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Press
Freedom: Ten Years On…
By Timothy Balding
Director
General
World
Association of Newspapers
Ten years
ago, on 3 May 1991, African publishers and journalists gathered
at a United Nations/UNESCO conference in Namibia drew up a
manifesto proclaiming the need for an independent, pluralistic
and free press as an essential component in democratic and
economic development. This manifesto - the Declaration of
Windhoek - called on the international community to outlaw
censorship as a grave violation of human rights and on States
to provide constitutional guarantees for freedom of the press.
The call
did not fall on deaf ears, at least at inter-governmental
institutions. Within months, the General Conference of UNESCO
had endorsed the Declaration, shortly followed by the General
Assembly of the United Nations, which formally declared 3
May as World Press Freedom Day.
On 3
May 2001, media world-wide will celebrate the tenth edition
of World Press Freedom Day. To what extent have the aspirations
of the press to freedom been realised, in Africa and elsewhere,
in the past decade?
The dismantling
of the former Soviet bloc and the creation of many new democracies
in the early 1990s provided momentum and significant potential
for a free press world-wide: Freedom House, an American human
rights monitoring institute, estimates that countries with
a press at least 'partly free' have increased by two thirds
in the last decade. In Eastern Europe in particular the media
were quick to seize their new freedoms and have become, in
countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, a strong
and diverse counterbalance to authority and its abuse. The
role of free and independent media in encouraging transparency,
demanding accountability, fighting corruption and creating
a stable and healthy economy cannot be overestimated: it is
certainly more than coincidence that the new democracies which
have accomplished most rapidly the transition to the market
economy are also those which, virtually from the outset, established
a viable free press.
There
were many press freedom advances in the 1990s. In South Africa,
for example, the end of apartheid and democratic elections
in 1994 led to the abolition of all vestiges of control and
censorship. In Indonesia and Nigeria, new civilian governments
in 1999 returned their countries to democracy and press freedom,
bringing an explosion of new publications. A diversified and
relatively vigorous press has also emerged with the new constitutional
monarchies of Thailand and Nepal during the 1990s, and democratic
elections in Benin, Tanzania and Ghana brought similar developments
in their wake.
But the
1990s have also proved, if indeed it still needed to be proved,
that the 'formal' introduction of democracy provides no guarantees
at all for the development of a strong and truly free press,
which is a much more laborious and complex process than many
imagined.
In many
parts of the former Soviet bloc, including Russia itself,
the five Central Asian Republics, the Ukraine, Belarus, or
Azerbaijan, the free press is today still struggling for its
survival against overt and covert attempts to control it.
At the same time, the economic viability, and thus independence,
of this press remains highly problematic, with inadequate
market development, poor or government-controlled production
and distribution infrastructures and a critical shortage of
trained, professional managers.
Aid
to press development 'abysmally' low
The authors
of the Windhoek Declaration saw very well that the continuation
of highly unfavourable economic conditions for the press would
be as big an obstacle to the development of a free press as
the lack of democracy and legal protection for free media.
Today,
as we note clear though still unsatisfactory progress in the
'political' conditions for press freedom, in Africa and elsewhere,
thanks often to Windhoek and other such initiatives, we still
see the chronic economic problems explicitly identified ten
years ago.
Both
in the former Soviet bloc and in Africa the international
community has failed abysmally to effectively invest aid in
building the strong, independent press which is necessary
before any durable economic, political and social progress
and stability can be assured. In the place of the 'Marshall
Plan' which the press and its international organisations,
like the World Association of Newspapers, called for a decade
ago, there has been little more than anecdotal funding for
projects to help independent press development.
While,
we repeat, the political conditions for press freedom have
improved significantly in many countries, there has often
been a shift towards more subtle forms of repression, persecution
or harassment. As it has become more and more unacceptable
for governments seeking international recognition and approval
to be seen to be crushing free expression and other human
rights, more of those with autocratic tendencies have transferred
their repression into the hands of the pliant judicial authorities
under their control, giving 'legal' approval to what remain
as press freedom violations.
At the
same time, violence against media employees and their publications
and companies has seen a dramatic increase over the decade.
The collapse of totalitarianism states has often engendered
civil conflicts which have brought journalists into the line
of fire (the civil war in Tajikistan, for example, in 1993
cost the lives of more than 50 media employees); reporters
have frequently been the victims of religious conflicts (57
Algerian press men and women were murdered in the worst years
of fundamentalist violence); with an increase in investigative
journalism and exposure, mafia, drug traffickers or other
criminals, often abetted by politicians, the police or judicial
authorities have 'taken over' the job of silencing curious
reporters (over 200 have been killed in Latin American democracies
since 1990, 100 of them in Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico).
One region
which has remained virtually hermetic to positive change for
the free press and democracy over the past ten years is the
Middle East; not one Arab leader in place today has been chosen
in a totally free and fair election! As though trapped in
a time-warp, the major Arab powers have held on tenaciously
to their more or less total domination over the information
they believe is fit for their peoples. From Tunisia, to Iraq,
to Syria, to Libya, to Saudi Arabia, free journalism is a
rare, virtually inexistant, commodity. But there remains hope,
particularly from the airwaves. The Al Jazeera satellite television
station, based in Qatar, for example, is sending shock waves
throughout the Arab world with its remarkably open and free
debates and news about Arab issues.
The
impact of the Internet
No discussion
of press freedom in the 1990s can fail to applaud the advances,
and above all the new opportunities, brought by the technological
breakthrough of the Internet. An information flow, however
policed and controlled, has been created in countries like
Burma, China, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria
and Vietnam, where the press is totally muzzled, and one can
only hope that free information providers will get better
and better at outwitting the security authorities.
In the
meantime, many of the pioneers are paying a very severe price
for their efforts. In China, for example, where the regime
appeared to have completely won the battle against free information
on political and other sensitive issues in the press, the
Internet has brought an entirely new challenge in the repression
of dissenting voices. Heavy jail sentences have been inflicted
on the brave souls who hoped either that the Chinese authorities
would embrace this modern form of communication more liberally
or that they could escape the attention of the ubiquitous
information police.
But few
governments can ignore the necessity, for economic progress,
of developing their Internet infrastructures and journalists
in some of the autocratic regimes of both the Middle East
and South East Asia, in particular, have been getting around
traditional controls by putting banned stories on the Web.
What,
then, can we expect, or hope for, in the decade ahead? International
'opinion', perhaps for the first time, is clearly weighted
against those governments which continue to violate the human
right to free information. This has not yet translated into
a real determination and commitment either to encourage real
change by helping free press development in foreign aid programmes,
or in completely excluding aggressive states from the 'club'
of respectable nations with which one can do business. It
is on both these fronts that progress is necessary in the
ten years ahead of us. As many democratic, industrialised
nations continue out of either genuine philanthropy or economic,
political and military self-interest to help less fortunate
countries in their progress towards democracy, human rights
and a better economic and social environment, renewed emphasis
must appear on aiding, at a much more significant level, the
emergence of free and independent media as a precondition
for all durable economic, political and social change.
At the
same time, conditions have never been more propitious for
insisting that all major international events - the Olympics,
for example - should only take place in countries which respect
human rights, including free expression and free information.
Only twice in modern history, in Berlin in 1936 and in Moscow
in 1980, has mankind's greatest sporting event taken place
in a totalitarian state. As the world's best athletes and
sports men and women seek Olympic glory in 2008 and beyond,
can the international community tolerate again that in close
proximity to their triumphs, men and women who have committed
no 'crime' other than promoting the fundamental right to express
their opinions or circulate free information, are shut away
from sight and sound in prison and labour camps?
We think
not.
Founded
in 1948, the Paris based World Association of Newspapers groups
66 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives
in 93 nations, 17 national and international news agencies,
a media foundation, 7 affiliated regional and worldwide press
organisations and
represents more than 17,000 publications on the five continents.
Links to related sites
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Association of Newspapers
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