Today is World Press Freedom Day, a day proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993. Its aim is to mark the importance of a free press to civil society and to remind governments to respect their commitments to uphold the fundamental rights of journalists and the people's right to be informed.
The reality is that in many countries the independence of the media is threatened by government censorship, and in some cases, the lives of journalists are threatened as they work to bring light to issues of public importance.
To underscore what is at stake, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (or Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF) noted yesterday that in 2005, at least 63 journalists were killed worldwide, the highest number in a decade. Its annual report, published to coincide with May 3rd, also noted that more than 1,300 media workers were attacked or threatened last year and more than 100 were in jail.
And as of February 27th last, 119 journalists and 57 so-called cyber dissidents were still imprisoned simply for communicating views and information. For the third year running, Iraq retained its position as the most dangerous country. Seventy-four journalists and media workers have been killed there since the US-led invasion in March 2003, making it the deadliest conflict for the press since the second World War.
"Violence against journalists is now routine in Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nigeria and Mexico and it goes unpunished," according to RSF. "Imprisonment is the favoured weapon of authoritarian rulers to silence journalists. The picture is much the same from year to year and China, Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran and Burma are still the countries holding most journalists."
The stories that emerge from journalists confronted by repressive regimes are many but not too varied: the intent and the methods are well tried and tested.
On this page today we reproduce two first-person reports which their authors produced for the World Association of Newspapers, the Paris-based body, of which The Irish Times is a member, that seeks to promote the interests of newspapers and those who work for them.
Further case studies and related information may be read on the Wan websites, www.wan.org and www.worldpressfreedomday.org; and on the RSF website, www.rsf.org
Cuba: Raul Rivero
Waking up in a prison cell every morning is an experience that weakens the will to live. Breakfasting on a slice of dirty, mouldy bread with sugar-sweetened water, while waiting for a few spoonfuls of rice and herbs for lunch and the same menu for dinner, is an antidote against any glimmer of hope.
If you have to wait three months to see your family for two hours in a cell with stone benches under the watchful gaze of prison guards, you cannot really be restless in anticipation at the prospect of seeing and being with your loved ones.
That was my life for two years. Just as today, on this beautiful spring day in the year 2006, it is the life of Víctor Rolando Arroyo, a journalist with the independent news agency, Unión de Periodistas y Escritores de Cuba Independientes (UPECI), in Commander Castro's prison in Guantánamo, a human warehouse that has been operating for over 30 years.
The dozens of journalists suffering from hunger, disease and maltreatment in the jails on the island of Cuba are hostages of a group of cronies who seized power by force and have stayed in power by force for almost half a century, on a throne upheld by the police and propaganda.
The young reporter Pablo Pacheco is undergoing horrendous treatment in the prison of Canaleta, together with his colleagues Pedro Argüelles and Adolfo Fernández Sainz and the young photojournalist Omar Rodríguez Saludes.
They were all sentenced to 28 years in 2003 for photographing and filming aspects of Cuban society that the dictatorial regime wants to keep under wraps.
Yet another victim is Normando Hernández, a journalist who launched a small magazine in the city of Camaguey. He only succeeded in publishing the first issue. The revolutionary courts immediately demanded life imprisonment for Hernández, though the sentence was later graciously commuted to 25 years. Hernández, as many others like him, has also suffered from various inadequately treated ailments due to the lack of medication and overcrowded prisons. In cells originally designed for 20 inmates, there are often 35 or 40, forced to sleep on the floor and to share a single sanitary facility and a rationed water supply.
This is how the poet and journalist Ricardo González Alfonso is living at present in the Combinado del Este penitentiary in Havana. His state is aggravated by the fact that he has undergone two operations in dubious prison operating theatres and that his initial wound, which dates back to November 2004, keeps festering and never seems to heal.
And in much the same way, Fabio Prieto Lorente, a young correspondent confined in a prison on the Isla de Pinos, 120km (75 miles) south of Havana, sees his youth slowly slip away because he reported on the reality of a land where brutality is freely exercised because of the lack of diplomatic representation and journalists who can record the abuses.
We know that in Cuba, World Press Freedom Day can only be celebrated with dignity in the cells of the 300 prisons scattered across the map of the small Caribbean isle. The prisoners are locked away in dark cells where they have been sent for wanting to be free in a country where freedom is no more than a hollow, meaningless word.
In the spring of 2003, journalist Raul Rivero was arrested along with 28 of his colleagues and sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. He was released from prison on medical parole in November 2004. He lives now in Madrid, and is a columnist for El Mundo newspaper.
Cameroon: Pius Njawe
I have been a journalist since the age of 15. I started as an errand boy at a newspaper called Semences africaines, in the city of Yaoundé, Cameroon. Over the past 34 years, I have been arrested 126 times while carrying out my profession as a journalist. Physical and mental torture, death threats, the ransacking of my newsroom etc, has often been my daily lot in a situation where repression and corruption, even within the press, have become the norm. Woe betide the slightest dissenting voice in this context, for it attracts all kinds of wrath, even from so-called colleagues.
My longest detention lasted 10 months. I was arrested on December 24th, 1997, for daring to wonder about the president's health after he had experienced heart problems while watching the Cameroonian football cup final. On January 13th, 1998, I was sentenced to 24 months in prison. Four months later, the sentence was reduced to 12 months under pressure from national and international public opinion. But that was not enough to remove the pressure, and after 10 months, the president resigned himself to pardoning me, a pardon I had never asked for.
While my many detentions have largely contributed to confirming my convictions about certain democratic and human values, my long stay in prison above all stimulated my sense of solidarity with others, particularly the poor and the outcast. It strengthened my determination to use journalism as a weapon against all kinds of abuse. For there is no better weapon than words for restoring peace and justice among people, although it depends how those words are used.
To have the privilege of writing taken away from you overnight feels like being a victim of a crime. The prison governor called me into his office one day to warn me that as a prisoner I did not have the right to write, and that my persistence would land me in solitary confinement. I immediately started to think about what my long days would be like in a cell I was sharing with more than 150 detainees, almost all of them crooks, if I could not write. So I decided to defy the governor's ban by stepping up my bi-weekly column, Le Bloc-notes du bagnard (The Convict's Notebook), in my newspaper Le Messager.
I entered journalism the way you enter a religion; journalism is my religion. I believe in it, and a thousand trials, a thousand arrests, a thousand imprisonments and as many death threats will never make me change job. On the contrary, the harder it is, the more you have to believe in it and cling to it. Respecting ethical standards is of fundamental importance for anyone wishing to be a journalist. It protects you against all kinds of people who would like to teach you a lesson. When you are facing a judge who is being manipulated, it is your irreproachable professional defence that makes that judge examine his or her own conscience. It is what wins your colleagues over to your cause when you are in difficulty. Doing your job properly therefore seems to be the best advice anyone can give a journalist operating in a context of constant harassment.
And doing your job properly also, and above all, means avoiding "gumbo journalism", a practice becoming increasingly widespread in our profession, where people write what they are paid to write instead of giving real information and the truth. While journalists have the right to earn a decent living, even in emerging nations, honest journalists never need pockets in their shrouds.
Journalists perform a social function, which gives them not immunity, but the right to look critically at the way a nation is being run. While playing this crucial role, it is important for them to be protected by the law, but also by the whole of society for which they work. Mobilisation is therefore essential every time a journalist is thrown into prison, or threatened with arrest or death. Because every time a journalist is silenced, society loses one of its watchdogs.
Pius Njawe has faced harassment by the Cameroon authorities throughout his career. In the past 30 years he has been imprisoned on three different occasions. Despite this, he continues to publish his newspaper Le Messager. In 1993, he was awarded the World Association of Newspapers Golden Pen of Freedom.