3 Sep 2013 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features, Sudan
Photo: Usamah Mohammed
Three Sudanese columnists were prevented from writing by the National intelligence Security Services (NISS) after they condemned the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Journalists Salah Awooda, Zuhair Elsrag and Rishan Oshi were banned from writing for between five to fifteen days during August after criticizing the Islamist group. This is part of a growing trend in Sudan for opinion columnists to be targeted by Government censorship, rather than newspapers.
Awooda, who works for the pro-government newspaper Alkir Lahza, was removed from his desk after he suggested that the Sudanese government’s criticism of the Egyptian military was hypocritical, as they also came to power via a military coup.
“They have suspended me because I condemned their contradictions about Egyptian events and claimed that they have acted as if they are democratic people,” Awooda says.
He also pointed out that the Sudanese government and its allied Islamists groups have organised demonstrations in front of the Egyptian embassy in Khartoum protesting against military action against the Brotherhood. Moreover, the official Sudanese media and others aligned with the Government have waged a campaign against the military intervening in politics in Egypt.
“I’m just surprised how they talk about legitimacy and democracy in Egypt,” he added, “while they undertook a military coup against the democratically elected government in Sudan in 1989 and they didn’t apologise to the Sudanese people for what they did. This is double standards”.
Awooda has been suspended on three occasions over the last two months, without any legal basis, following telephone calls by NISS agents to his editor-in-chief. The columnist was barred from writing for a month, and then for a further two days, after he criticized Government censorship. He was then detained for 15 more days without any apparent cause. In 2010, Awooda’s appointment as editor-in-chief of independent daily newspaper Aljareeda was blocked despite his considerable experience as editor-in-chief of three newspapers.
“They have stopped me three times since last July without giving any official reasons” he says. “They just suspend writers according to their mood without any legal basis in NISS regulations or the current constitution.”
Sudanese journalists have been engaged in a long running battle with the government over press freedom. 15 independent and anti-government newspapers have been closed in recent years. Since 2011, about 15 columnists have been prevented from working by NISS, though some have been allowed to return to their jobs after being suspended. Five have gone on to write for web publications but now the government is preparing a new law on electronic media which may lead to further harassment. In September 2009 the Sudanese Constitutional Court in Sudan rejected an appeal brought by a group of journalists, writers and columnists against newspaper censorship by NISS.
In a report on freedom of speech published in May by the organisation Journalists for Human Rights (JHR), the Sudanese government is accused of continuing to restrain press freedoms. It noted that the Sudanese government, via the NISS, has started to put pressure on individual columnists leading to their suspension, rather than targeting newspapers as they used to.
“There are many reasons for this,” says Faisal Mohamed Salih, a Khartoum columnist and winner of the Peter Mackler Award for ethical journalism. “For a long time the NISS restrained the news and other types of journalism as they controlled the newspapers but they moved their attention to the columnists because they have become stars. Readers prefer to get their information in opinion columns instead of the news stories.
“The NISS has succeeded in controlling newspapers but they couldn’t do it with the columnists because they are not employees of the newspapers, unlike the journalists, and can publish information that journalists couldn’t do” Faisal adds.
Yassin Hassan Bashir, another columnist who has been stopped from writing, thinks that the columns are an easier target for NISS censors compared to essays and investigative stories, simply as they are quicker to read.
“Because they are shorter than other type of journalism,” Bashir says, “they can read them more easily. You sometimes find the same opinions in longer, more difficult investigative stories, but they ignore it. They are not aware enough to evaluate the longer or more complex articles or they are too lazy to read them all”.
Aldooma argues that while government censors still target newspapers, they do so less than in the past. As the nature of journalism in Sudan changes to more opinion journalism than news and investigative journalism columnists will be increasingly targeted.
25 Jul 2013 | Volume 42.02 Summer 2013
Writer and artist Htoo Lyin Myo gives his personal account of working under government censorship in Burma
I became familiar with censorship as a boy in the 1990s, when certain pages of the monthly magazines I read were covered with black ink, which censorship officials manually brushed over printed words. The paragraphby- paragraph, line-by-line ink-covered pages made me curious, so I would place them on a lit-up surface in order to have a peek. Indeed, the hidden words covered with ink criticised government economic policy or local businessmen.
But when the ink was changed from black to silver, I could hardly see those hidden words: it was a totally hidden, reflective surface, like metallic camouflage.
Burma’s notorious censorship developed alongside the dictatorship, a government that created the 1962 Printers’ and Publishers’ Registration Act. So censorship is ‘the problem child’ of the dictatorship. Currently, Burma has nine laws that provide for censorship both directly and indirectly, including the Electronic Transactions Law (2004). It carries with it a penalty of up to 15 years’ imprisonment for internet users who receive email messages that are deemed to be detrimental to the security of the state.
From about 2005, browsing the internet became part of my daily routine. Low-speed internet connection, which continues today, made it difficult to access information.
In addition, though, a great number of websites were banned, including the BBC, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA). At that time, most of my friends who used the internet exchanged proxy website addresses in order to access government-banned websites. Hardly anyone was astonished when, in 2009, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Burma the worst country in the world to be a blogger.
As the decade went on, I internalised the censorship I experienced in my journalistic career.
FROM INDEX ON CENSORSHIP MAGAZINE
Global view: Who has freedom of expression? | The multipolar challenge to free expression | News in monochrome: Journalism in India
This article appears in the current issue of Index on Censorship, available now. For subscription options and to download the app for your iPhone/iPad, click here.
INDEX EVENTS
18 July New World (Dis)Order: What do Turkey, Russia and Brazil tell us about freedom and rights?
Weekly journals were required to submit samples to the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD) of the Ministry of Information before publication. So a full-page translated article about the Dalai Lama was banned. A so-called PR clerk, a post appointed in every publishing house to deal with the PSRD, sent the article back, telling me to ‘substitute’ it with another ‘lighter’ one. This happened on the day of our deadline and the team, like so many others in the media business, had to pull the front page at the last minute.
I experienced censorship, too, when it came to my work as a performance artist. At one of the international performance festivals held in Rangoon, local and international artists were scrutinised by an army of censorship board officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Homeland Affairs, the Ministry of Information and so on. Artists had to queue to be granted permission to perform and officials checked each participant artist’s materials, making sure their chosen colours and ‘ideas’ complied with guidelines to protect the ‘security of the state’. If officials suspected that an artist’s materials might go against the ‘will’ of the state, these materials were prohibited and the artist banned from using them. In addition to jeopardising the security of the state, artwork and materials could be banned on grounds of religion (offending Buddhism, mainly) or for posing a threat to law and order.
If an artwork was deemed to be critical of the state or going against its ‘will’, an artist could be completely rejected and denied permission to exhibit or perform that particular work. In order to avoid including anti-social materials in their art, artists often had to self-censor, imagining a potential ‘justification’ for banning pieces prior to the ‘permission hearing’. In 2008, I took part in a clandestine international performance festival held in a compound in a countryside township an hour outside of Rangoon. The event was moved there after local authorities denied permission for it to take place in a public park in the city.
Visiting foreign artists also had to practise self-censorship. During a workshop in 2009, a renowned Chinese artist originally suggested participants walk down the streets of Rangoon, pointing to the sun with their index fingers. Later, he rejected this performance art idea because, in Burma, the sun, ne in Burmese, implicitly refers to the late dictator Ne Win. The artist said he ‘understood’ why the activity might be refused and decided to withdraw it from the workshop.
Self-censorship evolved in the print media in a superficially different way: if the PSRD was known to reject a certain kind of front-page headline, journalists and editors made changes before submitting them for approval. However, occasionally a newspaper’s once-rejected headline could, with luck, be approved upon its second submission to the censor board, so journalists often kept this in mind when planning headlines.
After the 2010 elections – perhaps as a reaction to widespread accusations that the election was rigged – some subjects covered in the print media, including sport, health and entertainment, did not require censor officials’ approval prior to publication. News stories and articles about politics and religion, however, were still required to be submitted for approval. Leading print media companies seldom faced week-long publication bans for subversive stories on front pages, but journals could be subject to defamation lawsuits – and this law still exists today.
Since September 2011, formerly banned websites VoA, BBC Burmese and RFA have been accessible, as have the websites of some Burmese exiled media outlets like Irrawaddy and Democratic Voice of Burma. The latter are popular among the Burmese middle class because of their critical insight into the military government. With a handful of amnesties for journalists, activists, whistleblowers and bloggers, who had been given sentences of decades-long prison terms, the Burmese media environment has become more relaxed.
Almost overnight it became possible to report on land seizures for state projects like dams or for use by regional military bases, or on workers’ protests against unjust wages and corruption. Yet the silence around taboo subjects has not altogether lifted.
In terms of democracy, Burma is in its infancy. Freedom of speech is not 100 percent guaranteed. And government cronies have their eyes on the print media as a viable market they can control and which will earn them a nice profit. In Burma, the ruling party owns one of the most prominent daily newspapers and crony businessmen own a number of weekly and monthly journals.
The last time I confronted pressure from local authorities was after I joined a temporary art space called 7000 Padauk in March 2013. On the second day of opening, a group of ward-level authorities ordered those wanting to enter the space to formally check in, resulting in a dispute with artists. The ward official insisted it was illegal to use the premises for such events, demanded to know who the owner was, asked for information about planned events, the names of those involved, and so on. I have witnessed firsthand that people on both sides – those who rule and those who are ruled over – still engage in a process of ‘bargaining’. A free space like 7000 Padauk is very much needed at this time of so-called transition for Burma. But when I arrive there, I still look over my shoulder.
©Htoo Lwin Myo
Htoo Lwin Myo is a journalist, translator and artist living and working in Rangoon. His translation of a biography of the Dalai Lama, the first of its kind to be published in Burmese, was published in 2012
22 Jul 2013 | Europe and Central Asia
A Macedonian investigative journalist has gone on hunger strike today, in protest against his continued detention.
The wife of Tomislav Kezarovski told local media that both she and her jailed husband are now on hunger strike, in hopes that it will call attention to his “absurd” situation.
Kezarovski has been held in Skopje’s Shutka prison since May, for a 2008 article he wrote for Reporter 92 magazine, for supposedly revealing the identity of a protected witness in an an ongoing murder investigation. However, in February this year the witness confessed that his testimony against the accused killers was fabricated, and that he did not have protected status until 2010.
Skopje criminal court decided in June to extend the journalist’s detention by 30 days, saying that if released, he may “escape or influence other witnesses” in a wider investigation. The court will decide this week whether or not he will be held for another 30 days. Since the investigation is now over, Kezarovski’s family members hope that he will be released.
The Macedonian Journalists Association, the Trade Union of Macedonian Journalists and Media Workers, SSNM, ZNM, and the Macedonian Institute for Media expressed “deep concern” over the journalist’s “fragile physical and mental” condition in a joint statement released today. In June, UN Rapporteur for free speech Frank LaRue was prevented from visiting Kezarovski in prison.
Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrest of the journalist, as well as the “constant decline in freedom of information in Macedonia”, which ranks 116 out of 179 in the organisation’s 2013 press freedom index.
Sara Yasin is an Editorial Assistant at Index. She tweets from @missyasin
