Letters

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gravely concerned about the recent attack on two transmission towers and other technical facilities used by the Voice of Palestine in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is appalled at the October 2 attack on the Accra offices of The Crusading Guide, a private bi-weekly newspaper which has taken a critical stand toward your government.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) strongly condemns the recent banning of the New Culture Forum’s Web site (http://www.xinwenming.net), which featured essays and articles advocating a fresh approach to dealing with China’s social and political problems. CPJ fears that the site’s former staff may now face political persecution by Chinese authorities.

Dear Mr. Tompapa: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calls on Guinea’s National Communications Council (CNC) to immediately and unconditionally reinstate the press credentials of the Conakry-based foreign correspondents Mouctar Bah (Agence France-Press), Ben Daouda Sylla (Africa No. 1), and Amadou Diallo (BBC).

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) welcomes the recent Supreme Court decision to allow private broadcasting in Zimbabwe. We urge you to implement the Court’s ruling with all possible speed.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is concerned by the threatening posture adopted by an army inspection team sent yesterday to the headquarters of the Dawn Group of Newspapers at Haroon House in Karachi. The newspaper group includes some of Pakistan’s most influential and respected publications, including the English-language daily Dawn.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the recent confiscation of more than 100,000 copies of the Minsk-based independent weekly Rabochy. On September 13, according to local sources, police confiscated 112,000 copies of a special edition of Rabochy, nearly a third of the total print run, from the Magic publishing house in Minsk. The newspaper, published by the Belarusian Free Trade Union, had urged its readers to participate in the “Boycott-2000” campaign being organized by the opposition prior to the October 15 parliamentary elections. The police claimed that publishing a call to boycott the election was illegal.

Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply concerned about the recent disappearance of Georgy Gongadze, the 31-year-old editor of the news Web site Ukrainska Pravda. This event has alarmed the journalistic community in Ukraine and further eroded your government’s already limited credibility on press-freedom issues.

1. The issuing under your signature of the new “Doctrine on Information Security of the Russian Federation,” a Cold War-style text whose broad, ambiguous language can be used to justify severe repression of press freedom. 2. Your own statement — despite what you yourself have characterized as governmental mishandling of communication with the public over…

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is outraged by the imprisonment of Cheng Poh, a lawyer who was sentenced yesterday to 14 years in jail for allegedly distributing foreign news articles.