08 May 12 | Asia and Pacific, Index Index, minipost
A Thai man in his 60s who became known as “Uncle SMS” after he was convicted of defaming Thailand’s royal family in text messages has died while serving his 20-year prison term. Amphon Tangnoppakul, whose cause of death was unknown, was arrested in August 2010 and accused of sending four text messages to a government official that were deemed offensive to the queen. He denied sending them, claiming he did not know how to do so. He was convicted of defaming the Thai monarchy last November.
08 May 12 | China
Al Jazeera English’s China correspondent, Melissa Chan, has been expelled from the People’s Republic after five years in the country.
The TV station’s English arm today announced it has closed its Beijing bureau after the Chinese authorities refused to renew Chan’s press credentials or grant a visa for a replacement correspondent. Chan, a US citizen, is said to be the first reporter in 14 years to be ejected from China.
During Chan’s five years in China she covered a vast range of topics, including environment, foreign policy, economics, social justice and labour rights. She produced several reports on China’s secret “black jails”, and in 2010 was blocked by Chinese authorities from visiting Liu Xia, the wife of jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
It is still not entirely clear what prompted Chan’s expulsion, but according to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China(FCCC), Chinese officials had “expressed anger” at a documentary the channel aired last November. Chan was not involved in the making of Prison Slaves which investigated camps in which prisoners were said to be forced into manual labour.
“They have also expressed unhappiness with the general editorial content on Al Jazeera English and accused Ms Chan of violating rules and regulations that they have not specified,” the FCCC said in a statement on its website.
The group said it was “appalled” by the decision, calling it “the most extreme example of a recent pattern of using journalist visas in an attempt to censor and intimidate foreign correspondents in China”.
Findings from an FCCC survey point to Chan’s expulsion being part of a worrying climate for reporters in the People’s Republic. The group says that:
- Over the past two years 27 foreign reporters were made to wait for more than four months for visa approvals. Thirteen of these had to wait for more than six months and were still waiting at the time of the survey.
- Three requests presented in 2009 had not received a response, which in practice meant they had been denied.
- Twenty eight permanent postings or reporting trips had been cancelled since 2009 because applications for the required journalistic visas were rejected or ignored by the Chinese authorities.
- In six cases foreign reporters say they were told by the Foreign Ministry officials that their bureaux’ visa applications had been rejected or put on hold due to the content of the bureaux’ or the applicant’s previous coverage of Chinese affairs.
Praise for Chan’s work was widespread today. “She served as a voice for the voiceless, often putting herself in dangerous positions to get stories of injustice out in the open,” Charles Custer of ChinaGeeks said in a blogpost today, noting how much of Chan’s reporting focused on local stories rather than those of central government.
“Her removal is an embarrassment, the childish retribution of a government it seems is perpetually more concerned with silencing problems than with solving them,” Custer added.
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker was in agreement, arguing that the move “revives a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine its own efforts to project soft power and shows a spirit of self-delusion that does not bode well for China’s ability to address the problems that imperil its future”.
Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail also highlighted the significance of Chan’s case for Chinese reporters:
This false freedom given to reporters working in China is much more important than Melissa’s case or the careers of any of the foreign correspondents based in China. What’s at stake is not only the outside world’s (already poor) understanding of this rising but paranoid superpower, but also the future of journalism inside China. Chinese journalists have told me that they watch the foreign correspondents with envy, wishing they could report about their own country as freely as we do. Our fight to do our job is intertwined with their fight to do theirs.
Al Jazeera said today that its media network will continue to work with Chinese authorities in order to reopen its Beijing bureau.
“We are committed to our coverage of China. Just as China news services cover the world freely we would expect that same freedom in China for any Al Jazeera journalist,” Salah Negm, director of news at Al Jazeera English, said in a statement.
08 May 12 | Russia
Following an inauguration ceremony on Monday, Vladimir Putin is once again Russia’s president. After an absence of four years, Putin won a third term as president in controversial elections in March.
But as former President Dmitry Medvedev retook his role as Prime Minister — finalising the Putin-Medvedev job swap — Moscow was filled with thousands of policemen who blocked all central streets and central underground stations.
Putin’s opposition were also out in force. The opposition held a sanctioned march on Sunday which they believe drew a crowd of approximately 100,000 protesters in Bolshaya Yakimanka street in the centre of Moscow (some Russian news reports estimated the crowds at 20,000 people, while police said there were 8,000 people present).
The march — the largest since anti-Putin protests last December — was meant to end at a protest rally on Bolotnaya Square, but the square was blocked by metal detectors that prevented people from entering it quickly. As protesters spent what seemed like an eternity queuing up to pass through the detectors, their outrage grew. Losing hope, some sat down in the middle of the street while they waited to enter the square.
Then the protest stopped being peaceful.
Members of a radical youth group threw smoke bombs at the police, triggering mass arrests and beatings. Protesters then began throwing stones and asphalt, which hit journalists, policemen and fellow protesters.
Hundreds were arrested during the fray, including opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov, Alexey Navalny and Boris Nemtsov. One photographer fell to his death while attempting to photograph the clashes.
Most of the arrested were released next day, but over 100 young men arrested during the protest have now been drafted into the military.
On the day of their release, protesters returned to the streets to walk peacefully with white ribbons — symbols of the latest protests — on Moscow’s central boulevards. Once again, the police blocked protesters, and attempted to force the crowds towards underground stations to go home. Protesters wandered around the boulevard in a bid to thwart the police’s attempt to disperse crowds and find a safe place to peacefully protest Putin’s return to power. Protesters finally settled in near the presidential administration. Police quickly move in to arrest protesters who remained near the building, including journalists from Kommersant, the Moscow Times and the Dozhd TV channel. RFE/RL Russian service reporters were threatened by policemen, who forced them to stop using video cameras, but managed to escape. Hundreds of arrests were made.
Leading human rights activist, Lev Ponomarev, who was arrested on 7 May for walking on a boulevard with a white ribbon, told Index that he congratulates Putin on establishing a Nazi regime on the day of his inauguration. He said the clashes between protesters and the police showed that “the Putin regime stopped pretending to respect human rights, particularly freedom of expression”.
08 May 12 | Middle East and North Africa
In its annual report published on World Press Freedom Day (3 May), the National Syndicate for Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) announced that it had registered 60 physical assaults against journalists over the last year.
The syndicate criticised the “passivity and silence of the government” in response to the alarming increase in the number of assaults.
Multiple assaults were recorded in April alone. The most recent act of violence recorded took place on 30 April, when militants belonging to the Ennahda Movement, assaulted a journalist working for the collective blog Nawaat.
Ennahda is the largest party in Tunisia’s governing alliance and Emine M’tiraoui was attacked while he was at the headquarters of the party, after he conducted an interview with a party member.
In testimony published on Nawaat.org, M’tiraoui said:
at the lobby of the party’s headquarters there was a fight and a woman was screaming. I had my camera with me, and it seems that my assaulters thought that I was filming what was going on. Though I had my press card, with my name and the name of Nawaat on it, a young militant in the movement circulated that I was “a leftist dog, and a police officer loyal to one of Tunisia’s leftist figures.
The attack continued outside the party’s headquarters. “Outside I fell to the ground…there were police officers who witnessed the assaults but they did not interfere to stop [it]” he told Index.
In less than a month M’tiraoui has been assaulted twice. On 9 April, militants of another prominent political party in Tunisia, the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) beat him while he was covering the party’s conference.
According to the estimates from Aymen Rezgui, member of the press syndicate’s executive board, one assault is registered every week. This increase in the number of assaults is due to “police’s laxity, and to the attempts of a number of political parties to incite public opinion against journalists,” Rezgui explains.
Leaders of Ennahda, which heads the three-party coalition government, have often expressed their dissatisfaction with the media’s coverage of the government. In an interview with Radio Express FM on 25 April, Rached Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s president, accused state television station, Wataniya 1 of having “an anti revolutionary and biased editorial line which rejoices at the defeat of the legitimate government”.
“There is a clear hostility towards the government” he added.
The SNJT, on the other hand, accuses the government of seeking to tighten control over the media sector. In its report the SNJT denounced attempts to force “the media sector to follow the political vision of the government”.
