Press Freedom Withers in the Arab Spring

Whatever its long-term impact on the cause of liberty and democracy, the Arab Spring movement has been bad news for press freedom.  To nobody’s surprise, countries still cracking down on their uprisings continue, often viciously, to oppress journalists trying to cover the protests.  But even in Egypt and Tunisia, where long-time tyrants have been deposed, their successor governments are arresting and assaulting journalists, censoring the media and threatening new moves to control coverage.

In Egypt, former President Hosni Mubarak is on trial for the stifling oppression of his nearly 30 years in power.  But the trial looks increasingly like a whitewash, with prosecution witnesses changing their stories and journalists barred from covering key sessions of the court.

Most recently, the government crackdown on Coptic Christians protesting religious persecution killed dozens of people, including Wael Mikhael, a cameraman for the TV broadcaster Al-Fareeq.  At the same time, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, security forces violently raided the offices of two television stations and shut off electricity, telephone and Internet connections to the independent daily Al-Shorouk.  State television coverage of the protests was misleading and inflammatory, ignoring civilian deaths and urging viewers to “defend” the military from “angry Christian protesters.”

In late September, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported the censorship of two newspapers, the weekly Sawt al-Umma and the daily Rose al-Youssef.  Reporters Without Borders said the ruling military Supreme Council had twice raided and shut down a bureau of the Al Jazeera TV network, and had warned that it would use its emergency powers against any journalist “threatening social peace” — whatever the council deemed that to mean.

Months after the forced resignation of President Zine al Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, the new government was still trying to control media coverage of continuing protests against its policies.  In May, 15 local and international reporters and photographers covering a demonstration were brutally beaten by security officers, at least one of them wielding a metal rod, and their cameras were confiscated.  The Interior Ministry issued an apology and promised an investigation.  But in July, when another ten journalists were attacked again at a protest, Prime Minister Béji Caïd Essebsi called them troublemakers and said the media were to blame for Tunisia’s continuing unrest.  And in September, blogger Sami Ben Abdallah, an investigative reporter and an acid critic of the new regime, was arrested as he was about to board a flight to Paris.  He was interrogated for eight hours without being allowed to talk to his lawyer, and banned from leaving the country without permission of the Interior Ministry.

Predictably enough, the continuing crackdown on protest of any kind in Syria and Iran has stifled most media, with many journalists and bloggers jailed, satellite broadcasts jammed and reporters expelled or refused visas.  But there were many similar incidents in nominal Western allies including Yemen, Oman, Turkey and Iraq.  

In Yemen, where three journalists have been killed covering the continuing protests against the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, dozens more have been attacked, arrested or harassed.  In Iraq, special forces in Kurdistan raided the offices of Lvin magazine on September 8, beat its editor, Ahmed Mirin, with the butt of a Kalashnikov, and arrested him.  On the same day, Hadi al-Mahdi, a prominent talk radio host who had criticized both the government and the opposition and backed the continuing protests, was murdered at his home in Baghdad, shot twice in the head.  He had previously been arrested and beaten, and said he had been warned repeatedly that he was in danger.  “I have lived the last three days in a state of terror,” he wrote on his Facebook page the day he died.  He was the seventh journalist killed in Iraq this year.