ALL YEAR, FIGHTING RAGED BETWEEN GOVERNMENT TROOPS and the rebel Movement for Democracy and Justice (MDJT) in the mountainous Tibesti region. But because of restrictions on the press, there was little news from the battlefront. International reporters were barred from Tibesti all year, according to the BBC. Chad’s independent media, clustered in the southern capital…
THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF FORMER DICTATOR GEN. AUGUSTO PINOCHET and other military officers severely tested the independence of the Chilean judiciary at a time when the courts were being used to harass journalists investigating official corruption. After narrowly defeating rightist candidate Joaquín Lavín in a January 16 run-off election, Ricardo Lagos took office on March…
PENDING MEMBERSHIP IN THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION and fledgling steps towards greater dialogue with Taiwan are just two recent signs that China is opening up to the world, a trend that some say will lead to greater freedoms within the country. The ruling Communist Party, however, has yet to extend this opening to the news…
IN A DEVASTATING YEAR FOR COLOMBIA, journalists were murdered, assaulted, threatened, and kidnapped. Many fled into exile. With the peace process that began in 1999 largely moribund, a nearly four-decade conflict that pits two major leftist guerrilla groups against the army and right-wing paramilitary forces continued to escalate throughout the year. All the warring factions…
INSTABILITY PLAGUED THE THREE-ISLAND ISLAMIC REPUBLIC after the military government of Col. Azali Assoumani tried unsuccessfully to reintegrate the island of Anjouan, which had seceded from the federation in 1997. There were several attacks on journalists after a January referendum in which Anjouan rejected a settlement brokered by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Violent…
EVEN AS COSTA RICAN JOURNALISTS BATTLED A FLURRY of defamation lawsuits, a proposed bill that would have greatly enhanced press freedom in the country failed to win legislative approval. On February 15, the Legislative Assembly’s judiciary committee rejected a bill, drafted by several leading journalists and endorsed by President Miguel Angel Rodríguez, that would have…
FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT FRANJO TUDJMAN in December 1999, the advent of a reformist government brought a better year for the Croatian press. An opposition alliance defeated the late president’s nationalist HDZ party in January 2-3 parliamentary elections and in two rounds of presidential voting over the next five weeks. During the parliamentary election…
IN A COUNTRY WHOSE CONSTITUTION AND PENAL CODE specifically disallow press freedom, independent journalists continued to face repression from the Cuban government last year. Yet their ranks have grown steadily, and there are now about 20 independent news agencies in the country. In early 2001, a particularly courageous independent journalist saw the outside of a…
WHILE CZECH JOURNALISTS HAVE GAINED EXTENSIVE FREEDOMS since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Czech media continued to face pressure from both political and business interests last year. On December 20, the politically appointed supervisors of the state-run Czech Television network abruptly dismissed general director Dusan Chmelicek and appointed Jiri Hodac in his place. Hodac had resigned…
PRESS FREEDOM HAS BEEN ONE OF MANY CASUALTIES OF THE CIVIL WAR that began as a rebel insurgency in August 1998 and has continued to destabilize the entire region, with Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia supporting President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi fighting on the side of Congolese rebel forces (although Kabila’s army includes…