Press freedom in South Sudan deteriorates, watchdog
January 30, 2013 (LONDON) - South Sudan slipped 12 places in the
annual press freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders
(RWB) on Wednesday, leaving it at 124th out of the 180 countries
ranked.
JPEG - 1.2 Mb
Chief among the reasons for South Sudan’s slide down the table was the
murder of a columnist in Juba on 5 December - the first journalist to
be killed in the country since separating from Sudan 18 months ago.
In comments made to Al Jazeera, the international media watchdog had
warned earlier this month that South Sudan’s ranking was likely to
fall due to the general heavy handedness of security forces in dealing
with journalists and the killing of Isaiah Abraham, who had been a
strong critic of the government in his regular opinion pieces
published in Sudan Tribune and other news outlets.
RWB told Al Jazeera that the young nation’s press freedom issues are
due to the attitude and bad habits of many members of the government
and security services.
This disdain for journalists can be partly attributed to the
experience of being ruled by the Khartoum government, RWB said. In the
2013 press freedom league Sudan remained the 170th worst offender out
of the 179 countries included.
As well as fighting successive Khartoum governments in two civil wars
since Sudan’s independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1956, southern
Sudanese politicians, the press freedom organisation said, had also
been influenced during periods when they were part of power-sharing
governments.
Most recently, South Sudan’s former-rebels-turned-governing-party -
the SPLM - shared power with Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party
(NCP) for six years as part of a 2005 peace deal that led to the South
opting to secede in 2011.
Shortly after South Sudan declared independence the Committee to
Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that "local journalists fear the
former rebels turned government officials who still harbor a war
mentality that is unaccustomed to criticism, and that they are not
prepared to extend the freedoms they fought hard to attain".
Since Abraham’s death, Sudan Tribune’s reporters in Juba have observed
a decrease in the amount of comment critical of the government
appearing in South Sudan’s press.
As Sudan Tribune reported two weeks ago, many South Sudanese writers
live in fear and receive threats both in person from the security
services and anonymously over the phone.
There are hopes that when South Sudan passes long awaited media
legislation the rights of journalists and publishers will be clearer
and not left to the whim of politicians and the security services.
South Sudan was not the only nation to fall significantly in this
year’s rankings, with Chad and Zimbabwe by 18 and 16 places
respectively. The RWB reports also found that East Africa was
stagnating near the bottom of the index:
East Africa: journalists’ graveyard
In Somalia (175th, -11) 18 journalists were killed, caught up in
bomb attacks or were the direct targets of murder, making 2012 the
deadliest in history for the country’s media. The Horn of Africa state
was the second most dangerous country in the world for those working
in news and information, behind Syria. In Eritrea (in last place in
the index for the sixth successive year), no journalists were killed
but some were left to die, which amounts to the same thing. With at
least 30 behind bars, it is Africa’s biggest prison for journalists.
Of 11 incarcerated since 2001, seven have died as a result of prison
conditions or have killed themselves. Since the independent media were
abolished more than 10 years ago, there are no independent Eritrean
news outlets, other than outside the country, and terror prevails.
East Africa is also a region of censorship and crackdowns. Omar
al-Bashir’s Sudan, where more newspapers were seized and the arrests
of journalists continued during the summer, is stuck firmly in 170th
place, in the bottom 10 of the index. Djibouti (167th, -8), which also
has no independent media, detained a correspondent of the
foreign-based news site La Voix de Djibouti. Despite the release of
two Swedish journalists arrested in 2011, Ethiopia(137th) fell 10
places because of its repressive application of the 2009
anti-terrorist law and the continued detention of several local
journalists.
(ST)
You can read the full report here: RSF: East Africa stagnates near
bottom of the index, Mali nosedives
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"South Sudan Info - The Kob" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
