Press Freedom Under the Bus in Yemen
Press freedom ‘damaged’ in Yemen crackdown
The growing separatist unrest in southern Yemen and the ensuing government crackdown has already made a casualty of press freedom.
Eight publications independent or critical of President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s administration were suspended in early May when police halted their distribution and seized all copies.
The information ministry accused them of violating the press law which bans the publication of anything that could threaten the unity of Yemen, the poorest Arab country.
The regime accused the seven weeklies and the main southern daily, Aden-based Al-Ayyam, of siding with anti-government protesters in the south.
A total of 16 people, including five members of the security forces, have been killed in the south since the new wave of unrest erupted in late April.
Some of the four-million-strong population of southern Yemen, the most impoverished part of the country and until May 1990 an independent state, feel discriminated against by the central government which is controlled by northerners, and are now demanding independence.
“I am against independence but I understand the demands of our brothers in the south,” said Samir Jubran, the young founder and editor-in-chief of Al-Masdar (The Source), one of the eight publications that were shut down.
Jubran believes the problem is that the government considers any publication that does not toe the official line to be supporting the opposition.
The government has also decided to set up a special court to deal exclusively with press-related offences.
“These actions are a clear effort to silence independent voices in Yemen,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said on May 16, calling on Saleh to “end this campaign of intimidation and censorship.”
But Justice Minister Ghazi al-Aghbari told AFP that establishing the court was merely a “technical measure” aimed at “protecting the dignity of journalists,” not at silencing them.
However, journalists remain sceptical. Jubran, for example, is convinced the new court “will not be independent.”
Press freedom has deteriorated alarmingly in the past few years, especially since the start of an uprising in the north in 2004 by Zaidi rebels.
An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Zaidis are a minority in the mainly Sunni country, but they are a majority in the Saada governorate in the far north.
Journalist Abdul Karim al-Khaiwani, 43, knows all about rising restrictions on press freedom: he has been jailed four times and spent a total of 359 days behind bars over the past five years on charges of supporting the Zaidi rebels.
A former editor-in-chief of the opposition weekly Ash-Shura, he has harsh words for the government over the way it has tried to crush the uprising.
Khaiwani was last sentenced in June 2008 to six year in jail, before being pardoned by Saleh in September, but he has had to give up writing for the time being.
He says he was simply doing his job by trying to present the rebels’ point of view.
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group, in a report late last month on “Yemen: Defusing the Saada Time Bomb,” cited the Zaidi rebellion as carrying “grave risks for Yemen’s political, sectarian and social equilibrium.”
As with the Zaidi conflict in the north, a similar situation seems to be developing regarding secessionist sentiment in the south.
“The fall of the regime might come from the south,” Khaiwani told AFP.
Jubran said he had already been interrogated three times over his weekly’s coverage of the unrest in the south, especially over seven articles published in one edition.
He believes the aim of the government is to bully the newspapers into submission, but also that if the situation in the south deteriorates even further, “it might well shut down all of them.”
On Monday, Qatar-based watchdog the Doha Centre for Media Freedom pointed the finger at Sanaa, saying: “There can be no doubt that the Sanaa authorities have sacrificed press freedom in their efforts to control unrest in the south of the country.”
