Force for evil: N. Korea's media is world's most-censored
UNITED NATIONS — The Nominations are in and the winners for the most censored media in the world are: first place North Korea, with Burma and Turkmenistan as runners up. After a round of dutiful applause let me explain. To mark World Press Freedom Day at the UN, the independent Committee to Protect Journalists published a shame list of the world’s ten most censored countries. According to Ann Cooper, the Committee’s Executive director, “In the most censored countries, the media were not a force for change, but a powerful force for the status quo.”
Cooper told correspondents that the report showed that people in North Korea were the most isolated people in the world, living in the most censored country and in the “deepest information void.” The communist government controlled all media. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) offered a “steady diet of fawning coverage of dear leader Kim Jong Il” while ignoring the terrible famine.
Cooper later told a UN committee hearing that beyond censorship, violence against journalists is prevalent with 68 reporters having been killed in Iraq since March of 2003. She added that at the end of last year 125 editors, writers and photographers were imprisoned around the world. Two thirds were being held in four countries: China, Cuba, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Beyond the quaintly titled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) the Committee to Protect Journalists List of Shame included, Burma, Turkmenistan, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Eritrea, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Belarus. Ratings were based on seventeen criteria judging state media controls.
Happily the only European country making this sordid grade, in respect to press freedom, “Belarus was the most repressive country in Europe. It was a ‘shameful record’ that should be protested not just by the U.S. and Western European governments, but by Russia and other countries from the former Soviet Union,” Cooper stressed. In a separate development a UN human rights expect called on the Belarus government “to cease human rights violations” and demanded a release of political prisoners.
Belarus, a retro-communist regime, recently held “elections” where the local dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko predictably triumphed, assisted by his secret police known by the Soviet era acronym KGB.
Among other voices dealing with press freedoms, Geoffrey Nyarota of Zimbabwe, a Laureate of UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Prize, told the hearing, “Free media in an genuinely democratic political environment could be a catalyst for political, social and economic change.” He lamented that “Authoritarian government customarily formulated strategies to establish total control over the print press and the electronic media including the Internet.”
Nyarota lamented that in Zimbabwe, the government’s hold on power had resulted “not from popular appeal” but partly from intimidation, violence and the party’s tight control of the media. He cited the demise of the independent Daily News paper adding that the climate in the country had allowed for journalists being “harassed, arrested and tortured.”
Tragically in parts of Africa the media, not nearly as developed as in Zimbabwe, has been under the thumb of local tyrants—Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, and Libya. Zimbabwe, despite not making the list, came painfully close.
“Freedom of expression was a fundamental right” stressed UN Under Secretary General for Communications Shashi Tharoor. He added, “A free press was a crucial element to fulfilling the role of the United Nations.” Yet one sadly wonders how many of the 191 member states actually see it that way?
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com. |
