Letters

Your Excellency, The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged at your government’s continued clampdown on independent media in Zimbabwe, including proposed new legislation that could be used to jail journalists for up to 20 years. At a time when several other African countries are lifting criminal sanctions for press offenses, bringing their laws in line with international standards, Your Excellency’s government is preparing to introduce penalties that are among the harshest on the continent. This will only further impede Zimbabwe’s media, which already face other restrictive laws.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about apparent Omani government censorship of two writers who made critical comments on a satellite television program earlier this year.

Your Excellency: Today marks the one-year anniversary of the arrest and imprisonment of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, the editor and publisher of the tabloid weekly Blitz. The Committee to Protect Journalists strongly condemns Choudhury’s ongoing detention and calls for his immediate and unconditional release.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is outraged by Thursday’s violent attacks on four private newspapers in Abidjan, and by a government ban against eight newspapers. These grave attacks on press freedom came as hostilities resumed in the rebel-held north of the country. We are also alarmed at the silencing of three international radio stations in Abidjan, reportedly by an act of sabotage.

Dear Secretary Rumsfeld: The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply concerned about the death of Iraqi freelance cameraman Dhia Najim, who was killed on Monday, November 1, while covering a gun battle between the U.S. military and Iraqi insurgents in the western city of Ramadi.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed by the evident crackdown on Internet expression and print journalism in the weeks leading up to and following the final transfer of leadership to Your Excellency on September 19.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the imprisonment of Paul Kamara, editor and publisher of For Di People newspaper. Kamara was sentenced yesterday to two years in prison stemming from October 2003 articles that criticized Your Excellency.

Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists is alarmed at the recent detention of Zhao Yan, a news assistant at the New York Times Beijing bureau and a former reporter for Beijing-based China Reform magazine.

Dear Mr. Secretary, The Committee to Protect Journalists is gravely concerned about the U.S. military strike on Haifa Street in Baghdad on September 12, which killed at least 13 civilians and injured another 100 civilians.

Your Excellency: We are writing to express alarm over the deteriorating human rights situation and growing repression of freedom of expression in Eritrea. In particular, we are concerned about the ban that your government has imposed on all independent non-governmental press since September 2001, when an unknown number of critics of your government were detained. Those detained include more than a dozen journalists who have been incarcerated for over three years without being formally charged.