Africa, Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, Press Freedom

MEDIA: Censorship by the Bullet

Niko Kyriakou

NEW YORK, Apr 14 2005 (IPS) - Neither of the two journalists who fearlessly crusaded for human rights and free speech despite violent threats will be accepting their 2005 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Awards in person next week.

That is because one, Ali Al-Domaini, is languishing in a Saudi prison, and the other, Deyda Hydara, was shot dead last December.

Ali Al-Domaini is one of three well-known intellectuals currently in jail for denouncing the work of Saudi Arabia’s new National Human Rights Commission as lacking both breadth and vigour in its reforms, and for planning to set up his own, more effective commission.

Deyda Hydara, the first-ever posthumous award recipient, peacefully struggled for press freedom in the Gambia for many years. But on Dec. 16, 2004, the day after he publicly critiqued a new Gambian press law, Hydara was shot in the head and chest by an unidentified gunman.

The awards, which honour international literary figures persecuted for exercising or defending the right to freedom of expression, will be presented at PEN’s Annual Gala on Apr. 20 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

According to Freedom to Write Programme Director Larry Siems, PEN America hopes that the award will provoke Al-Domaini’s release.

“That’s what these awards are for,” he told IPS, “and they’ve had a remarkable impact. We give these awards because they are a way of focusing international attention on important cases.”

Over the last 19 years, the PEN Centre has given the award to 37 men and women, 29 of whom were in prison at the time they were honoured. A startling 27 were subsequently released.

Siems says that “censorship by the bullet” is increasingly common, and laments that only 35 of the murderers of 245 journalists in the past 10 years have been prosecuted.

Al-Domaini, the author of three collections of poetry and a novel, was arrested on Mar. 15, 2004 along with 11 other prominent Saudi intellectuals for criticising Saudi Arabia’s first human rights watchdog.

Their detentions have paralysed the kingdom’s budding civil rights movement, which became more active after the country announced its first municipal elections. Groups of citizens submitted petitions to the crown prince in 2003 asking for swifter progress in halting discrimination against Shi’a minorities and pushing for women’s rights and a constitutional monarchy.

But as the U.S. State Department said in its 2004 Country Report on Human Rights Practices, “after the March arrest of the reformers, there were no further petitions.”

No sooner had Al-Domaini and his counterparts been arrested than the Ministry of the Interior announced that the 12 prisoners were suspected of issuing “statements which do not serve the unity of the country and the cohesion of society…based on Islamic religion.”

Eight of the detainees have since been released, but Al-Domaini and two other leading intellectuals were held, reportedly after refusing to sign a document renouncing their political activism. Authorities charged them, among other things, with threatening national unity, doubting the independence of the Saudi judiciary and justifying violence.

On Aug. 9, 2004, the trial of Al-Domaini opened at an Islamic court in Riyadh. But the court adjourned in early October 2004 because the defendants refused to answer questions in a closed hearing.

Two weeks ago another trial hearing was held, but Siems told IPS that the three defendants still refused to answer questions unless the trial was conducted openly.

Al-Domaini reportedly gave an hour and a half-long, passionate defence in which he told the court that the legal debate was overshadowing the larger issue of reforms. Further hearings were postponed for 20 days following a request by the prosecutor for more time to produce evidence.

After a year and one month, Al-Domaini and his two “collaborators” are still in detention. Al-Domaini was not allowed to see his father before his death in October, and the attorney representing one of Al-Domaini’s co-defendants was arrested in November for publicly petitioning Crown Prince Abdullah to give the three intellectuals a fair trial.

At a recent announcement of the upcoming awards in New York, Siems said that eyes of the world were fixed on new opportunities for political participation and freedom of expression in the Middle East.

“These developments owe a great deal to individuals like Ali Al-Domaini, intellectual leaders who have openly and peacefully advocated reform at considerable personal risk,” he said.

The story of Deydra Hydara is also one of great courage. In 1991, Hydara co-founded a tabloid called The Point, which at that time was the only newspaper in the Gambia to provide independent news and editorials that openly opposed the government. His work at The Point made him an important symbol of the struggle to maintain a free press in the country.

When media freedom in the Gambia recently began to dissolve at an alarming rate, Hydara and three other independent journalists took legal action. In September 2003, he and colleagues filed a lawsuit challenging a 2002 law requiring all journalists and media organisations to register for one-year renewable licenses with a media commission.

Before the case could be addressed by the Supreme Court (it is still pending), a group with links to the ruling party, called the Green Boys, began threatening the plaintiffs and attacking independent journalists.

Just before Hydara’s murder, the Gambian National Assembly passed new media legislation requiring authors of any published works that fell under broad definitions of libel, or that were deemed “seditious”, to serve a 6-month minimum prison term for their first offence, and three years for repeat offences.

Hydara and other journalists publicly opposed the law, and the day before he was killed, Hydara published an editorial denouncing it. At the time of his death he was working to establish a new PEN centre in the Gambia.

In February 2005, Gambian authorities arrested a Lebanese businessman in connection with the killing of Deyda Hydara, but his colleagues are calling for an investigation of the Green Boys and the many other recent attacks on independent journalists. A number of journalists have reportedly fled the country since Hydara’s death.

Siems says that this year’s candidates were chosen because they represent two important aspects of the struggle for press freedom. While media reform in the Middle East is a lightning rod of international attention right now, Gambia is a story that is off the radar, he said.

“Hydara’s story is one of the brutal monotony that occurs outside of the international limelight,” he said, and “one that has been backsliding in recent years.”

The fate of both men, he said, “is an important barometre of how seriously reform is proceeding in those countries.”