Published on 3 May 2010
There are 40 names on this year's list of Predators of Press Freedom –
40 politicians, government officials, religious leaders, militias and
criminal organisations that cannot stand the press, treat it as an enemy
and directly attack journalists. They are powerful, dangerous, violent
and above the law.
See all the predators
http://en.rsf.org/predator-abdallah-ibn-al-saud,37208.html
Many of them were already on last year's list. In Latin America, there
is no change in the four major sources of threats and violence against
journalists: drug traffickers, the Cuban dictatorship, FARC and
paramilitary groups. Africa has also seen few changes. But power
relationships have been evolving in the Middle East and Asia.
Several predators have been dropped from the list, as in Somalia, where
intelligence chief Mohamed Warsame Darwish, the instigator of
heavy-handed raids, arbitrary arrests and, in some cases, deliberate
shooting on the country's few remaining journalists, was dismissed in
December 2008. In Nigeria, the State Security Service has been reined in
while the Nigeria Police Force, led by Ogbonna Onovo, has emerged as the
leading source of abuses against the press. The poorly-training police
are encouraged to use violence against journalists so that no one is
there to witness their operations.
In Iraq, journalists who do their job face real dangers from the
conflicts that keep erupting but the situation is slowly improving and
the violence is affecting the general population more than journalists
in particular. That is why Reporters Without Borders has withdrawn
Islamist groups from the ranks of the predators.
But, a little to the south, in the Persian Gulf, Yemeni President Ali
Abdulah Saleh has been added to the list. Yemen's authorities have
become much more repressive in the past year, creating a special court
for press offences, harassing newspapers and prosecuting a dozen
journalists in an attempt to limit coverage of dirty wars being waged in
the north and south of the country.
It was hard not to put the Philippines' private militias top of the list
after the local governor's thugs massacred around 50 people, including
30 journalists, in Maguindanao province on 23 November 2009. The ensuing
convoluted judicial proceedings betray a lack of political will to try
those responsible, whose political support is too important for
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Impunity is prevailing yet again.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar, whose influence extends to Pakistan as well
as Afghanistan, has joined the list because the holy war he is waging is
also directed at the press. In his war to control media coverage, around
40 attacks were directly targeted at journalists and news media in 2009.
Reporters Without Borders met Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, the
list's other new entrant, in March 2009. No one should be fooled by his
confident pretence of tolerance and a benign view of press freedom. Two
outspoken critics of Russia's handling of the "Chechen issue," Anna
Politkovskaya and Natalia Estemirova, were both gunned down –
Politkovskaya in Moscow in October 2006 and Estemirova in Grozny in July
2009. Both these murders had Kadyrov's prints on them, as have many
others that have taken place under the regime of terror he has imposed
in Chechnya.
The three national leaders Kim Jong-il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muammar
Gaddafi illustrate the new Reporters Without Borders campaign ad about
the Predators of Press Freedom. The ad was conceived by the Saatchi &
Saatchi agency and was designed by artists Stephen J Shanabrook and
Veronika Georgieva.
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