In a year marked by political turmoil and restive street demonstrations, Haitian media faced violence, intolerance, and a corrupt judicial system. President René Préval, who succeeded President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1995, dismissed Parliament in January but failed to hold new elections. At year’s end, elections were scheduled for March 2000. Supporters of the Lavalas Family…
The press limped through its first full year after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Mitch. Restrictive government policies aimed at silencing independent media and corruption among local journalists themselves cast a long shadow over press freedom. The country’s few independent journalists routinely face government pressures. Their phones are often tapped, they are ridiculed by the…
Relations between the press and the Hong Kong government have deteriorated sharply in the two years since Britain returned the former colony to China. While the Hong Kong press remains one of the freest and most aggressive in the region, the strains of the “one-country-two systems” formula devised by communist China to govern the capitalist…
Hungary joined NATO in April and remained a front runner for European Union membership. However, these diplomatic victories could not mask the government’s growing contempt for the press and especially for journalists investigating stories that might embarrass the ruling Fidesz Party. In 1999, Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Fidesz Party sought more control over…
India’s extraordinary diversity is often seen as its greatest strength, but religious, ethnic, and regional conflicts regularly pose significant challenges to the country’s democracy, and to its press. While the Indian press remains one of the most pluralistic and vibrant in the world, journalists are still vulnerable to attack. And under the leadership of the…
Despite a year of extraordinary political turmoil and uncertainty, the Indonesian press survived and prospered. Greater legal protections were put in place for media, and the once-feared Ministry of Information was eliminated. But the agonizing separation of East Timor from Indonesia (see separate entry on East Timor), and ethnic and political tensions in other parts…
The Iranian press was again the main battleground in a bitter power struggle between reformist president Muhammad Khatami and Iran’s conservative clerical establishment, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. With crucial parliamentary elections slated for February 2000, the conservative-controlled judiciary pressed ahead with a steady campaign of repression against reformist…
In the ninth year of crippling UN economic sanctions and after last year’s frequent U.S. and British air strikes, President Saddam Hussein showed little sign of loosening his iron grip on Iraqi society. All media remained at the government’s disposal, functioning as instruments of propaganda for Hussein’s brutal Baath regime. In his 1999 report about…
Since Israel began turning over parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) six years ago, its repression of the local press has noticeably declined. The censorship, intimidation, and arbitrary arrests of Palestinian journalists that marked full-fledged Israeli occupation are now practiced by Palestinian president Yasser Arafat and…
“Press freedom will be total,” promised Gen. Robert Gueï, Côte d’Ivoire’s new head of state. General Gueï, 58, who overthrew the government of President Henri Konan Bedie on Christmas Eve, made this announcement just hours after his nine-man junta imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in this west African country, historically noted for its political stability. However,…