Committee to Protect Journalists Finds “A New Kind of Repression” by Arab Governments
By Joe Catapano and Daniel Hollingsworth
February 12, 2008 | Printer Friendly

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) writes that Arab governments seeking to control the media have adapted to an international environment in which “blunt repression could cost them international standing, foreign aid, and outside investment” and have “fashioned themselves as democratic reformers while resorting to stealthy forms of media control.”  As these governments have sought to counteract increasingly assertive journalists in the region, “job dismissals, behind-the-scenes threats, third-party defamation suits, and trumped-up terrorism… have replaced the torture, enforced disappearances, and open-ended incarcerations that were the hallmarks of the previous era.”

The CPJ writes that in Yemen, government officials are efficiently blurring the lines between what it means to report on regime enemies and what it means to actually be an enemy of the state. Abdel Karim al-Khaiwani, editor for the newspaper Al-Shoura, was arrested in mid-2007 on charges of terrorism, charges that can be punishable by death. Yet, the CPJ writes that “as al-Khaiwani’s court case unfolded over several weeks, it became clear that the editor was no terrorist… Al-Khaiwani, it seemed, was being railroaded for his unsparing criticism of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom he blamed for the war [between the Yemeni government and rebels] in Saada and whose government he had accused of widespread corruption.”

The CPJ also cites a similar trend in Morocco, where “authorities have relied on third-party lawsuits, launched by individuals ostensibly independent of the government, to punish the country’s most independent journalists through extraordinary monetary damages that threaten to put their publications out of business.”  In Algeria the editor of Le Matin, Mohamed Benchicov, was jailed for alleged currency violations, but “few journalists doubted that the real reason for Benchicou’s jailing was his criticism of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whom he had labeled an ‘Algerian fraud’ in a book published earlier that year.”

Such cases are representative of the larger threat to media freedoms in autocratic regimes, specifically Arab autocracies, where governments have been adapting to outside pressures on them to liberalize media and managing demands on them to democratize their countries.  Regimes recognize that the appearance of an independent media is necessary, so control of the media occurs through the manipulation of media laws and the granting of radio and television licenses to pro-regime business owners that are subsequently banned from broadcasting news or political content.  The CPJ notes that regional satellite stations like Al-Jazeera have made inroads against the state media monopolies, but “they are no substitute for domestic broadcast outlets that can cover local news and deliver it to mass numbers of people.”

The CPJ also writes that governments in the region have often enacted meaningless reforms, which are meant to satisfy outside observers but have little practical effect in providing protection for media in their countries.  They find that in Jordan, “the government championed successive revisions of the country’s press law as a major step toward democracy because they eliminated prison penalties for journalists. Yet most journalists and dissidents jailed over the last decade have been put away not under the press law, but under the country’s restrictive penal code, which, along with other repressive legislation, remains intact.”

In response to this adaptation by Arab governments, CPJ stresses that “Donors, human rights groups, and those involved in promoting democracy need to rethink their strategies to account for the new tactics employed by authoritarian governments.” Increases in political and economic costs for governments that inhibit press freedoms are among the measures suggested as a response to media suppression.  It argues that “Western donors have provided little inducement for governments to make meaningful reforms,” citing inconsistent application of democratic standards and media protections in the Millennium Challenge Corporation as one obstacle to creating incentives for meaningful reform in the region.  It also places a heavy burden on press freedom groups, which should focus on “exposing empty media reforms, unmasking stealth attacks on the press, and lobbying policymakers to develop meaningful criteria for change.”  As governments in the region continue to demonstrate their ability to adjust their approaches to media control, the CPJ warns that a concentrated effort on the part of democracy and press freedom activists is required to prevent the pockets of freedom in the region from vanishing.

Source:

Committee to Protect Journalists: Under the Radar, a New Kind of Repression