SIERRA LEONE REMAINS THE MOST DANGEROUS COUNTRY IN AFRICA for journalists. In 2000, Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels killed three reporters, bringing to 15 the total number of journalists killed in the war-plagued West African nation since 1997. The RUF alone is responsible for 13 of those deaths. On May 3, World Press Freedom Day,…
February 6, 2001 — Police yesterday detained Pius Foray, owner and editor of the independent Freetown daily Democrat, after his newspaper ran a story suggesting that President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah feared for his life following the postponement of elections. He was released later the same day. The article was written by Foray and ran on…
New York, January 4, 2001 — Of the 24 journalists killed for their work in 2000, according to CPJ research, at least 16 were murdered, most of those in countries where assassins have learned they can kill journalists with impunity. This figure is down from 1999, when CPJ found that 34 journalists were killed for…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in SIERRA LEONE New York, May 24, 2000 — The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by the latest murderous attack on journalists in Sierra Leone, which claimed the lives of two western journalists and left two others injured on Wednesday, according to news agencies and…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by recent serious press freedom violations in Sierra Leone. We are particularly concerned about the continued illegal detention of Abdoul Kouyateh, acting editor of the private Freetown weekly Wisdom Newspaper.
Dear Mr. McKinnon, On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is writing to express its concerns about press freedom violations in Malaysia and Sierra Leone, which have been Commonwealth member states since 1957 and 1961, respectively. We would like to draw your attention to the fact that the leaders of these Commonwealth countries rank among CPJ’s “10 worst enemies of the press” for 2000.
By Philip GourevitchNearly a hundred years ago, in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain, titled King Leopold’s Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule (1905). The text is an imagined monologue by the Belgian monarch, delivered as he reads through stacks of literature protesting the systematic murder and mutilation of…
By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…