A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER THE END OF PRESIDENT SUHARTO’S authoritarian rule, the most significant reform in Indonesia remains the emergence of a largely unshackled press. With hundreds of islands and a large, fragmented population, the press plays a crucial role in allowing Indonesians to debate their future and in calming tensions that arise…
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is alarmed by a proposal announced last week by Indonesian Foreign Minister Alwi Shihab that could severely restrict foreign journalists from traveling to a number of crisis-prone regions in Indonesia.
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in INDONESIA Click here to read CPJ’s Protest Letter New York, December 14, 2000 — CPJ welcomes the release of Swiss journalist Oswald Iten, who had been imprisoned in Jayapura, Irian Jaya, since December 2 on suspicion that he violated Indonesian immigration laws by reporting without…
Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in INDONESIA Click here to read CPJ’s Protest Letter New York, December 6, 2000 — CPJ is deeply concerned by the prolonged detention of Swiss journalist Oswald Iten in Jayapura, Irian Jaya, on suspicion that he violated Indonesia’s immigration laws by reporting without a press visa.
Your Excellency: The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is deeply disturbed by the recent attack on the Surabaya-based daily newspaper Jawa Pos by members of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the grassroots Muslim organization that you chaired for fifteen years before becoming president of Indonesia.
By Ann CooperAs a foreign correspondent covering the Soviet Union a decade ago, I was an eyewitness to a dramatic example of the press’ critical role in building democracy. Granted a bit of freedom by Mikhail Gorbachev’s mid-1980s glasnost policy, long-suppressed Soviet journalists set their own daring agenda: they probed forbidden history, investigated contemporary corruption,…
By Kavita Menon and A. Lin NeumannMuch of Asia remained hostile to a free, independent media, despite the growing consensus that Asian political and economic stability depends in great measure on governments’ willingness to improve transparency and lift restrictions on the press. In China, Burma, Vietnam, and even Malaysia, government suppression of the media is…