Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by ongoing government censorship and attacks on private media in the aftermath of the April 24 presidential election, of which you have been pronounced the winner. Local journalists told CPJ that many phone lines were cut and Internet connections remain tenuous, making it difficult to report ongoing events to the world.
New York, May 16, 2005—The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned that the biweekly newspaper The Independent, which lost its printing press in an unsolved arson in April 2004, has been forced to stopped publishing entirely after its printing arrangement with the private Daily Observer was abruptly terminated. The Independent has not published since…
New York, May 12, 2005 – Zimbabwe’s High Court yesterday dismissed a request to accredit journalists of the banned Daily News, according to news reports and CPJ sources. The ruling came more than a year after the newspaper’s owners, Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe (ANZ), filed the application. The judge said the newspaper’s journalists could not…
JULY 5, 2005 Posted: July 7, 2005 Hamidou Diarra, Radio Kledu ATTACKED Unidentified assailants kidnapped and brutally beat a commentator for the independent Radio Kledu in the Malian capital, Bamako. Hamidou Diarra was found several hours later about 10 miles (15 kilometers) outside of Bamako, Radio Kledu director Abel Koné told CPJ. No suspects were…
New York, May 11, 2005—A U.S. photographer was released from custody yesterday after being detained by Sudanese authorities in Darfur two weeks ago, the U.S. daily The Hartford Courant reported today. Sudanese security forces detained Brad Clift on April 26 while he was taking photographs at an internally displaced persons camp outside Nyala, capital of…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply troubled by the recent jail sentence given in absentia to two journalists who reported on alleged corruption in the gendarmerie. On April 20, a court in Maroua, the capital of Cameroon’s Far North Province, sentenced Guibaï Gatama, publication director of the independent weekly L’Oeil du Sahel, and Abdoulaye Oumaté, a journalist for the paper, to five months in prison and fined them 5 million CFA francs (approximately U.S. $9,782) in a criminal defamation case.
MAY 9, 2005 Posted: May 10, 2005 Honoré Sepe, Le Front HARASSED Three armed gendarmes came to Honoré Sepe’s house at 4 a.m. and demanded to be let in, although they admitted they had no warrant, according to the journalist. Sepe refused to let them in and instead called his lawyer. As he was on…