year. Although the drop was due to the Hamas takeover of the PJS Gaza office, both parts of the Territories examined as one received a lower placement than Afghanistan or Iraq.
Ruth Michaelson is a freelance journalist based in Ramallah. Follow her on Twitter @_Ms_R
