Author:
Publication: Reuters
Date: May 3, 2001
The Committee to Protect Journalists
on Thursday said China's President Jiang Zemin, Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
and Liberia's President Charles Taylor were among the world's 10 worst
enemies of the press.
Jiang appeared on the advocacy group's
annual list for the fifth consecutive year ``for maintaining the Communist
Party's obsessive control over information, enforced in part via harsh
prison sentences that have now made China the world's leading jailer of
journalists,'' the committee said in a news release.
Presiding over what CPJ called ``the
world's most elaborate system of media control,'' Jiang has also poured
huge resources into policing online content, fearing the Internet's potential
to ``break the state's information monopoly,'' the group said.
Twenty-two journalists were jailed
for their work in China at the end of last year.
But Jiang did not top the list,
which the group said was not ranked for the most part. The top spot instead
went to Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader whose ``fiery April 2000 sermon
against the press inspired an unsparing campaign of repression against
Iran's reformist media that continues to this day,'' the group said.
CPJ, an independent non-profit group
that monitors worldwide press freedom, said Iran's leader ``stopped things
cold'' when parliament debated reversing harsh provisions of Iran's notorious
press law.
More than 30 papers have been banned
in Iran and the country's best-known liberal journalists have been jailed,
CPJ said.
New to the list were Taylor, who
it said jailed journalists, censored media outlets and forced others out
of business, as well as Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, Russia's President
Vladimir Putin and Colombian paramilitary leader Carlos Castano.
'Alarming' Moves In Russia
Putin, who took office last year,
has ``presided over an alarming assault on press freedom in Russia,'' CPJ
said. ``The Kremlin imposed censorship in Chechnya, orchestrated legal
harassment against private media outlets and granted sweeping powers of
surveillance to the security services,'' it said.
``President Putin ... pays lip service
to press freedom but then maneuvers in the shadows to centralize control
of the media, stifle criticism and destroy the independent press,'' said
Executive Director Ann Cooper.
CPJ noted in particular the April
takeover of NTV, the country's only independent television network, by
the Kremlin-controlled Gazprom corporation.
Mugabe's government, it said, ``has
launched an all-out war against independent media, using weapons that range
from lawsuits to physical violence.'' The secret service in Zimbabwe screens
e-mails and Internet communications, it said, while bomb attacks twice
damaged the offices of the independent Daily News. The second bombing followed
closely a call by Mugabe's information minister to silence the paper ``once
and for all.''
Three of the leaders on last year's
list -- Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, Sierra Leonean rebel leader Foday
Sankoh and Peru's Alberto Fujimori have since been ousted from power, CPJ
noted.
Veterans of the list included Cuban
President Fidel Castro, appearing for the seventh time, President Zine
al-Abdine Ben Ali of Tunisia, listed for four years, and Malaysian Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad, with three years on the list.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma
appeared on the list for the second time.
Castro's Cuba is the only Western
Hemisphere nation currently holding a journalist jailed for his work, CPJ
said. His government ``continues its scorched earth assault on independent
Cuban journalists by interrogating and detaining reporters, monitoring
and interrupting their phone calls, restricting their travel and routinely
putting them under house arrest to prevent coverage of certain events.''
