25 March 1999

By Stuart Gorin

USIA Staff Writer

Washington -- The current situation in Serbia involving the expulsion of foreign journalists and the closing down of an independent radio station following the NATO airstrikes has outraged the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Ann Cooper, executive director of the independent organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide, told a news conference in Washington March 25 that these actions by the Serb government are violations of international norms.

The CPJ remains "deeply concerned," Cooper said, but she pointed out that the organization concluded last year that a continuing crackdown on journalists would not stop as long as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic remained in power.

She noted that 29 Western journalists had been detained by Serbian authorities once the airstrikes began, and that even though all were eventually released, they were confined to their hotels and transmission of their stories was blocked.

Meanwhile, contradicting stories out of Belgrade reported that the Serbian government ordered the journalists' expulsion and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia encouraged them to remain as long as they are objective in their reporting.

The treatment of the foreign journalists "is what the independent Serb media has been living through for years," Cooper said.

Discussing the recent arrest of Veran Matic, editor-in-chief of Radio B-92, Belgrade's pre-eminent independent broadcast station, Cooper said he has now been released, but the station is now off the air. Matic is attempting to stay in operation through the Internet, she added.

"Suppression of the news only increases fear and suspicion among the general population," Cooper said. "Voices in opposition to Slobodan Milosevic must not be silenced."

Cooper held the news conference in connection with the release of CPJ's annual worldwide report on the lack of press freedom. "Attacks on the Press in 1998" is a nearly 400-page book compiled from first-hand research that analyzes press freedom issues in 118 countries.

Writing in the book's preface, National Public Radio correspondent Sylvia Poggioli said the press paid an "incredibly high price" for the bloody breakup in Yugoslavia, where state-run media fomented ethnic hatred.

"What makes ill-treatment of the media in the former Yugoslavia particularly disturbing," Poggioli said, "is that this region has been the object of intense diplomatic involvement and scrutiny by the international community, yet Western diplomacy has focused mainly on regional stability at the expense of freedom of information and free speech."

The CPJ study indicates that at least 118 journalists were in prison in 25 countries at the end of 1998 and 24 in 17 countries were murdered during the year in reprisal for their reporting. There are some 500 additional accounts in the report of attacks aimed to intimidate and silence journalists and news organizations through assault, wrongful imprisonment, censorship and legal harassment.

For the fifth consecutive year, the CPJ report says Turkey held more journalists in prison than any other country. Last year it was 27. "Turkey sadly remains at the top of this list," Cooper noted. Still, she said, this was slightly down from the 29 in prison at the end of 1997. Most of the journalists had been reporting on the Turkish conflict with Kurdish insurgents, the CPJ report said.

It said the most lethal country for journalists was Colombia, where there were four confirmed cases of assassination, targets of either the ongoing civil war or the pervasive criminal violence that exists. It is "the deadliest place in the world to practice journalism today," Cooper said.

CPJ continues to investigate the reasons for the murder of five other journalists in Colombia, where 43 have been killed in the past decade.

In addition, the CPJ report said two journalists were murdered for their work in each of four countries during 1998 -- Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria and Russia -- and there were single victims in 12 additional countries.

Among the other nations holding journalists in prison at the end of 1998, China and Ethiopia had 12 each. Third highest was Sierra Leone with 11, and Burma and Syria each held 8. The rest of the imprisoned journalists were scattered among 19 countries.

Discussing the Latin American region, CPJ said journalists have played a vital role in democratic development by bringing a measure of political accountability to the region, but there has been a violent backlash to their investigative reporting. The report noted the existence of anachronistic press laws that constricted independent reporting particularly in Panama, Chile and Mexico, but said region-wide, the press operates more freely and with fewer restraints than at any time in history, with the distinct exception of Cuba.

Cuba had four journalists detained at the end of 1998, and even though one was released, the number remains the same with the addition of an independent journalist in January. CPJ denounced his imprisonment as "a flagrant violation of the most basic tenet of international human rights, the right to a presumption of innocence." It said the situation has grown worse in Cuba with a new law that virtually outlaws journalism.

The CPJ report also said that in Africa, the wave of democratization that swept across the region earlier in the decade is a distant memory, but that courageous reporting in the face of repression and brutality has prevented the complete reversal of press freedom. In Nigeria, it said, the death of General Sani Abacha led to the release of 16 imprisoned journalists but the independent press remained doubtful that abrogation of laws criminalizing reporting would occur.

In Asia, economic free-fall continued to affect the press climate, with starkly contrasting results: for example, a re-emergence of once-banned publications in Indonesia but an attempt in Malaysia to use the mainstream press to crush a political rival. CPJ cited China for "mixed signals," a softened stance on political discussions before U.S. and British state visits, and then a renewal of hard-line attitudes toward the press at the end of the year.

The committee report said dissent and critical reporting continued to be muzzled in countries in the Middle East through state control, censorship, intimidation, criminal prosecution and imprisonment. It noted that independent journalism does not exist in the most repressive states -- Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia. Journalists in Algeria who attempted to report about civilian massacres had lingering fears of assassination, and government restrictions in that country kept many details about the war out of the public eye, CPJ added.

According to the report, in Eastern Europe, journalists still face repression in many countries, and have avoided trouble spots like Chechnya because of the danger of kidnapping. A perennial candidate for CPJ's annual listing of the world's worst enemies of the press, Belarus's President Alexander Lukashenko, continued his tactics of harassing independent media.

CPJ also announced a $650,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to support its fact-finding missions in support of safeguarding journalists and freedom of expression.