Two journalists have been killed in Syria while reporting on the front line. French journalist Yves Debaywas shot twice while covering the conflict between the Syrian regime’s army and rebel forces on 17 January, reportedly killed by a regime sniper. Al Jazeera correspondent Mohamed Al-Massalma was shot with three bullets the following day during fights in the town of Busra Al-Harir in the southern province of Deraa. The Syrian journalist for Al Jazeera, who used the pseudonym Mohamed Al-Horani, was an activist in the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad before he joined the news network. More than 60,000 people have died since the Syrian conflict began in March 2011.
Lupe Fiasco – ejected at Obama’s reelection event
On 17 January, a Cameroonian man who text his friend saying “I’m very much in love with you” had a three year jail sentence upheld.Jean-Claude Roger Mbédé had already served a year and a half in prison for homosexual conduct when he was released on bail for medical reasons in July 2012 — he was malnourished and injured after being assaulted. Cameroon is considered the worst place in Africa for persecution of homosexuals. Last year, 14 people were arrested for homosexuality, 12 of whom were prosecuted.
On 19 January, a journalist in Somalia was killed whilst walking to work. Abdihared Osman Aden, a veteran producer for Shabelle Media Network was shot by unidentified assailants, becoming the fifth Shabelle worker to be murdered in 13 months. Twelve journalists were killed in Somalia in 2012, the highest rate of murders in Africa that year. All the deaths from last year remain unsolved, accoring to Committee to Protect Journalists’ research. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud had vowed to establish a task force to investigate the deaths of media workers in November, but has failed to take action so far, according to local journalists.
Google will decline personal information requests from authoritarian governments in Africa, it announced on 17 January. In a press conference in Nairobi, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said Google are careful where they place servers and staff, as refusing frequent information requests from the government could lead to arrests and harassment.
Rapper Lupe Fiasco was removed from the stage during an event to celebrate Barack Obama’s inauguration. Headlining the StartUp RockOn concert, Fiasco took to the stage at The Hamilton in Washington, saying that he didn’t vote for Obama during a 30-minute anti-war performance. The performance ended with security eventually moving him along for the next performer, after the rapper refused to leave the stage. Co-founders of the festival Hypervocal later released a statement putting the removal of the star down to a “bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance”, as opposed to his opinions. Lupe Fiasco has previously voiced opposition to the Obama administration, when discussing the President ordering drone attacks.
President Barack Obama’s speech at Yangoon University appears to be another step in what he described as a “remarkable journey” for the country. The progress does look real.
Back in 2007, BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane wrote a report for Index after he returned from reporting the brutal crackdown on the Saffron revolution.
He alluded to the necessarily secretive nature of entering the country and meeting interviewees:
I won’t go into how I managed to get into the country: suffice to say that I was able to operate for several days without being picked up. It was nerve wracking and posed immense human and journalistic challenges.
While describing the immense difficulties local activists faced, he was optimistic about the role of the web in opening up the country and helping local democrats get their story out. “[T]he “bamboo curtain” has been lowered once again,” wrote Keane. “But not for long I believe.”
Yangon, Burma: A child holds a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi along with President Obama (Demotix)
Five years on, and Burma seemed to have changed almost beyond recognition for Keane:
“Since the beginning of 2012 I’ve visited Burma three times. Each trip has been on an official journalist visa. Not once have I been harassed, intimidated or interfered with. I have reported from city slums and rural villages, from huge opposition rallies and from within sedate government compounds. On my first ‘official’ trip I walked the streets of downtown Rangoon interviewing people at random. Again my expectation was that a secret policeman would appear from the shadows and bundle myself and the camera team away. But nothing happened.”
Shortly before Keane wrote that dispatch, the Burmese government had announced that it was scaling down censorship. On 1 June Tint Swe, head of the Press Scrutinisation and Registration Department was quoted by AFP saying:”There will be no press scrutiny job from the end of June. There will be no monitoring of local journals and magazines.”
Remarkable in a country where newspapers and magazines had faced pre-publication censorship for decades.
After the release of political prisoners in 2011, including opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and and satirist Zarganar, the first real test of whether the broader population would enjoy extended free speech under the newly liberalised regime came in January of this year, with the Arts of Freedom Film Festival, which more or less passed the test (barring the rejection of some submissions from outside Burma.
Since then, progress has been pretty much consistent. But there is a long way to go yet. Burma is nowhere near a democracy, and the disturbing reports of violence against the Rohinga Muslim population (and the opposition NLD’s apparent indifference to it) are certainly cause for alarm.
Obama spoke today Burma’s need to embrace Roosevelt’s four fundamental freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Burma has huge challenges in all these areas.
Nov 5, 2012 (Index) The United States two-party system leaves little room for third party candidates in the presidential race. Green Party nominee Jill Stein has faced numerous obstacles throughout her run — including being arrested outside of one of the presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney.
Index’s Sara Yasin spoke to the candidate about free speech in America, and the challenges she’s faced as a third party candidate in the Presidential race
Index: What are the biggest barriers faced by alternative candidates in the Presidential race?
Jill Stein: Its almost as if third parties have been outlawed. There is not a specific law, but they have just made it incredibly difficult and complicated to get on the ballot, to be heard, it is as if [third parties] have been virtually outlawed.
To start with we don’t have ballot status, the big parties are “grandfathered” in. Other parties have to collect anywhere from ten to twenty to thirty to forty times as many signatures to get on the ballot. We spend 80 per cent of the campaign jumping through hoops in order to get on the ballot. It really makes it almost impossible to run.
It takes money in this country. You have to buy your way onto TV. The press will not cover third parties, challengers, alternatives. The press is consolidated into the hands of a few corporate media conglomerates, and they’re not interested and they also don’t have the time because their staff has been cut. So they’re basically, you know, covering the horse race. Not looking at new voices, new choices, the kinds of things that the American public is really clamouring for, and also not looking not the issues. And so you get this really dumbed down coverage that excludes third party candidates.
And then you have the debates, which are a mockery of democracy. Which are really sham debates held and organised by the Commission on the Presidential Debates, which is a private corporation led by Democratic and Republican parties. They sound like a public interest organisation; they’re not. They’re simply a front group to censor the debate. And to fool the American voter into thinking that is the only choice that Americans have. And in fact, by locking out third party candidates, we’ve effectively locked out voters.
According to a study in USA Today a couple weeks ago, roughly one out of every two eligible voters was predicted to be staying home in this election. That is an incredible indictment of the candidates.
Index: What are your thoughts on how multinational companies are using lobbying, lawsuits and advertisements to chill free speech around environmental issues?
This is certainly being challenged. Fossil fuels are an example. The fossil fuel industry has bought itself scientists — pseudo scientists I must say — and think tanks to churn out climate denial. That whole area of climate denial has been sufficiently disproven now, to the point where they don’t rear their ugly head anymore. Now there’s just climate silence, which Obama and Romney really share. Romney is not denying the reality of climate change, he’s just not acting on it. Unfortunately, Obama has seized that agenda as well in competing for money.
I think we are seeing enormous pushback against this, in the climate movement, in the healthy food movement, in the effort to pass the referendum in California (37) that would require the labeling of food which the GMO industry is deathly afraid of, because people are rightly skeptical. So for them, free speech, informed consumers, informed voters, are anthema, it’s deadly for them. They require the supression of democracy and the suppression of free speech. And the buying of the political parties is all about silencing voices like our campaign. which stands up on all of these issues.
There are huge social movements on the ground now for sustainable, healthy organic agriculture. For really concerted climate action, for green energy, for public transportation. These are thriving movements right now. Our campaign represents the political voice of those movements. There is also a strong movement now to amend the constitution to stop these abuses, to stop this suppression of free speech.
Index: Do you think that the two-party system allows for topics viewed as inconvenient to both Republicans and Democrats to remain untouched?
JS: That’s their agreement really. And the commission on presidential debates makes it so very clear. They have a written agreement that was leakeda couple of weeks ago. That agreement includes very carefully selected moderators who agree about what kinds of questions they will ask and they will go through…until they find the candidate for a moderator that will agree basically not to rock the boat. The moderators have to agree to not only exclude third parties, but not to participate in any other format with candidates whose issues can’t be controlled. This has everything to do with why they make the agreements that they do and why they will only talk to each other, because they’re both bought and paid for by the same industries responsible for the parties.
When I got arrested protesting the censorship of the debate, my running mate and I were both tightly handcuffed with these painful plastic restraints, and taken to a secret, dark site. Run by some combination of secret service, and police, and homeland security. Who knows who it really belongs to, but it was supposed to be top secret and no one was supposed to know and we were then handcuffed to metal chairs and sat there for almost eight hours. And there were sixteen cops watching the two of us, and we were in a facility decked out for 100 people to be arrested, but it was only the two of us and one other person brought in towards the end of the evening who was actually a Bradley Manning supporter who had been arrested just for taking photographs of someone who was photographing the protesters.
Index: What does freedom of expression mean to you?
JS: It means having a democracy, having a political system that actually allows the voices of everyday people to be heard. Not just, you know, the economic elite which has bought out our establishment political parties. So free expression, for me, is the life blood of a political system. I was not a political animal until rather late in life. I was shocked to learn we don’t have a political system based on free expression. We have a political system based on campaign contributions and the biggest spender, and they buy out the policies that they want, so to me, that is where free expression goes. And if we don’t have it we don’t have politics based on free expression —- it’s not just our health that is being thrown under the bus, it’s our economy, it is our climate, it is our environment. We don’t have a future if we don’t have free expression. If we don’t get our first amendment and free speech back, and that means liberating it from money.
Sara Yasin is an editorial assistant at Index on Censorship. She tweets at @missyasin
A further 5 per cent quit in protest, including me.
RFE/RL broadcasts on medium wave will end on 10 November, due to amendments to the law on mass media which state a radio cannot broadcast in a primary service area if more than 5 per cent of it is owned by foreign individual or legal entity. RFE/RL’s broadcasts in Russia will only be available online through its website, which makes the decision to fire web staff especially strange.
Index’s Sara Yasin spoke to the candidate about free speech in America, and the challenges she’s faced as a third party candidate in the Presidential race