2001

Read first-hand accounts by journalists covering the war in Afghanistan. • December 21, 2001—The New York Times reported that on December 20, Afghan tribal fighters detained three photojournalists working for U.S. news organizations. The journalists were detained for more than one hour, apparently at the behest of U.S. Special Operations forces in the Tora Bora area….

Research by Edith Tsouri. Illustrations by Béatrice Coron.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D.C., defending press freedom has become more important than ever before.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent organization of journalists dedicated to the defense of our colleagues around the world, is deeply concerned by the criminal charges of forgery against TV ALC director Shukhrat Babadjanov.

New York, July 19, 2001–A CPJ representative testified before a joint congressional subcommittee yesterday about the terrible state of press freedom in Central Asia. [Read the transcript] “Repression and violence, or the threat thereof, are ever present for many reporters, encouraging self-censorship as a survival mechanism,” CPJ Washington representative Frank Smyth told the joint hearing…

Uzbekistan has one of the strictest censorship regimes in the world, as the author learned when she launched her journalism career in Tashkent.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a nonpartisan organization of journalists dedicated to the defense of our colleagues around the world, is writing to protest your government’s efforts to silence the U.S.-based Voice of America journalist Jahongir Mamatov by harassing his relatives in the Uzbek city of Samarkand.

POLITICAL REFORMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH, along with the advent of democratic governments in Croatia and Serbia, brightened the security prospects for journalists in Central Europe and the Balkans. In contrast, Russian’s new government imposed press restrictions, and authoritarian regimes entrenched themselves in other countries of the former Soviet Union, particularly in Central Asia, further threatening…

AS PRESIDENT ISLAM KARIMOV’S GOVERNMENT CONTINUED its harsh crackdown on Islamic militants, officials kept local media on a tight leash. Uzbek human rights workers, themselves targets of bureaucratic harassment and violence, condemned numerous violations of the rights of their fellow citizens, including journalists. In April, CPJ raised the plight of three imprisoned Uzbek journalists in…

EIGHTY-ONE JOURNALISTS WERE IN PRISON AROUND THE WORLD at the end of 2000, jailed for practicing their profession. The number is down slightly from the previous year, when 87 were in jail, and represents a significant decline from 1998, when 118 journalists were imprisoned. While jailing journalists can be an effective means of stifling bad…