04 Mar 15 | Afghanistan, Awards, mobile
Campaigning nominee Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar
Abdul Mujeeb Khalvatgar is an Afghan journalist and the executive director of the media advocacy group Nai Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, which works to develop a free media as the country develops a peacetime society. A radio journalist for more than 10 years, he began his career with the Internews Network in 2002 and then as general manager for a national radio channel, Salam Watander.
Khalvatgar has been a tireless campaigner for a free and fair Afghan media. Nai is the only organisation in the country to monitor violence against Afghan journalists. It has offered basic training to around 10,000 Afghan journalists, teaching investigative reporting, TV hosting and technical skills. Nai also runs a network of all-female radio stations, which Khalvatgar helped set up.
The Afghan media sector has grown from having only 15 media outlets in 2000 to almost 1,000 in 2014. With this growth, new challenges have arisen. Since 2001 more than 40 journalists have been killed in Afghanistan and hundreds of attacks on members of the press have been recorded. Many of these are believed to have been perpetrated by the government. Operating in a well-documented atmosphere of violence and hostility, Khalvatgar aims to strengthen Afghan democracy by being one of the founding fathers of a free media in the country.
“The problem here is that on the one hand, the government of Afghanistan are trying to push and pressurise as much as possible the environment for free expression and free media. On the other hand the terrorists, the Taliban, are trying to silence the people who are working as journalists, who are working as media activists and those who are trying to support them,” Khalvatgar told Index on Censorship.
Her says insecurity is one of the main problems facing Afghan journalists. “Just 20 kilometres outside of Kabul it is sometimes not possible to report on what is going on,” he says, adding that outside the big cities, journalist have to self-censor for fear of the local government, local powers, and in south and east of the country, the Taliban. Even in big cities, he explains, it is sometimes difficult to investigate stories related to corruption in depth “because you don’t feel safe to do it”. He also highlights impunity for crimes against members of the press, the undefined relationship between media owners and journalists and the lack of access to information as challenges to media freedom.
Khalvatgar joined Nai as executive director in 2010, a position he still holds. He is part of Afghanistan’s Foundation Open Society Institute, working as media coordinator and acting country manager, as well as an active member of Access to Information Law Working Group, a collective of more than 15 media professionals and activists working for better access to information law in Afghanistan. He spent the better part of 2012 successfully campaigning to get a government draft law withdrawn that would have dampened media freedom and given more power over the press to conservative bodies. He also helped launch Afghanistan’s first media awards, as well as its Legacy Fund, which raises money for families of Afghan reporters who have been killed. And he is doing this work at great personal risk.
“I have had threats from Taliban that they want to kill me; threats from the government of Afghanistan that I do not criticise the government; threats from the local powers to not touch the kind of hegemonies that they have,” he lists. “But I do believe in what I’m doing. And I do love what I’m doing. So any kind of threats will not stop me.”
Khalvatgar says he is delighted about the Index award nomination, but true to form, his focus on is on his country’s media community. “If I win this award, it is an award for the people; for 49 journalists who have been killed in Afghanistan, for their families, for the almost 12,000 people that are working in the media sector in Afghanistan.”
This article was posted on March 4 2015 at indexoncensorship.org
31 Dec 13 | News and features, Politics and Society
Journalists are known for uncovering the truth. What is less known is how these journalists gather these facts, often risking their jobs, and sometimes their lives, to discover information others are attempting to keep hidden from the world.
The Taksim Gezi Park Protest
The Gezi Park protest in Turkey made international news when, in May 2013, a sit-in at the park protesting plans to develop the area sparked violent clashes with police. What didn’t grab the attention of media workers worldwide was that at least 59 of their fellow journalists were fired or forced to quit over their reporting of the events.
The Turkish press have been long-time sufferers of the need to self-censor in an environment where the press is ultimately run by a handful of wealthy individuals. The Gezi Park protests saw a surge in the controlling influence of the Turkish media as 22 journalists were fired and a further 37 forced to quit due to their determination to cover the clashes for a national and international audience, as was their duty as journalists.
Turkey came in at 154th in the Reporters Without Borders Freedom of the Press Index 2013, a drop of six places from 2012.
Journalists imprisoned
2013 was the first year a detailed survey was carried out by Reporters Without Borders which looked into how many journalists had been imprisoned for their work; the result was shocking. One hundred and seventy eight journalists were spending time in jail for their actions, along with 14 media assistants. Perhaps more worrying was the statistic that 166 netizens had been imprisoned, those who actively supply the world with content often without being paid whilst gaining access to places that many ‘official’ journalists are banned from.
China handed out the most prison sentences during 2013 with 30 media personal serving time behind bars. Closely behind was Eritrea with 28 journalists imprisoned, Turkey with 27, and Iran and Syria handing out 20 sentences each.
Press freedom in Afghanistan
Murder, injuries, threats, beatings, closure of media organisations, and the dismissal for liking a Facebook post have all accounted towards the 62 cases of violence against the media and journalists working in Afghanistan over the past eight months. The Afghanistan Journalists Center, which collected the data from January to August 2013, has claimed that government officials and security forces, the Taliban, and illegal armed groups are behind the majority of attacks.
Of particular concern is the growing threat to female journalists who have been forced to quit their jobs after threats to their families.
According to the Afghanistan Media Law; every person has the right to freedom of thought and speech, which includes the right to seek, obtain and disseminate information and views within the limit of law without any interference, restriction and threat by the government or officials- a law Afghanistan does not appear to be upholding.
Exiled journalists
Some journalists are taking a risk every day that they go to work. They may not be killed for their reporting but that does not stop them facing imprisonment, violence, and harassment. Between June 2008 and May 2013 the CPJ found that 456 journalists were forced into exile as a means of protecting their families and themselves due to their determination to uncover the truth.
The top countries from which journalists fled included Somalia, Ethiopia and Sri Lanka with Iran topping the table having forced a total of 82 journalists into exile. Although a majority of these journalists claim sanctuary in countries like Sweden, the U.S and Kenya, only 7% of those exiled since 2008 have been able to return home.
Impunity
Murder is a crime for which those involved should be punished. Yet in the case of the killing of journalists nine out of 10 killers go free. Put another way, in only five percent of cases for the murder of a journalist does the defendant receive a sentence of full justice. The most likely reason to kill a journalist is to silence them from speaking the truth to others.
IFEX, global freedom of expression network behind the International Day to End Impunity campaign said: “When someone acts with impunity, it means that their actions have no consequences. Intimidation, threats, attacks and murders go unpunished. In the past 10 years, more than 500 journalists have been killed. Murder is the ultimate form of censorship, and media are undoubtedly on the frontlines of free expression.”
06 Jul 12 | Asia and Pacific
This year, Massoud Hossaini became the first individual Afghan journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize. Hossaini’s photograph — a little girl crying in a bright green dress covered in the blood of the bodies surrounding her — also made him the first journalist to win a Pulitzer for the Agence France-Press news agency in its 177-year existence.
For Afghan journalists, the success of Hossaini’s photographs from a December 2011 attack on Kabul’s most important Shia shrine is indicative of the state of post-Taliban media in Afghanistan.
After 30 years of war and six years of a Taliban-imposed media blackout, to the Afghans working for foreign and domestic outlets the awards Hossaini’s photographs have received show the gains Afghan journalists have made in the last 10 years. But Hossani’s images from one of the bloodiest attacks in the capital in the decade since the US invasion also highlight the fragility of those gains.
Akmal Dawi, a journalist who splits his time between Afghanistan and Virginia, says Afghan journalists fill an important role in media coverage of the embattled nation. He believes the stories of the actual people have “been lost” among what he sees as politicised coverage of the ongoing conflict.
Hossaini aims to show the world events on the ground as an Afghan would view them. “People forget that most of the victims of these attacks are women and children. There is nothing political about them, but they are dying,” Hossaini says of the 56 people whose deaths in the 7 December attack were part of the record 3,021 civilian casualties in 2011.
Despite their efforts, the majority of Afghan journalists reporting internationally still face challenges in promoting local angles to stories reported by foreign outlets. Dawi, who reported for the BBC World Service after the fall of the Taliban, says the media coverage is “almost entirely shaped by the foreign journalists” who cover the country’s situation with the interests of foreign audiences in mind.
Mustafa Kazemi, a Kabul-based freelance journalist who has worked with several foreign media outlets — including the Deutsche Presse-Agentur and Sky News — puts it more simply:
Afghan journalists are not in a decision-making position in foreign outlets. A small percentage enjoy this freedom.
As with every war zone, coverage of a nation of 30 million focuses on the war, says Lotfullah Najafizada, Head of Current Affairs, for TOLO News, the nation’s first 24-hour news channel.
The reportage by a few prominent, highly-connected outlets has led to a situation where anything that does not go with the “flow of news” is cast off by foreign reporters, who rely on the majority of locals only for translation and fact-finding, says Dawi.
Dawi says this “superficial reporting” has had a particular impact in the US, where coverage of the central-Asian nation has never exceeded five per cent since the Pew Research Center began weekly monitoring in 2007.
Though Dawi says that he is “not interested in Afghanistan being top news”, the content of what does get covered by foreign outlets has ripple effects at home and abroad.
In Afghanistan, Najafizada, who works for the nation’s most popular television station, says local media is inspired and impacted by the big names in foreign media.
In an effort to counter the tendency to look towards established foreign outlets for inspiration, Najafizada has placed a strong emphasis on investigative reporting in the country.
By forming a team of journalists who were given a week to expose corruption within the Afghan parliament, Tolo TV’s popular 6:30 report was recently able to expose bank statements of several leading MPs who were receiving money from unknown sources.
Such reports have not been without their dangers. According to Nai Supporting Open Media in Afghanistan, there was a 38 per cent increase in violence against media workers in 2011, including three deaths, six injuries, two detentions, and 33 instances of assault. The majority of the threats, say the journalists, come from political officials within the Western-backed Karzai government.
Kazemi says on many occasions he too has had to question the effects of publishing information that may impact the reputation of a public figure. He says:
I was confident that if I write this story and publish it, I will have black-filmed Land Cruisers with no number plates follow me.
In 2009, New York-based rights group Human Rights Watch called on the Afghan president to pardon Parwez Kambakhsh, a student and part-time journalist for the daily Jahan-e-Naw, New World, at Balkh University.
Kambakhsh’s original death sentence on charges of blasphemy was commuted to 20 years in prison, but it took international pressure for President Hamid Karzai to grant Kambakhsh “amnesty” nearly a year after a high court found him guilty of “blasphemy and distribution of texts defamatory of Islam” for allegedly distributing writings critical of the treatment of women under Islamic law.
According to the journalists, the real test for Afghan media, much like other aspects of Afghan society, will come after December 2014, when international forces are expected to pull out of the country. With that year fast approaching, Najafizada says the international community must make serious investments in the Afghan media, which he cites as “one of the greatest successes of post-9/11 Afghanistan”.
Without a stable economy, Najifazada sees a bleak future for independent media in the country:
I’m pretty much pessimistic of media growth dependent on foreign aid and media outlets (…) Media organisations [in Afghanistan] are fragile, and are likely to die as soon as the foreign money dries up.
Sardar Ahmad, whose Kabul Pressistan employs 15 Afghan journalists, shares a similar fear for the state of post-Taliban media after the withdrawal of foreign forces.
“We are already required to work harder just to survive [as it is],” says Ahmad, who fears the impact of further financial and political constraints on local reporting will have the work of an Afghan-founded and Afghan-run media house like Kabul Pressistan.
Without foreign funding and oversight, Hossaini and other Afghan journalists fear the human side to the country’s story will not be conveyed to the world.
Ali M Latifi is a Kabul-born, California-raised journalist based in Doha, Qatar. He has written for Al Jazeera English, Campus Progress, New America Media, and TBD.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alibomaye
13 Mar 12 | Uncategorized
Yorkshire 19-year-old Azhar Ahmed is facing charges of “racially aggravated public order offences” after he posted an angry Facebook status update about the reporting of the latest British Army fatalities in Afghanistan.
Ahmed’s sentiment (see pic) was not unsual. He starts off with the widely repeated complaint that deaths of British soldiers are given blanket coverage, while deaths of Afghans barely merit a mention. This is true, and hardly controversial.
Ahmed’s mistake, apparently, is to continue to vent his anger, and suggests that British soldiers should all die and go to hell. Strong language, but does it tip into incitement to violence? I think not. Nor, for that matter, do West Yorkshire police, who have not pursued Ahmed on this charge. Rather, they have sinisterly construed Ahmed’s comment as “racially aggravated”.
Serving British army soldiers do not count as an ethnicity. So why angry words about them could be seen as racially aggravated is a mystery. But perhaps unwittingly, those responsible for this charge have revealed something dark about the way the war in Afghanistan is now viewed.
Unconditional support for soldiers is now expected, even as we become increasingly unsure of what they’re doing out there. From the most ardent supporter of the war to the most strident critic, everyone claims to be acting in the interest of Our Brave Boys. This is now not a matter of politics, but loyalty. This question is compounded in Ahmed’s case, as the six soldiers killed were all from the local Yorkshire Regiment. Ahmed’s home town Dewsbury was also home of Britain’s best-known suicide bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, in the months before his attack on London. Suspicion of young Muslims voicing anti-troops opinions in the area is predictable.
But still the “racially aggravated” charge doesn’t stick, unless one is willing to buy into the notion that Afghanistan is part of an ethno-religious war between “Islam” and “the West”. This is the line that the likes of Anjem Choudary have been pushing for years. And now it seems West Yorkshire police agree.
