27 Jul 17 | Awards, Fellowship, Fellowship 2017, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”89552″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_separator color=”black”][vc_column_text]Following the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards in April, journalism award-winner Maldives Independent has undergone a period of change and restructuring.
Former editor Zaheena Rasheed credits the award with increased press coverage outside of the Maldives. Most significantly, Rasheed told Index that the attention from the award convinced their sponsors to continue funding them.
After an Al Jazeera documentary containing interviews with Rasheed was released, the Maldives Independent’s office was attacked and raided by police in September 2016 and Rasheed had to flee for her safety. She has since taken a role at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar.
“The job has been very busy, but exciting, especially following a diplomatic crisis between Qatar and its neighbours,” Rasheed told Index.
In late April, Yameen Rasheed, a prominent blogger and journalist, who had contributed opinion pieces in the Maldives Independent, was murdered. His death is still on the minds of those at Maldives Independent, which extensively covered the investigation into his murder.
“Yameen was a critical and brave voice who spoke out against injustice despite the crackdown on free speech. His murder has had a chilling effect on free speech in the Maldives and prompted many others to practice self-censorship. I believe he was targeted by religious extremists because of his advocacy for a more tolerant and secular society”, Rasheed said. No information has been released on the identities of the suspects in Rasheed’s murder or what charges they might face.
Maldives Independent journalist Ahmed Rilwan disappeared in August 2014. Despite the international attention these incidents have received, Rasheed is not confident that they will affect the culture of impunity that exists around attacks on critics and freethinkers.
“The biggest concern, as evident by Yameen’s murder and Rilwan’s disappearance, is that there are groups who are willing to kill in the name of Islam. They enjoy impunity because they have the protection of state bodies. State officials support them for two reasons; they think supporting radical groups bolsters their legitimacy, or they also subscribe to these views” Rasheed said.
Rasheed identifies the Maldives Independent’s biggest challenge is securing consistent and sufficient funding, something which Maldives Independent is working on now. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1509444026808-19a50408-3e9b-3″ taxonomies=”9028, 4002, 9136″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
23 Apr 17 | Campaigns -- Featured, Digital Freedom, Statements
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Index on Censorship strongly condemns the killing of Maldives blogger Yameen Rasheed, who was found with multiple stab wounds in the stairway of his apartment building in Malé on Sunday 23 April 2017, and died soon after he was taken to the hospital.
“We call on Maldives authorities to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into the murder of Yameen Rasheed,” Index’s head of advocacy Melody Patry said. “The failure to protect Rasheed after he reported receiving multiple death threats to the police is tragic. It is critical the police show credible and independent efforts to bring those responsible to justice.”
Rasheed was 29 years old and frequently satirised the Maldives’ political and religious authorities in his blog the Daily Panic. Zaheena Rasheed, friend and editor of the Maldives Independent news website said Yameen Rasheed had reported receiving multiple death threats to the police. He was also a close friend of Ahmed Rilwan, the Maldives Independent journalist who was abducted and disappeared in 2014.
This killing takes place the same week editors of Maldives Independent received the 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Journalism Award. During her acceptance speech, exiled editor Zaheena Rasheed said “the space for independent press was narrowing by the day”.
Maldives journalists and bloggers have faced increased pressure and taken great risks to express their opinion and hold the government to account. In August 2016 the Maldives passed a law criminalising defamation and empowering the state to impose heavy fines and shut down media outlets for “defamatory” content. In September, Maldives Independent’s office was violently attacked and later raided by the police, after the release of an Al Jazeera documentary exposing government corruption. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492962363297-360949b6-0f99-2″ taxonomies=”4002″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Apr 17 | Asia and Pacific, Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia, Event Reports, Maldives, News and features, Serbia
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Maldives Independent’s former editor Zaheena Rasheed and KRIK editor-in-chief Stevan Dojcinovic. (Photo: KRIK)
Thousands of miles separate the Maldives from Serbia, but Zaheena Rasheed, the Index award-winning journalist and former editor of Maldives Independent, and Stevan Dojcinovic, editor-in-chief of the Serbian investigative website KRIK, but both described similar attacks on press freedom at a panel discussion at the Corinthia Hotel in London.
Rasheed lives in exile, having been forced to flee the Indian Ocean archipelago after working on an Al Jazeera documentary critical of the Maldivian government. She said she escaped just in time – a man who left a day later “barely made it out of the airport”.
Rasheed spoke of the intimidation tactics that independent news media had been subject to in the country. “Some newsrooms had gangs going inside of the newsroom and saying specifically we are not leaving until certain articles were taken down,” she said.
The Maldivian government claims that these gangs are criminals beyond their control.
As violence does not deter outlets like Maldives Independent from their investigative work, president Abdulla Yameen’s regime resorted to legal means, including imposing a draconian defamation law.
Rasheed said: “The definition of defamation is so broad that I could be sued for something I think, it doesn’t have to even be expressed. It could be a gesture. If it’s a gang or criminals after you, you can hide and avoid it, but when it’s the government you just can’t.”
On Serbia, Dojcinovic said that most in the West do not realise the extent of the country’s problems. “There’s not a real, clear picture of Serbia in the EU regarding how wild corruption and crime are,” he said.
Both journalists have seen hard-won democratic freedoms erode quickly. In Serbia this slide began in 2012 when Aleksandar Vučić was elected prime minister (this month, Vučić was also elected as the country’s president). Dojcinovic said: “The government has managed to destroy and undermine all of the democratic institutions built over 12 years within two years. We no longer have an independent judicial system and it’s the same with the media.”
In the Maldives, 2012 also left its mark. “Since the coup, a lot of democratic gains have been lost. What we saw in the first couple of years after the coup were physical assaults against journalists,” Rasheed said. “There were murder attempts, death threats and one TV station was even torched.”
She said that police turned a blind eye to these attacks. “All of the CCTV cameras were turned away from the building. The police just weren’t there.”
Whilst the threats are different in Serbia, Dojcinovic described a choked media landscape: “It’s not possible to see criticism of the government in the mainstream media. Not on any newsstand or on any TV frequency. They have destroyed all of these institutions.”
Dojcinovic said that the Serbian government is falling into the same patterns as Slobodan Milosevic’s regime: “It’s the arrests of journalists by the same group of people who were behind the murder of journalists back in the 1990s. They can’t cross this line now because it would ruin their reputation with the EU, so they find a way to make your life a nightmare without leaving fingerprints.”
Reprisals for his work have included three smear campaigns: he has been tagged as a criminal for his links to organised crime, branded a foreign agent, and had his personal life put on display.
“You cannot fight this much either because you can only publish on the internet,” Dojcinovic said. “That’s nothing compared to the newspapers which present us in this way.”
In the Maldives, however, there appears to be no such line. Rasheed said: “A member of our team was disappeared in 2014. Then a well-known gangster, who we think was involved in our colleague’s disappearance, vandalised the security cameras [at our office] and left a machete at our door. And then I got a text message saying: ‘You’re next.’”
Rasheed thinks that her colleague Ahmed Rilwan was targeted because he was seen to be in favour of secularism, and negative stories about Islamic radicalisation raise the government’s ire. “What really bothers them are these stories of growing radicalisation in the Maldives because that is what puts tourists off,” she said.
Rasheed also spoke about the difficulties of constantly fighting such repression. She told the audience that she had, to some extent, been traumatised by her experiences. However: “As a journalist, the most important thing to do is to live to tell the story.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492769899588-d49a7ccf-cd47-5″ taxonomies=”8148, 9028, 8734″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
