John Emerson

Fiji’s diverse and energetic media have remained strong despite ongoing political instability in the country. Tensions between indigenous Fijians and the ethnic Indian population dominate political and social life and are often played out in the media, which include several English- and Hindi-language newspapers, the partially privatized Fiji TV, and two major radio broadcasters that…

President Omar Bongo maintained his solid grip on power in this small West African nation. Opposition and pro-democracy movements remained weak, while independent journalists, fearful of losing their jobs, softened their criticism of Bongo, who cultivates a cult of personality and uses widespread official bribery to secure his rule.

The Gambia’s ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) won a landslide victory in mid-January parliamentary elections, capturing 52 of 55 seats in the National Assembly and cementing President Yahya Jammeh’s rule. The main opposition parties boycotted the poll, alleging electoral fraud. Jammeh and the APRC used their renewed power to silence opposition voices…

While corruption and crime continued to overrun Georgia in 2002, some officials blamed the country’s woes on excessive press freedom, even accusing the media of contributing to the February suicide of Security Council chief Nugzar Sadzhaya. Public figures readily chastised the press for exposing inadequacies in President Eduard Shevardnadze’s government. Shevardnadze himself publicly lamented past…

One year after President John Agyekum Kufuor’s media-friendly government repealed Ghana’s criminal defamation law, the state imposed controls on reporting about interclan clashes in March, after a local tribal king and several of his supporters were killed during a feud between rival clans in the northern Dagbon region. Kufuor declared a state of emergency, which…

Relations between the government and much of the press remained hostile during 2002. Human rights groups continued to criticize President Alfonso Portillo Cabrera’s administration for ignoring and postponing obligations that the Guatemalan state had agreed to under peace accords that ended the country’s 36-year civil war in 1996.

On June 30, almost three-quarters of voters cast ballots in parliamentary elections, which landed the ruling Unity and Progress Party 85 out of the National Assembly’s 114 seats and further strengthened President Lassana Conté’s long-standing hold on power. The country’s usually feisty opposition leaders refrained from blaming their losses on voter manipulation, but some journalists…

Following an alleged coup attempt in late 2001, President Kumba Yala and his minority Social Renewal Party (PRS) government struggled to demonstrate to the international community their willingness to implement democratic reforms and restore stability to this impoverished West African country. But Guinea-Bissau plunged further into crisis, with Yala continuing to interfere with the judiciary…

December 11 Jonathan C. Randal, The Washington Post The U.N. International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY) ruled to limit compelled testimony from war correspondents. The decision, announced at the tribunal’s Appeals Chamber, came in response to the appeal by former Washington Post reporter Jonathan C. Randal, who had been…

With President Jean-Bertrand Aristide under pressure qrom the international community and Haitian opposition groups to expedite political and economic reforms and to resolve a two-year-old electoral impasse that has stalled the flow of millions of dollars in aid, Haiti’s embattled press corps vigilantly reported the news despite political unrest and a deteriorating economy.