Committee to Protect Journalists Releases Annual Report on Attacks

Group calls Internet, shortwave key in closed societies; Belarus highlighted

The Internet and international radio broadcasts play important roles in providing news to citizens of countries where governments limit press freedom, an independent media group said as it released its annual report on attacks against journalists.

"From Iraq to China, from Uzbekistan to Zimbabwe, 2005 was another terrible year for journalism in much of the world," the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in its report, Attacks on the Press in 2005, released February 14.

"By CPJ's count, more than 100 journalists were killed doing their jobs over the past two years, the deadliest such period in a decade. Twenty-four countries jailed 125 journalists in 2005, figures that reflect increases from the previous year," the organization said in a press release.

CPJ, which is based in New York, is a nonprofit nongovernmental organization that receives its funding from private and corporate donations.

Alex Lupis, CPJ's Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, met with reporters during a February 15 roundtable at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Washington, saying that there were some positive, as well as troubling, developments in 2005.

"More and more journalists are turning to the Internet," said Lupis, who had just returned from Russia and Belarus. The Internet is "harder to regulate" and doesn't require a printing press or costly distribution routes, he said.

But "that freedom of the Internet may change," Lupis added. The governments of Russia and Belarus have suggested they may want to update their media laws to regulate the Internet. But even if such laws were enacted, he said, it is unclear how or if they would be enforceable.

Internet cafés are coming under growing government scrutiny in countries that stifle press freedom, he said, noting that he has heard reports of authorities requiring Internet users to register before going online and of Internet café staff walking around to monitor computer use visually.

Belarus in particular has a poor record of press freedom, and behaves more like the Central Asian republics of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan than like a central European country bordering the European Union, Lupis said. (See related article.)

In Belarus, "clearly the biggest problem now is bureaucratic obstruction to distribution," he said. Authorities are placing economic pressure on news operations, limiting their advertising base and stifling circulation. For example, Lupis said, the post office refuses to distribute papers to paid subscribers. "The government wants to be able to say, 'Look, we didn't shut them down; they shut down on their own,'" he said.

International pressure does appear to bring results, Lupis said. In Belarus, he was told that in the late 1990s, there were a number of reports of journalists who had "disappeared." This "actually has stopped or significantly decreased" due to a combination of local opposition and international pressure, he said.

Along with the growth of the Internet, "international broadcasting is becoming more and more important" in closed countries that have curtailed their own media, Lupis said. "It's one of the few remaining sources of information."

FM radio stations most easily can be targeted for closure, he said, because of the limited distance their signals can be transmitted. But shortwave broadcasts can have a tremendous effect because even in a remote town where only one person has access to a shortwave radio, that person can listen to a news broadcast, then relay the information to many other people.

Also, local journalists are "adapting" and "getting creative," Lupis said. "For every step of repression, there's always creative journalists trying to find a way to get around that."

More and more journalists are filing anonymous stories or writing under pseudonyms while posting their stories on out-of-country Web sites, he said. They also are reviving a Soviet-era practice of typing and printing out individual copies of news stories, which are circulated privately by hand to members of small, trusted groups.

RFE/RL is a funded by the U.S. government, but Lupis expressed independent views.

CPJ is sometimes critical of U.S. government media policies. For example, Lupis

questioned whether all countries are being held to equal scrutiny by the U.S. government. On the other hand, he said, individual U.S. Embassy staffs have been personally involved in press-freedom issues.

For instance, in one Central Asian country, when authorities detained a journalist arriving at the main airport, a U.S. diplomat went to the airport and insisted on remaining until the situation was resolved. In another country, when authorities cut electrical power to an opposition newspaper, the U.S. Embassy loaned its generators to the newspaper so it could keep publishing, Lupis said.

Source: U.S. Department of State

judythpiazza@gmail.com

   _   _