John Emerson

In March, President Mathieu Kerekou won a second term in office by a landslide amid allegations of fraud from the opposition. Press coverage of the candidates became a major issue in the months preceding the vote. In an early January television address, Timothé Adanlin, head of the High Authority for Audio-Visual Communications (HAAC), cautioned reporters…

On August 6, Former military dictator Hugo Banzer, who was suffering from advanced cancer, resigned his post as president and handed over power to Vice President Jorge Quiroga Ramírez, who will head the government for the remainder of the five-year presidential term, which ends in August 2002. Despite widespread social and political unrest, the Bolivian…

While Bosnia’s ethnically fragmented media showed modest signs of integration in 2001, independent journalists endured threats, harassment, and violence from political parties and government officials. Nationalist and reformist parties battled in the November 2000 elections, with mixed results. The Bosnian Serb nationalist SDS party, formerly led by indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, handily won in…

Botswana is generally considered a model of peace and stability in southern Africa, and its press, though relatively small, is vibrant and outspoken. Relations between the government and the press were strained this past year, however, as officials tried to influence editorial policy and cooperated less with independent journalists.

Sustained media coverage of corruption during 2001 helped increase pressure on powerful Congress members and other government officials, several of whom were forced to resign amid accusations of misconduct and embezzlement. In February, the weekly ISTO reported that taped conversations between federal prosecutors and Senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães, who was president of the Congress at…

An absolute monarchy whose leader, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, rules by decree, tiny Brunei has enormous oil and gas reserves and is one of the richest countries in the world on a per capita basis. This wealth has not made for a free press, however. The government controls the electronic media through Radio Television Brunei, and…

During 2001, media outlets that criticized ruling authorities faced harassment, while journalists investigating politically sensitive issues, such as official corruption and organized crime, continued to suffer threats and intimidation for their work. A crisis erupted at Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), the country’s largest and most influential media outlet, after the director’s term expired on January…

The people of Burkina Faso have grown used to President Blaise Compaoré’s broken promises to respect the law. So on March 30, after the president opened the “National Day of Forgiveness” with an extraordinary apology for all crimes committed by his government, hundreds of people took to the streets to demand justice, not apologies.

Controlled by a harsh military junta and operating under a regime of severe censorship and threat, Burma’s media are barred from reporting even the most mundane local events. Debate about government policies or the dire state of the economy is unheard of, and most political news consists of glowing stories recounting the presumed achievements of…

On April 18, troops loyal to President Pierre Buyoya, a member of the Tutsi ethnic group, dislodged hardline Tutsi soldiers calling themselves the Patriotic Youth Front from Radio Burundi. In an act reminiscent of African coups during the 1970s and 1980s, the rebels had occupied the station and aired a statement announcing Buyoya’s overthrow.