WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY
May 3, 2012
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By Melissa Chemam
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World Press Freedom
Day: Tunisia leads the way in a stagnant Africa
Zied Mhirsi is an eternal optimist. And 2011 won’t turn him
down. He has seen his country, Tunisia, change radically in terms of political
and social issues and he believes it is time to make the Tunisian press play a life
changing role. Zied Mhirsi is the manager of the first news website in English,
Tunisia Live.
“After the revolution, Tunisians were having high hopes but
lots of questions remained unanswered”, he admits. “One of journalists’ main
problems nowadays is the lack of new laws and of a new Constitution, for this
means the former laws are still in application to punish the media. But the
context has already changed so much; there are no more censorship in Tunisia,
for newspaper as well as the web; it is a major achievement”. Zied Mhirsi very
much realised the work he is doing now with Tunisia Live would not have been
possible at all two years ago, but that improvements are still necessary. “Now
we also have to reform ourselves and to see some cleaning among the old guard
of journalists who were so close to the former regime”.
As decades-old authoritarian regimes have vanished from
Tunisia and countries like Egypt, Libya and others in the Arab World, freedom
of the press gained precarious new footholds last year, according to a survey
by the watchdog group Freedom House released Tuesday. “For the first time in
eight years, global media freedom did not experience an overall decline”,
according to the Freedom House report, “however, due to downgrades in some
previously free countries, the percentage of the world’s population living in
societies with a fully free press has fallen to its lowest level in over a
decade”. The report,
Freedom of the Press
2012: Breakthroughs and Pushback in the Middle East, found that
three countries -
Egypt, Libya, and
Tunisia - experienced significant improvements as a result of the Arab
Spring. “Dramatic gains in press freedom in Tunisia and Libya in particular
marked major breakthroughs for countries long governed by autocratic rulers”.
Outside the Middle East and North Africa region, positive improvements were
seen in countries including Burma, Indonesia, Niger, the Philippines, Thailand,
and Zambia.
It is one on the reasons why World Press Freedom Day, WPFD, is
commemorated in Tunis, Tunisia, this year, 3-5 May, jointly by the UNESCO and
Tunisian Government. The event intends to prove that media freedom has the
“power to transform societies”. It does “by enlightening the decision making
process with information, and thus empowering individuals to take control of
their destinies”, the UNESCO says. In this context, media freedom plays a
crucial role in the transformation of society by reshaping its political,
economic and social aspects.
And Tunisia Live and the Centre for Developing
Communication (CDC) organised a round table entitled “Media and
Governance: Sustaining the Pioneering Role of Tunisia in the Arab
Awakening”, sponsored by the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Africa still appears
in bad rankings
But if North Africa evolves, the rest of the continent still
remains press unfriendly, especially the Horn of Africa.
According to Amnesty International, the number of
journalists killed increase from 2010 to 2011, and the number of those arrested
nearly doubled. As protests spread across the Middle East and North Africa, so
did crackdowns by security forces seeking to distort the first draft of
history. In only the first few months of 2012, 17 journalists have already been
killed around the world.
In its 2011 report, Reporters without Borders, RSF, shows
that overall, 2011 took a heavy toll on media freedom, especially in the Arab
world. Of the total of 66 journalists killed in 2011, 20 were killed in the
Middle East - twice as many as in 2010. China, Iran and Eritrea continue to be
the world’s biggest prisons for the media. According to RSF, among the 10 most
dangerous cities for journalists in 2011 are Abidjan,
in Côte d’Ivoire, Cairo in Egypt, Misrata in Libya and Mogadishu in Somalia. Four out of ten are in Africa.
The Committee
to Protect Journalist in New York City, CPJ, declared Eritrea the most censored country in the world in 2011, followed by North
Korea, Syria, Iran and Equatorial
Guinea. Again, two
African countries are in the first five on the list. For this
list, CPJ considered only countries where restrictions are imposed directly by
the state, but underline that in Somalia,
journalists also practice extensive self-censorship in the face of extralegal
violence. And in the runner-up can be found two other African countries: Ethiopia and Sudan. Addis where
“censorship has become far more restrictive in recent years and the government
of Meles Zenawi appoints managers of broadcasters and state newspapers and
licenses all media; anti-terrorism legislation criminalizes any reporting that
the Ethiopian government deems favourable to opposition movements designated as
terrorist”. And in Sudan where “authorities frequently confiscate newspapers,
which are the widespread form of media and security forces have increasingly
confiscated newspaper editions wholesale to inflict financial losses on
publishers.
“Shutting out international
media and imposing dictatorial controls on domestic coverage, the Horn of
Africa nation of Eritrea has emerged
as the world's most censored country, the Committee to Protect Journalists has
found in its newly updated analysis of press restrictions around the globe”,
CPJ writes. No foreign reporters are granted access to Eritrea, and all
domestic media are controlled by the government. Ministry of Information
officials direct every detail of coverage. “Every time a journalist had to
write a story, they arrange for interview subjects and tell you specific angles
you have to write on,” an exiled Eritrean journalist told CPJ, speaking on
condition of anonymity. Then in Equatorial
Guinea, “all media is controlled, directly or indirectly, by President
Teodoro Obiang”, the report says.
We can at this stage only hope that the North of the
continent will inspire the rest.
