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Threatened
May 29
Komsomolskaya Pravda, THREATENED
Editors at the Almaty office of the Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda and a local district court judge were summoned to the office of the prosecutor general of Kazakstan and told that the prosecutor general was calling for a ban on the newspaper. The prosecutor general charged that Komsomolskaya Pravda had violated Kazakstan's constitution, which forbids incitement of ethnic hatred and violation of territorial integrity. The charges cited an April 23 article by Alexander Solzhenitsyn calling for the reunification of the northern districts of Kazakstan with Russia. Komsomolskaya Pravda later published letters opposing Solzhenitsyn's view. The allegations were first made by the Union of Writers of Kazakstan, which brought the case to the district court. When the district court judge dismissed the charges, the union then brought the allegations to the prosecutor general, who ordered another hearing. CPJ wrote a letter to the president and prosecutor general of Kazakstan urging that the case be dropped, noting that the charges were in serious violation of free press standards. Meanwhile, Altynbek Sarsenbaev, chairman of the government's National Agency for Press and Mass Media of Kazakstan, petitioned the prosecutor general to close the newspaper for six months because of the alleged constitutional violations. On July 17, the district court ordered the newspaper to print an apology about the incident within a week. Komsomolskaya Pravda printed a statement of regret the next day, and the case was dropped on July 24.
November 25
Radio/TV M, THREATENED, HARASSED
Electric and telephone wires to the studio for independent radio and television station M were cut, making work there virtually impossible. The station managed to continue broadcasting six hours a day to special three-channel receivers in customers' homes. On Dec. 5, an official from President Nursultan Nazarbayev's administration called M's directors and said, "For two years you have been the mouthpiece of the opposition, and therefore we are closing you down." Members of the administration later denied that anyone had made that statement, even though the phone conversation had been taped and broadcast. The officials claimed that the station had been closed "due to technical reasons." The station's license expired on Jan. 1, 1997, and unable to compete in a high-priced government auction of frequencies, M was forced to close.
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