3 May 2011
AFP: Media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) added Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa to its latest blacklist of “predators” against press freedom on Tuesday.
The king entered the watchdog’s list of 38 state “predators” that “sow terror among journalists”, which included three Arab countries hit by recent protests — Syria, Bahrain, Yemen — and Libya, where conflict has broken out.
3 May 2011
AFP: Media rights watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) added Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa to its latest blacklist of “predators” against press freedom on Tuesday.
The king entered the watchdog’s list of 38 state “predators” that “sow terror among journalists”, which included three Arab countries hit by recent protests — Syria, Bahrain, Yemen — and Libya, where conflict has broken out.
RSF said journalists were killed in each of these countries, citing cases including that of Karim Fakhrawi, a Bahraini journalist close to the opposition, who died in detention.
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia were no longer on this list after they were driven from power in revolutions this year.
The watchdog said crackdowns were under way by authorities in countries including China that fear “contagion” from the wave of pro-democracy protests in the Arab world.
The list also includes warlords and armed entities such as the Israeli armed forces, the forces of Hamas in Gaza and the Basque armed group ETA.
King Hamad Ben Aissa Al Khalifa , Bahrain
Since the start of the country’s pro-democracy movement, the government has tried to control news about the protests and the excesses of police and troops. Foreign journalists have been arrested and deported, others have been unable to get entry visas and Bahrainis wanting to tell them what is happening have been threatened. Free-speech activists have been hounded and prosecuted, photographers, bloggers and netizens arrested (one of them dying in prison), journalists forced to resign from the main opposition paper and called before the state prosecutor, and printing any news about ongoing investigations by the military prosecutor banned for supposed national security reasons. The media blackout has been accompanied by a big regime propaganda campaign, through media it controls, against major protest leaders, who are dubbed traitors or terrorists. Hamad Ben Aissa Al Khalifa, as king of Bahrain, is responsible for all this violence and abuses.
RSF
Thirty-eight heads of state and warlords sow terror among journalists
Middle East: predators of press freedom start to topple
The kingpins of repressive machinery, political leaders of regimes hostile to civil liberties and direct organizers of campaigns of violence against journalists – they are the predators of press freedom. They prey on the media.
There are 38 predators this year. Pride of place goes to North Africa and the Middle East, where dramatic and sometimes tragic events have taken place in recent months. It is the Arab world that has seen the most important changes in the 2011 Predators list. Heads have fallen. The first to go was Tunisia’s President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was forced to step down on 14 January, thereby giving his people the chance to explore the entire range of democratic possibilities.
Other predators such as Yemen’s Ali Abdallah Saleh, who has been overwhelmed by the wave of protests sweeping his country, or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is responding with terror to his people’s democratic aspirations, could also fall. And what of Muammar Gaddafi, the Guide of the Revolution, now the guide of violence against his people, a violence that is deaf to reason? And Bahrain’s King Ben Aissa Al-Khalifa, who should one day have to answer for the deaths of four activists in detention, including the only opposition newspaper’s founder, and the vast repressive operation against pro-democracy protesters?
Freedom of expression has been one of the first demands of the region’s peoples, one of the first concessions from transitional regimes, and one of the first achievements, albeit a very fragile one, of its revolutions.
Attempts to manipulate foreign reporters, arbitrary arrests and detention, deportation, denial of access, intimidation and threats – the list of abuses against the media during the Arab Spring is staggering. Those determined to obstruct the media did not stop at murder in four countries – Syria, Libya, Bahrain and Yemen. The fatalities included Mohamed Al-Nabous, shot by snipers on the government’s payroll in the Libyan city of Benghazi on 19 March, and two journalists directly targeted by the security forces in Yemen on 18 March.
There have been more than 30 cases of arbitrary detention in Libya and a similar number of foreign correspondents have been deported. Similar methods have been used in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, where the authorities make every possible effort to keep the media at a distance so that they cannot broadcast video footage of the repression.
The media have rarely played such as key role in conflicts. These oppressive regimes, already traditionally hostile to media freedom, have treated control of news and information as one of the keys to their survival.
Journalist have been direct targeted by the authorities or caught in the crossfire of the violence between activists and security forces, reminding us of the risks they take to perform their essential job of reporting the news.
The need to be at the reporting front line, and often the front line of the violence, has taken a heavy toll on photojournalists since the start of the year. Reporters Without Borders pays tribute to the Franco-German photographer Lucas Melbrouk Dolega, who was hit by a police teargas grenade in Tunis on 17 January and died three days later, and to Tim Hetherington, a British photographer working for Vanity Fair, and Chris Hondros, an American photographer working for Getty Images, who were killed by a mortar shell in the Libyan city of Misrata on 20 April.
rsf.org