The shackled press

Sultan Ahmad Baheen and M. Faheem Dashty must now be sweltering in the 40-degree heat of Islamabad, waiting for their return flight home. Manila at 34 degrees was scorching enough for Dashty, 23-year-old chief editor of Kabul Weekly, who grew up in a land where there’s snow.

To get to Manila from Kabul, the two journalists from Afghanistan had flown to Islamabad, Pakistan. They waited three days for their connecting flight to Lahore, where they had a nine-hour layover before flying to Bangkok, Thailand. There they again waited six hours for their flight to Manila. The trip back would have the same waiting periods, they told me during a visit to The STAR office over the weekend. 

At least they can travel abroad and have families to return to back home in Kabul. The two men were their country’s delegates at the conference here last week sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) to mark World Press Freedom Day.

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Baheen, the 53-year-old director-general of the Bakhter News Agency in Kabul, said recovery for his war-ravaged country is going to be tough because most of their best minds now live abroad. The interim government lacks competent people, public coffers are empty, there are no industries and no exports. Tribal warfare is threatening to tear the nation apart.

The people of Afghanistan are nevertheless reveling in their freedoms since the fall of the Taliban. Since a new press law was passed a month ago by the interim government, there has been a race to open newspapers in Kabul. Baheen said there are now 85 newspapers in the country and two printing presses.

I said it must be good to have so many people interested in reading the news. He chuckled and said many of his people are illiterate. Everyone simply wants to own a newspaper. (So it’s not only in the Philippines!)

Is there a free press in Afghanistan? Baheen said they could write about anything but must avoid pornography, libelous or defamatory articles against public officials, and of course anything derogatory about Islam.

Which isn’t quite accurate. An Agence France Presse dispatch from Kabul last week said Dashty’s paper was recently threatened with closure by the government for reporting that the vice defense minister, a northern warlord, wanted Afghanistan federalized. A journalist from the Afghan government TV station was also fired after asking Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf about problems in the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Unesco’s head in Kabul also expressed concern about Article One of the new press law, which seeks "to regulate" freedom of expression and the press, AFP reported. Rohan Jayasekera, director of the Institute for War and Peace reporting, said the Afghan press law "envisages but does not guarantee the freedom of a private press."

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Nothing makes you count your blessings than learning about others’ misery. Here we have people complaining about a licentious press, while others point out that the free-wheeling Philippine press is in fact controlled by business and political interests. 

Other journalists such as Baheen and Dashty have more pressing problems. And Geoffrey Nyarota has an even bigger concern. The recipient of the World Press Freedom Day award returns to Zimbabwe this week with the likely prospect of arrest as soon as he sets foot in Harare. While in Manila for the Unesco-sponsored conference, Nyarota heard that two of his reporters in the Daily News had been arrested for criticizing the government of President Robert Mugabe. Nyarota told me he had wanted to return home immediately but was told that the flight was not possible.

Wasn’t he scared of arrest? He grinned and said he had been arrested and locked up five times so far since January. He was forced to sell his house to keep his paper going, and now that he wants to buy back the house the price has shot up astronomically to the equivalent of about P22 million. His $25,000 prize money will go to the down payment for the house, he told me.

Despite the crackdown on dissent, Nyarota has high hopes for his country. When I told him that I had visited South Africa and loved its natural beauty, he said I should see Victoria Falls and the game preserves in Zimbabwe.

But what about the white settlers who are being attacked by blacks? Nobody’s attacking tourists, he assured me. Sounds like Dick Gordon selling Wow! Philippines! When you hear the sad stories from other parts of the world, Gordon’s enthusiasm no longer seems quixotic. We do have a beautiful country.