Attacks on the Press 2000: Democratic Republic of Congo
PRESS FREEDOM HAS BEEN ONE OF MANY CASUALTIES OF THE CIVIL WAR that began as a rebel insurgency in August 1998 and has continued to destabilize the entire region, with Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia supporting President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi fighting on the side of Congolese rebel forces (although Kabila’s army includes…
Attacks on the Press 2000: El Salvador
IN A YEAR THAT SAW EL SALVADOR’S FORMER LEFTIST GUERRILLAS EMERGE as the country’s leading political party, conservative publishers reined in the journalists they employed. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) completed its transformation from a guerrilla army into a leading political party in the March 12 elections, winning a plurality in the Legislative…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Indonesia
A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER THE END OF PRESIDENT SUHARTO’S authoritarian rule, the most significant reform in Indonesia remains the emergence of a largely unshackled press. With hundreds of islands and a large, fragmented population, the press plays a crucial role in allowing Indonesians to debate their future and in calming tensions that arise…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Peru
PERU’S INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISTS HELPED drive President Alberto K. Fujimori from power after forcing his once-mighty intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos into exile. Fujimori’s November departure led to the unshackling of the independent press, which had seriously suffered under a regime that tried to manipulate public information for a decade. President Fujimori used all resources at his…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Philippines
THE RAUCOUS PHILIPPINE PRESS TOOK CENTER STAGE as President Joseph Estrada faced mounting scandals and a televised impeachment trial in the Senate. The crisis began after a one-time crony of Estrada accused the former movie actor of accepting millions of dollars in illegal gambling payoffs. Estrada’s predicament was a riveting media event, and press investigations…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Somalia
WITH NO FUNCTIONING CENTRAL GOVERNMENT IN RECENT YEARS, Somalia remains fractured into rival fiefdoms controlled by warlords. Threats to local journalists have been correspondingly decentralized. In the last months of 2000, however, newly-elected president Abdiqasim Salad Hassan and a new transitional legislature tried with some success to assert central authority. (Both Hassan and the legislature…
Attacks on the Press 2000: Yugoslavia
PROSPECTS FOR PRESS FREEDOM IN YUGOSLAVIA BRIGHTENED when President Slobodan Milosevic finally accepted election results and resigned on October 6. The elected dictator’s all-out war on the independent media was a thing of the past, but official habits of intimidating the press did not disappear, and the difficulty of reforming Serbia’s state-run media became evident.…
Attacks on the Press in 2000: Journalists in Prison
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…
Belarus: Missing journalist feared dead; official investigation stalled
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the lack of progress in the investigation into the disappearance of Dmitry Zavadsky, a cameraman with the Russian public television network ORT who has been missing since July 7. Because no group has come forward to take responsibility for Zavadsky’s disappearance over the past six months, we now fear that the journalist may have been killed. The official investigation, which has been carried out in secret, now appears to be stalled.