ATR

During the four years that he ruled the Democratic Republic of Congo, President Laurent-Désiré Kabila compiled one of Africa’s worst press freedom records. On January 4, 2001, the last three journalists jailed by Kabila were released on the president’s personal orders. Two weeks later, Kabila was assassinated.

Egypt’s press remains one of the most influential in the Arab world. The editorial and opinion pages of the leading daily papers are widely read in many Arab countries for their coverage of regional affairs. On a local level, newspapers deal with a wide range of issues. Opposition papers, in particular, often criticize government officials…

Throughout the year, Gambian journalists feared that authoritarian president Yahya Jammeh and his ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC) would deal harshly with journalists ahead of the October presidential elections. To the surprise of many, these fears proved misplaced. However, repression resumed soon after President Jammeh won reelection. One journalist was subsequently arrested…

India’s free press is perhaps the strongest pillar of its democracy, but Indian journalists continued to face numerous challenges in 2001, including physical threats, legal harassment, and more subtle pressures applied by the central government. In the disputed territory of Kashmir, where fighting between local separatists, foreign fighters, and Indian security forces has long forced…

Another year of political turmoil saw the Indonesian press clinging to its hard-won freedoms. But President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who took over from the quixotic Abdurrahman Wahid in July, is showing worrying signs of being less friendly toward the press than her predecessor. One of Megawati’s first acts in office was to appoint a state minister…

On January 8, President Laurent Gbagbo’s government thwarted an attempted coup by mercenaries whom the ruling Popular Front (FPI) accused of being in the pay of Burkina Faso and other countries bordering Côte d’Ivoire. The rebels occupied the compound of the official RTI broadcasting network and aired communiqués saying that the elected government had been…

King Abdullah II, who promised political reform when he began his reign in February 1999, has repeatedly affirmed that “the sky is the limit” for press freedom in Jordan. The reality is very different. Harsh new legal restrictions, along with familiar hardships such as threats and detentions, led to a deterioration in press freedom conditions…

A year of extraordinary violence and political upheaval severely strained Nepal’s young democracy and posed profound challenges for the country’s media. Scores of journalists were detained after the declaration of emergency regulations in November, and 17 remained in prison at year’s end. The first major crisis for the press in 2001 began on June 1,…

A decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia still struggled to define the limits of free expression. Nowhere was the struggle more intense than in the media. President Vladimir Putin’s administration was either directly involved in or held responsible for a broad range of abuses, including the selective use of tax audits, prosecutions,…

President Paul Kagame surprised his own cabinet in December when he refused to sign a contentious media bill that prescribed the death penalty for journalists found guilty of inciting genocide. Lawmakers passed the bill in September, citing the macabre role that certain Rwandan media outlets played in promoting and orchestrating the 1994 massacre of more…